[OT] Pool on CMS usage
Richard Gaskin
ambassador at fourthworld.com
Mon Oct 24 12:08:21 EDT 2011
Andre Garzia wrote:
> This is OT and not directly related to LiveCode. I would like to know how
> many of you guys are using a CMS on your own websites and what CMS are you
> guys using. I want to see how many of you built your own tools and how many
> are using common available packages such as wordpress, drupal, etc. This is
> just me trying to get some sense of how you guys are doing. To avoid
> flooding the list, those interest in answering can please reply to my
> personal email.
It's kinda OT but at the same time very much relates to a lot of what we
all need to do, since when we're not using LC to drive our web sites
we're making web sites to drive sales of our LC-based products. So I
hope no one minds, but I'm submitting my reply here:
I have clients and customers who use a wide range of CMSes, including
Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and others. I've been impressed with each of
them in various ways, esp. Drupal, but I've noticed something about
them: sooner or later (and in the case of Drupal and Joomla it's
definitely "sooner") they need to hire a consultant to tailor them.
Reflecting on this, and on the needs I have for my own current sites and
sites in development, I've been researching alternative ways of doing
things. Of course, these involve LiveCode.
Here's an interesting statistic from livecodejournal.com, where I've
started adding a forum powered by PHPBB, and have long had a blog there
powered by LiveCode - this is from the server's process logs:
Process user machine average
php5.cgi 99.134% 0.072% 0.715
irv.cgi 0.866% 0.001% 0.002
Note that php5.cgi is what's running the forum, and that the forum
hasn't even officially gone "live" yet, so the only traffic is Ken and I
doing setup stuff and spammers trying to create accounts and me logging
in to block their IPs.
Meanwhile, irv.cgi is the LiveCode-based CGI I used to drive the public
blog, which gets significantly more traffic.
The upside for both is that even on a shared server, their loads are
well below any limits that would require migrating to a dedicated
machine or even a VPS. So far so good.
But look at the difference in performance! The seldom-used PHP-based
forum is consuming hundreds of times more CPU cycles than the public
blog. I've omitted the hit counts from the stats above, but I can say
that the blog gets almost four times as many hits as the forum - and yet
still consumes a fractions of total CPU time!
In all fairness, the difference between the two systems is that PHPBB
simply does more work.
But that's the point: How much work does a system need to do?
We could rephrase that: How much can it do that I'll never use?
Or more to the point: If I write a CMS that does only what I need it to
do, how many orders of magnitude more efficient will it be relative to
Joomla, Drupal, etc?
Last year on this list I made what turned out to be a premature
reference to a system I call RevCloud, a set of developer services which
will be available through RevNet. Those are still in development, and
Chipp's open sourcing of Magic Carpet will play a role in it, but with
various client commitments its still uncertain when I'll have time to
roll it out for you folks.
But in the meantime, the lightweight and flexible data store I came up
with for its backend is finding its way into a number of projects here.
I call it "Document Chunkadelic", or "dChunk" for short, and it's
inspired by the simplicity of document-based data stores like Mongo and
CouchDB but very slim, trimmed down to be optimized for short-runtime
uses like CGIs.
Working with dChunk in recent months, in conjunction with the
performance tests I've been doing on my servers, has prompted me to
abandon my work learning Drupal and put my energy into making a new,
much simpler CMS based on LiveCode.
This is still very much in development, and I'm not certain how much
time I'll be able to put into productizing it for use by others, but
with the four-dozen domains I manage and all the flexibility of LiveCode
under the hood, even if it's never used by anyone other than myself and
a couple of clients it'll pay for itself many times over.
So I think there's a very strong message here with regard to RevServer
and CMSes: even if you roll your own, you can probably get more done
with less system load than using nearly anything else.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv
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