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141 lines
4.9 KiB
141 lines
4.9 KiB
title: How to sneak in a static CMS |
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pub_date: 2019-09-24 |
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author: Nico Schottelius |
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--- |
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body: |
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## Introduction |
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To put you in the right mood for reading this article, I ask you |
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take some assumptions for reading this article: |
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Assume you are the CEO of a small IPv6, Linux and FOSS company. Assume |
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that some years ago you made the decision to use |
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[Django CMS Blog](https://github.com/nephila/djangocms-blog) for the |
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blog to support non-technical staff to post blog articles. |
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Also, for the sake of completeness, assume that you are still running |
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your own [private blog](https://www.nico.schottelius.org) with |
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[ikiwiki](http://ikiwiki.info). |
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## Motivation |
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I believe that before changing anything |
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([especially in IT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here)), |
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you should have a good reason for changing. So what could be |
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the reason for sneaking in a static CMS? The answer is relatively |
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easy: |
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* Reducing latency |
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* Reducing latency |
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* Reducing the inhibition threshold for writing blog articles |
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Let's have a look at each of the points in detail, |
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[before letting us convince |
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ourselves...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here). |
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### Reducing latency |
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One of the biggest problems for me is to wait for an web application |
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to *save* something. With Django CMS Blog, you have the standard |
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**write - save - publish flow**. So when I want to see the result, I |
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have to wait seconds. Depending on my distance to our blog this might |
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take 1 second (Europe) or about 5 seconds (South Korea). While this |
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does not sound like much, it **feels** very long. |
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While google apps (which we don't use for our blog) |
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like google drive (which has other issues as well) |
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take a different approach in *autosaving*, this also blocks if you |
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have a weak network link. |
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While it is just a few seconds, it is a huge difference between just |
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being able to write in [emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) |
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(yes I was converted from vim) versus writing in a browser, waiting |
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for the website to return. |
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### Reducing latency |
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While editing with "high" latency is a problem of the writer, latency |
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while loading the result is a metric that directly affects the readers |
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*feeling* about a website. If it takes too long to a website, you, |
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dear reader, are about to leave this website very fast. Even if I |
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write the greatest and best content, you won't like it. |
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So by switching to a static CMS, the dynamic processing time is |
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removed and pages can load as fast as the round trip time (RTT) |
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between the web server and you. |
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### Reducing the inhibition threshold for writing blog articles |
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Let's come to the third and maybe most important point: reducing the |
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inhibition threshold for writing blog articles. Let's put some |
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background into this: we are a small, Swiss based hosting company |
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loving open source. However, the emphasises is on **small**. |
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So we cannot (nor do we want to ) afford huge marketing / adwork / paid |
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advertisements. But our strategy is to **do good and talk about it**. |
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However if the barrier for writing and publishing is high, we won't |
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write much about the things we do. And I think with a static CMS, |
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geeks (like me) are having a much easier time to actually write a blog |
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entry. |
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## How to do it |
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Now let's have a look on how to sneak in a static CMS into an existing |
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company website. [ungleich.ch](https://ungleich.ch) is powered |
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by our [Django CMS](https://www.django-cms.org) |
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based CMS (full [source code is |
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online](https://code.ungleich.ch/ungleich-public/dynamicweb/)). |
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The Django instance is running behind nginx, which allows us to proxy |
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different parts of the website to different backends and to serve |
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static assets directly from the filesystem. |
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On the other hand we have a static web server named |
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*staticweb.ungleich.ch* that hosts various static pages. |
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The existing URLs of ungleich.ch should all stay as they are without |
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any conflict. For this reason the new static cms is placed at |
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**/u/**. The static pages are generated on a client machine and are |
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uploaded using the following Makefile snippet: |
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``` |
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BUILDDIR=../ungleich-staticcms-build |
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DESTINATION=ungleichstatic@staticweb.ungleich.ch:/home/services/www/ungleichstatic/staticcms.ungleich.ch/www/ |
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all: publish |
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publish: build permissions |
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rsync -av $(BUILDDIR)/ $(DESTINATION) |
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permissions: build |
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find $(BUILDDIR) -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \; |
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find $(BUILDDIR) -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \; |
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build: |
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lektor build -O $(BUILDDIR) |
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``` |
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The last step to sneak in the CMS was to modify the nginx |
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configuration of ungleich.ch with the following snippet: |
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``` |
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location /u/ { |
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proxy_pass https://staticcms.ungleich.ch; |
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} |
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``` |
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## What's next? |
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As you can see in this post, the design does not fully (*cough*) fit |
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the regular design of ungleich.ch. However Lektor uses jinja2, which |
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is very similar to what we already use in the |
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[existing dynamicweb |
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project](https://code.ungleich.ch/ungleich-public/dynamicweb/). |
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If you want to join the discussion about this, I invite you to our |
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open chat on [chat.ungleich.ch](https://chat.ungleich.ch).
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