Here at SilverStripe HQ, we’re on a mission. We want to uncover the amazing sites being built with SilverStripe open source software. We’ve been improving our community showcase section and how you add your work, now that’s all that’s left is your sites.
Why is this important? As an open source project we succeed together!
SilverStripe can be used to develop first-class sites delivering complex business requirements while still providing simple user experiences. SilverStripe CMS is used by banks, telcos, corporates, government agencies and many other sectors! But when we’re presented against well-known CMS brands, we’re often the underdog. A strong showcase section helps overcome client objections and support your technical recommendations.
Also it’s a great opportunity to publicise your own work and gather leads from the thousands of visitors to www.silverstripe.org. Every month we’ll select a site that exemplifies what you can build with SilverStripe and share extra details from behind the scenes. Our first site is from SilverStripe Professional Partner Bit League.
Site of the Month: St Jerome’s Laneway Festival
Bit League has been working with St. Jermone’s Laneway festival for the past seven years. Over this time, it’s grown from its beginnings in Melbourne to eight separate cities across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States. Bit League has supported this growth with web, blog and social content driven from a central SilverStripe site.
Painless content creation across eight sub-sites
The Laneway site runs on Silverstripe CMS, publishing content simultaneously to eight city subsites, delivering line-up announcements, line-up bios, and all the crucial show day information to festival goers. The client is empowered with a flexible solution for their content needs. A large percentage of the site content is published automatically across all the subsites. Content specific to a single country or location such as sponsor footer logos or artists can be easily created.
The multi-site content syndication saves a large amount of time on data entry and content management during peak periods and lets the client create timely updates in the lead-up to the event, by publishing a single page.
Keeping festival-goers happy
The site experiences large traffic spikes when ticket sales are released. The site runs on cloud leader AWS to handle traffic spikes exceeding 50,000 visits per day during peak periods.
The website is also responsive—it scales from mobile devices, through tablets and up to desktop screen sizes. On show day, festival-goers can quickly and easily access all the festival information they need on their smartphones.
St Jerome's Laneway Festival, Melbourne 2015
Technical Goodies
The application uses several well-known community modules, including:
In addition, Bit League implemented several custom features, including:
1. Updates to the mysql database connectors to create the artist search function, and updates to the full text searchable extensions.
2. The Twitter API to connects each artist with their own Twitter handle to show the artist's feed on each artist page. Caching keeps API requests minimal.
3. Sessions and cookies are used to check which city (subsite) the user last visited, directing the user to that city for return visits.
4. A stale cache manages embedded Flickr content. This ensures that the site runs smoothly, even with large amounts of high-quality user-generated photos. The first user generates an initial cache which is stored for subsequent users. The cache is then updated periodically using build tasks to fetch collections from Flickr.
Photo uploading through Flickr
Get your own work showcased!
You can see Bit League’s full work showcased on the SilverStripe developer directory. To upload your own work head to our community showcase.
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