New Radiant Website
Posted by Doug Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:38:00 GMT
blah blah blah (lawyers made me change this) has been going through a major re-branding effort for the last long time. This morning we’re launching a major re-write of our main application. There’s a pretty cool on-line demo that shows off our new sexiness.
Simultaneously we’re rebranding our website and also restructuring most of our internal item catalog. Pretty much everyone in the company has been involved in this effort in some way. After months of work, we’re live!
The new website is running Radiant from index to thank you page. We have a web service for handling all of the EC business logic and multiple user facing web sites that connect to the service for managing their cart. We’ve written a “store behavior” to handle this xml-rpc client interface with Radiant.
This actually isn’t our first production Radiant site. Our first was our Japanese RosettaWorld. That site isn’t getting near the traffic that our US site does though. The US site runs steady-state at about 5 user sessions per second. We had a bit of a problem serving our CSS and JavaScript out of Radiant. It was causing a session hit that forced an update to the DB. Turns out that was a pretty big bottleneck in our load testing. As a fix, we just moved those files out of Radiant for this rollout. I’m sure there’s some in-Radiant solution to tell it not to track sessions on those pages. We’ll figure that out for this next release.
Hopefully, after all the stress of getting this release done we can take a collective deep breath. However, I’m guessing it’s more likely we’ll be scrambling to make all kinds of tweaks and such.
It should be noted that out of the box Radiant doesn’t have sessions on for it’s main content. That was one of the first things I had to hack in.
The site looks nice. That’s quite a lot of work.
What drew you to use Radiant as a base?
We had actually built several CMS-like websites prior to settling on Radiant. The one just prior (which is located at http://rosettastone.de complete with our old site design) was internally very similar to Radiant. What Radiant provided us was sound internals with a nice content editing interface and a framework for easily extending it. Radiant is clearly a light-weight CMS, it says so right on the box. But it gave us a solid framework to build on in a language we love.
Are you going to be releasing any of your work as extensions?
The major portions of our extensions are to talk to in-house services. Those pieces don’t make sense to release because no one would be able to take advantage of them.
That said, there are a couple things we’re doing with workflow routing and feedback tracking that may make sense to release. We’re still in the throws of our major release this week. We also have three more Radiant sites to release in the next 6 weeks (re-brand our JP site, release our UK and DE sites as Radiant). Once we’re done with the pressure of those releases we can bring up releasing some of this.
Man you don’t even know how long I’ve waited for this since disabling my own Movable Type widget (that doesn’t work since Haloscan bypasses that code).
THANK YOU!
Demo really looks not bad :) Who knows maybe you’ll make a lot of money on this…