In early 2009, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis determined that it needed to upgrade its website, mostly for security concerns. After investigating a move from Joomla! 1.0.x to Joomla! 1.5.x, the Archdiocese determined it would be more cost effective and a more future-proof decision to migrate the over 49 individual Joomla! sites that comprised Archdiocese of St. Louis | The Roman Catholic Church in Saint Louis, MO into a single Drupal installation.
This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.
The decision was made early on to partner with a development company that would help with the content migration and initial site buildout. Theming would be done in-house. We chose to partner with Palantir.net, a web development company located in Chicago, IL. After Palantir completed initial site work, I went up to meet them, and also attended my first DrupalCamp (Chicago); Chicago has a much more vibrant Drupal community than St. Louis... but perhaps that will change at some point!
After nearly a year's worth of planning and development, the Archdiocese launched its upgraded website on February 22, 2010.
Server Configuration
The Archdiocesan website was formerly running on a server managed through RackSpace, but costs and configuration restraints prevented us from continuing on a managed server through RackSpace. We migrated all of the Joomla sites to a new dedicated server from SoftLayer, and also migrated a few of our other sites (including the Saint Louis Review - case study on Drupal.org here). Due to caching and optimizations, the server is typically not burdened much, even with a few relatively high-traffic sites running on it.
The server is running the CentOS distribution of Linux, along with Apache, PHP and MySQL. Apache's configuration is set to survive a slashdotting, PHP is configured with APC caching for performance, and the MySQL configuration has been thoroughly tweaked to provide the best performance with the amount of RAM we have in the server.
This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.
The decision was made early on to partner with a development company that would help with the content migration and initial site buildout. Theming would be done in-house. We chose to partner with Palantir.net, a web development company located in Chicago, IL. After Palantir completed initial site work, I went up to meet them, and also attended my first DrupalCamp (Chicago); Chicago has a much more vibrant Drupal community than St. Louis... but perhaps that will change at some point!
After nearly a year's worth of planning and development, the Archdiocese launched its upgraded website on February 22, 2010.
Server Configuration
The Archdiocesan website was formerly running on a server managed through RackSpace, but costs and configuration restraints prevented us from continuing on a managed server through RackSpace. We migrated all of the Joomla sites to a new dedicated server from SoftLayer, and also migrated a few of our other sites (including the Saint Louis Review - case study on Drupal.org here). Due to caching and optimizations, the server is typically not burdened much, even with a few relatively high-traffic sites running on it.
The server is running the CentOS distribution of Linux, along with Apache, PHP and MySQL. Apache's configuration is set to survive a slashdotting, PHP is configured with APC caching for performance, and the MySQL configuration has been thoroughly tweaked to provide the best performance with the amount of RAM we have in the server.
