Frommer's Budget Travel
Frommer's Budget Travel is a highly regarded travel magazine. Formerly owned by the Washington Post, the new owners needed a entire new infrastructure and CMS to keep the site running. The business never had its own CTO and dev team, so Triumvant filled the gap.
Since the former CMS was a proprietary, de-commissioned system, a new CMS needed to be selected. Triumvant arranged a vendor selection process, looking at best of breed in commercial products, as well as providing evaluations of leading open-source solutions, including Drupal and Django. A comparison matrix analyzing functionality, cost, and suport facilitated the final decision. The selected platform was Django, an open-source framework used by TheOnion.com and a number of other publishing sites.
Development, Architecture, and Staffing hit the ground running once the CMS selection was final. Triumvant provided system architecture and support expertise, however, permanent staff for Frommer's Budget Travel was also necessary. Triumvant vetted candidates' skills and made recommendations. Since there was no hardware infrastructure available, deployment to the Amazon cloud was taken; a highly cost-effective solution.
After deployment, site traffic immediately increased by 50%. Auto-scaling in the cloud provided savings by eliminating the need to maintain under-utilized hardware only for peak traffic. Editors found the new system faster and easier to use. New functionality, such as CMS-driven slideshows and integrated user registration greatly improved the user experience.
Technologies Employed: Amazon EC2/S3 (cloud), RightScale, Django, Python, Linux, Postgres, MySQL, Varnish, Perl, Java, Apache