Interest in U.S. Politics set a new traffic record for a SilverStripe-powered website last week. DemConvention.com, the official website for the four day U.S. Democratic Party's National Convention, set some impressive stats:

• 3.2 million visits
• 2.6 billion hits
• 350,000 hours of streaming video served

The website runs on a number of Apache/Redhat Linux webservers. While PHP5 and MySQL underpin any SilverStripe website, the scalability is due primarily to the static file caching code we blogged about recently.

We are frequently asked (primarily by business people) why SilverStripe is developed with an open development model.

People generally assume we get some form of contribution by outside developers, which is true, but wonder just how useful or worthwhile it is. All we can offer is that a closed-development model would never encourage genius contributions like this...

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(In case you wondered about the technical background: currently SilverStripe has a caching mechanism that offers speed improvements. If you make manual changes to your HTML templates, you need to instruct SilverStripe of this, so that it can update cache files. Mark's patch, changeset #61721, fulfills a long-desired new feature to remove all cached files, and not just ones pertaining to an area of the site you're working on.)

Thanks to everyone who nominated SilverStripe for "most promising open-source CMS" in the Packtpub CMS Awards. We're excited to say that (like last year), we're one of the finalists!

We now need your support, from Monday, to vote for us. If we get in the top three, we'll get a monetary prize which will be used to build up the project! Voting ends October 20.

 



Feel free to circulate and use this banner!

When you are dealing with the levels of traffic seen on sites like the Democratic National Convention, it's not enough to dynamically serve every page view.  You need to change your approach.

To this end, there is a new feature in the trunk / daily build version of SilverStripe: "static publishing".  What happens is that each time you publish a page in the CMS, it will generate static versions of appropriate URLs. You can then configure Apache to send these files directly to the visitors, without hitting Sapphire or the database.  And because the cache generation is linked to the publish function, your cached site is kept up to date.

The result: the ability to serve 100s of requests / second from a single server, provided your network bandwidth can hack it!

For more information, see the documentation wiki.  This documentation will be expanded in the coming weeks.

 -- Sam

Each year, the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) runs a prestigious awards ceremony to recognise outstanding innovation in technology.

Winners and finalists were congratulated at an event last night at the Auckland Museum Dome. SilverStripe was associated with two categories.

Finalist in Healthcare Category

One in seven young New Zealanders are severely depressed each year, leading to suicide being their second most common cause of death, after motor vehicle accidents. As part of the Ministry of Health's National Depression Initiative, SilverStripe worked with some leading companies to produce thelowdown.co.nz, launched late 2007.

The website offers inspirational and honest videos about depression as delivered by New Zealand teen role-models, a large resource of written material, and contains an interactive chat room. The chat room provides a private and free online counseling service run by trained professonals.

The website is offered as both a very rich and innovative multimedia/Flash website and a bare-bones HTML site for dial-up users. The SilverStripe CMS powers both sites, with content automatically shared across them.

Since launch, the website has had over a million page views and hundreds of thousands of video views. Most importantly, on a regular basis, the counselors on the site observe an imminant risk of a young person about to take their life, and have intervened by calling emergency services. 

TUANZ recognised this work by naming it as one of three finalists in the Innovation in Healthcare category; a very humbling result.

Geoff Munn Wins Government Category

Over several recent years, SilverStripe employee Geoff Munn single-handedly created an E-Govt Validator, an automatic tool to check websites against the New Zealand Government Web Standards and Recomendations.

It identifies compliance and warnings to enable people with disabilities equal access to government websites. It is open source, and can be used (and downloaded) for free at www.accessware.co.nz.

We congratulate Geoff on his hard work and for winning the prestigious TUANZ Innovation Award in the Local and Central Government Services category!

Highlights of the night

Sigurd Magnusson and Geoff Munn attended the evening, with Kim Hill as MC.

Tens of thousands of people are currently in Denver, Colorado, as part of a major process in the U.S. Presidential Election—the Democratic National Convention.

The four day convention schedule supplies key speeches and decisions by the Democrats, and there is significant interest in what Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and others, are going to announce.

Pew Research notes "the upcoming Democratic National Convention is generating much more public interest than did the party's convention four years ago. Fully 59% of Americans say they are interested in following what happens at the Democratic convention, up from 36% in 2004."

Major announcements are expected to align with the American evening primetime television segment, however this year particular emphasis is being placed on demconvention.com, the official website.

In a convention of many firsts, the website aims to be the most tech-savvy of its kind, for instance providing HD-quality streaming video, a virtual Town Hall for submitting questions to the Democrats, blogs, and Spanish content.

As announced on our blog back in April (and covered in the T.V. news clip below) both the SilverStripe software and the company were used to build the website. Demconvention.com shall certainly become the most visited SilverStripe-powered website to date, easily surpassing our past record of 80,000 page views in 3 hours that was set by the California Women's Conference ticket rush last month.

The video can also be downloaded in high quality mpeg format.

Help us to gain exposure and money to further our software in the Open Source CMS Awards!

All you need to do is complete the tiny form below by Monday 25th August. If we are amoung the top five most nominated we get into the finalist round.

(The award organisers even put you into the draw for an iPod Nano.)

We've created a new RSS feed so you can be a part of the steady stream of new SilverStripe powered websites added each day:

• silverstripe.com/showcase/rss

This gives everyone an extra incentive to submit SilverStripe-powered websites to our showcase, since there's a larger audience to appreciate them now!

It's truly fantastic to see the diversity of visual design and functionality of websites in the showcase, given the product and its documentation are little more than a year in the public eye...

 

 

 

Aucklanders interested in SilverStripe are invited to an informal after-work meeting at the Empire Tavern in the CBD (map, directions?) from 6pm on Wednesday the 27th of August.

Both Geoff and Sigurd shall be up in Auckland after being named finalists in the TUANZ Innovation Awards. We're taking the opportunity to meet with you to share views, get insights, and support the Auckland SilverStripe community.

Businesses and organisations interested in meeting people experienced with building websites in SilverStripe are most welcome also.

The San Francisco meetup last month was a great success, so we're expecting the Auckland one to offer equally as intelligent and animated discussion.

Please RSVP on facebook so we can advise the Empire on numbers. (Just comment below if you're not a facebooker.)

This week we are merging a number of exciting changes from a development branch - known as "branches/roa" to some - into the main subversion trunk release.  Those of you who wish to access these features early will be able to do so by using the subversion trunk or the daily builds.  Here is a run down of the new features...

Update: These features have been merged into the main trunk and stabilised.

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