{"id":981,"date":"2010-02-23T17:28:36","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T00:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/?p=981"},"modified":"2010-02-23T21:04:21","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T04:04:21","slug":"the-evolution-of-sumo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/2010\/02\/23\/the-evolution-of-sumo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of SUMO"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Guest post by James Socol<\/a> of the webdev team. <\/em>Comments or questions? Head on over to James’ original blog post<\/a> and comment there!<\/em>)<\/p>\n

When I joined the SUMO<\/a> team six months ago, the team was just starting a discussion of \u201cwhere do we go from here?\u201d\u00a0 SUMO was built on a CMS<\/abbr> called TikiWiki<\/a>, and had diverged pretty significantly in two years. (David Tenser wrote a more detailed history<\/a> if you\u2019re interested.)<\/p>\n

After a few months of talking and testing\u2014and a few changes of direction\u2014we\u2019ve decided that SUMO will follow our colleagues on AMO<\/a> and move to a custom web application, built on Django<\/a>, a development framework in Python.<\/p>\n

Why are we committing to such a dramatic new direction? Three major reasons. Keep in mind that SUMO was built on TikiWiki 1.10, a little more than two years out of date.<\/em><\/p>\n

Performance<\/h3>\n

TikiWiki is a very feature-rich application. An unfortunate trade-off for us is performance, especially on a site serving 16 million users every week. As our European users<\/a> in particular know, SUMO can be unacceptably slow at times, especially when editing articles. Many of the changes we made to the platform\u2014most of which were contributed back over the past few months\u2014were to improve performance via tools like output caching, database replication, and just refactoring. When we evaluated the latest version of TikiWiki, we found that performance was around the same, on average.<\/p>\n

In the new platform, we\u2019ll be taking advantage of techniques now available, including query and template\/fragment caching and expect to see dramatic performance improvements. We\u2019ll also be avoiding some of the performance pitfalls that TikiWiki fell into over the years with improvements to the security, database, and templating layers, among others.<\/p>\n

But the biggest performance impact\u2014I expect\u2014will be moving from a general-purpose CMS to a dedicated web application, focused on providing the SUMO experience.<\/p>\n

Hackability<\/h3>\n

To work on SUMO, you have to overcome a steep learning curve. Components tend to be tightly-coupled, or grouped in unintuitive ways, and are not as extensible as we\u2019d like. The lack of a comprehensive test suite leaves changes to important sections of code open to introducing regressions in otherwise unrelated, dependent areas. SUMO 1.x also fails to function without a relatively complete copy of its database, which makes it difficult for community members outside the company to contribute.<\/p>\n

With the new platform, and some discipline from the team, our goal is to improve all of these and make it easier for someone to get started hacking on SUMO.<\/p>\n