About Web Development by Activo

We have been receiving a lot of comparison inquiries lately and I wanted to put this simple Joomla vs Ektron content management systems comparison table out there. Have in mind that much of the decision of which CMS to choose for your company or organization is usually made way before this comparison since the two systems are different in such a fundamental level. However, this is a comparison of those fundamentals plus some of the ‘interesting’ features.

Joomla vs Ektron

Thoughts?

We recently spotted an article from Bill Roger’s blog (Ektron’s CEO) which discusses usage of the Ektron Server Controls v.s. Ektron’s API. At Activo, we are constantly using both approaches and indeed each approach is a bit different and is used in different situations. The article makes it much clearer that Ektron actually put more effort than we thought before into the Server Controls. Understanding that the Server Controls were made for this sort of usage makes us now feel more secure using this method. Previously, I always thought of this method as a hack and preferred the API.

Frank heads our .NET development team and added the following:

I’ve found it easier to start off with a foundation of one of the server controls and build off of that, rather than using only API calls. The server control acts as a “datareader” which can be used to access the data initially. Many of the custom controls we built to replace XSLT use this model:

• Add a ListSummary inside the user control/page and set its properties.
• Access the ListSummary’s EkItems property.
• Manipulate the data from EkItems, transform it, and output it into a repeater.

This tends to work more reliably than using the API calls. However, if the code needs to bypass the permissions model, the only option is to go direct using the API.

Server performance is one of the most important functions of websites today. Users expect immediate response when clicking around your site. Even a 3.5 seconds delay may send them somewhere else. Also,  search engine crawlers (like Google) will rank you lower as a result of high latency. Hence, it is not only important to practice a faster website delivery, it’s a necessity. Recently, we have assisted our clients with server performance, which we supported using Ektron CMS400 v7.0.4. Here are the three main server performances we have noted after testing and tracking down the cause of website delays by using the Trace technique in .NET:

1. Avoid XML/XSLT Tranformations for Controls Output

After researching the cause of a huge latency greater than 2 seconds on every page refresh, we have discovered that about 50% of the latency was during the Page_Load occurrence. A more thorough research revealed that the 50% in delay was occurring during the XSLT transformations of all the controls on the page.
By caching these controls, (this solution is only partial and not recommended), and changing the way controls are rendered onto the page, we were able to reduce this latency to less than half. Therefore, we recommend building your Ektron site with the basic Ektron controls, and if you need a special way to present the information, use the code behind to generate a display of the data while you gather the data through the Ektron API and process the data programmatically. In other words, avoid XSLT altogether.

2. Make Use of the Flex Menu Ektron Control

Most of the Ektron sites that we’ve had the chance to work on were structured similarly. The main menu was a set of multi-level menus, which are all rendered by a style-specific XSLT. In some cases, before running through the XSLT, a script was passing through the menu items to find the one that needed to be ’selected’.
Why should we reinvent the wheel?
If you read Ektron’s documentation, you will find a few menu controls that can be very handy: DHTMLMenu, Menu, SmartMenu, and FlexMenu. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. In short about each one:

• DHTMLMenu: My least favorite. Uses too much JavaScript and doesn’t render nicely for SEO
• Menu: The simplest one to use for basic menu systems
• SmartMenu: I like this menu because it’s a styled and nested unordered list. It can also support section 508 and highlights the selected menu item by a client side script, which is a lot more performance friendly
• FlexMenu: Our tests indicate that this menu control is the fastest if you have a sophisticated XSLT. It seems like Ektron simply provided a flexible menu control specifically for XML transformations.

We recommend the use of the SmartMenu, and if you insist in using XSLT to display a menu, use the FlexMenu as the alternative.

3. Make Use of the .NET Caching Mechanism

A simple thing for developers to set, isn’t it? Well, you can’t imagine how many sites we’ve seen without any caching beyond what the default settings allow. There is so much more to cache, it is almost a crime not to make use of it in our technology-driven age.

Ultimately, the above lists are just a few main performance issues that we have found with many Ektron sites. The items above alone can improve the site’s performances by up to 50%. However, this list is far from complete by any means. Hardware, Paging, Deadlocks, Server Environment, and even Bandwidth need to all be reviewed in order to improve performances.

Fast Surfing!