[Grok-dev] ANN: New Grok Powered Website

[Kevin Smith]

Hi Fellow Grokkers,

I am pleased to announce the new http://www.montereycountyweekly.com 
site powered by Grok/Zope3. It was soft-launched early December. The 
site took approx. 8-9 months to build (5 months on the public face and 
3-4 months on the back end), has over 35,000+ pages (as indexed by 
Google) and according to sloccount is composed of 15,430 lines of python 
code.

Biggest hurdles: lack of export/import, moving large data sets, lack of 
docs/examples (at the time), lack of layers and viewlets, Catalog 
scaling limitations, lack of respect to how long it takes to build a 
custom CMS from ground up, zc.buildout

Biggest helpers: GROK SMASH ZCML, grok.View, hurry.query, groklets, a 
renewed respect for ZPT's especially macros, Martijn's sense of humor, 
Philipp's book, emacs, screen, open source in general, zc.buildout

The site's not finished yet, and our business requirements are 
constantly in flux, but thankfully due to Grok's roots in Zope3, it's 
always being evolved to meet our needs.

THANK YOU Grok community for your hard work and know-how in creating a 
dream web programming environment.
 
Go GROK!


Kevin Smith
Director of New Media
Monterey County Weekly
831-394-5656 x119

Some miscellaneous info.
OpenVZ on Debian 4.0 to manage resources, maintain dev server
PGStorage to cut start up time from what was 55 sec and growing to 4-6 sec
Nging web server
bazaar-ng for super simple distributed version control
JQuery/Jframe/Simile/Spry for ajax stuff mostly on back end
z3c.authentication for membership/authorization
Grok 0.9 (heavily expanded to use layers, viewlets, groklets, additional 
field indexes and add 'context' to hurry.query)
The site initially made heavy use of viewlets which were then simplified 
to groklets.