PostNuke

So, how does eurojamLIVE! fit in?

eurojamLIVE! has been designed to allow participants and event organisers to communicate before, during and after the event.
There will be 10,000 people at the event, so the website has the potential to receive a great deal of traffic over the coming months.

eurojamlive.org as a PostNuke website

PostNuke was chosen for the eurojamLIVE! website. We needed a solution that could be deployed quickly, with only a limited amount of
modifications. The websites for Scouting 2007 are run on an entirely volunteer basis, and PostNuke's ease of use and open source code
was ideal for this.

Constructing the website

The website initially began as a standard PostNuke install. All the extra core modules that were not needed were removed, and the
tables for each of these modules manually removed from the database. The decision was made to use pagesetter
for most of the content, including the news functionality. We needed the workflow and template functionality provided by pagesetter
but not available in the core News module. Additionally, PNphpBB2 was used for the forums, due to its extended feature set.

In the end, the site's configuration looked like this:

PostNuke Version: 0.760

Although at the time 0.760 was still in the RC stage, it was considered important to use the latest version to take advantage of
sessionless anonymous users (for a performance increase) and also recent improvements in Xanthia's full page caching, which in the end
proved important for the website.

Module List

• pagesetter


• photoshare


• EZComments


• PNphpBB2


• Downloads


• pnFlashGames


• Weather

Blocks

• dp-StaffStatus

Theme

• pnfr-vx - courtesy of Chestnut, pnFrance

Custom Developments

Although nothing revolutionary was needed, a few custom developments were used.

Block Management

A fairly simple module making it easier to change the news stories appearing on the homepage. Instead of the default pagesetter block,
which requires the story ID, this module allows the user to choose the story title to show, rather than having to know the ID.

Profile integration - PNphpBB and PostNuke

Better integration between PostNuke's profiles and PNphpBB profiles were needed. As a result, all the forum profile settings were
moved to a link in the 'Your Account' section, the profile link in the forums now redirecting to user.php. One further change was
needed for everything to work as expected - the profile information had to be updated each time the user visited the forum index,
incase they had changed any part of their profile.

The First Day

Although the site was launched on the 3^rd of June, it's existance was not advertised until the 5^th June
at 2pm. Between this point, and 9pm, the site received 55,000 hits and served almost 1GB of traffic. This level of initial
support was not initially anticipated, and there was a slowdown for a few minutes until Xanthia's full page caching was enabled.
This had the effect of reducing server load by more than 50%, and the site consequently confortably rode through the initial spike in traffic.
The server itself already ran the Scouting 2007 network of sites, before the eurojamLIVE! launch. In an ideal world the eurojamLIVE!
website would be on its own seperate server, however this is not the case, and therefore performance in paramount. In the end,
I would say the server and the PostNuke website stood up to the demands quite well.