Several parties united under one roof

With its size, ACM as a group of companies and publishing houses, had the challenge to simplify the challenge of managing their websites by centralizing updates and decentralizing content publishing with the ability to share across the sites.

The goal was to build a toolkit with which a new page could be kickstarted and customized in a short amount of time. Such a modular system allows for sharing of common functionality like form handling, user guidance or search. While the layouts share common elements, they allow for individualization to satisfy all actors involved.

Now counting 30 individual websites that are maintained by 120 editors on a daily basis, the concept has grown up to become a stately site with its very own challenges.

During the course of the project the ACM-own developer team (mediagami/data-graphis) has been trained in both TYPO3 integration and development, so further maintenance and enhancements are mostly done in-house.

To keep an acceptable speed for both editors as well as visitors, varnish is used as a caching layer. Every publisher decides key facts like cache lifetime and exceptions, based on their needs and content: customizable but fast by default. And both PHP as well as MariaDB are very happy about the support Varnish is providing, serving more than 1.2 million requests.

Serious search, flexible types, frontend facetting and everything is blazing fast—Apache Solr gives great performance combined with the ability per publisher to have a separate configuration to perfectly match their content: standard pages, PDFs, ePaper, company records and shop products are all indexed.

A redis installation serves as a backend for the TYPO3 caching, replacing the database and the filesystem with the high-speed memory of the server. This results in a very high performance throughput in the cache, further improving load times in the frontend as well as the backend.