SilverStripe

Why the 2008 Democratic National Convention used SilverStripe

Posted by Sigurd Magnusson on 5 August 2009

You can now watch an hour-long video explaining SilverStripe's involvement with demconvention.com, the official website for the US Democratic Party's 2008 National Convention. During its 96-hour peak period, the website recieved 2.6 billion hits, 3.2 million visits, served 350,000 hours of streaming video, and took the prize of busiest SilverStripe website ever.

The video is a recording of Tim Chambers and I talking at the monthly Washington DC Web Content Mavens group. Tim Chambers is one of the founders of Dewey Digital, the company appointed the official website producer for the convention. Dewey Digital is now one of SilverStripe's official partners. Dewey was responsible for the website strategy and design and, as we discuss in this video, the selection of a CMS platform and the delegation of the technical build to an appropriately skilled company.

In the talk, Tim elaborates on the most important criteria when selecting the SilverStripe software and company, explaining the seemingly unlikely selection of an open source package from New Zealand:

• Open source, allowing buyer confidence (the software can be trialled before selection), and allowing the 2012 campaign to reuse ideas, code, and content if wanted. (Oh, and providing a good price!)
• Scalability, for obvious reasons: this would be the busiest convention website in history. Caching to static files was a required component of this.
• Easy content authoring, to ensure that the system could be used by volunteers, without user error.
• Multilingual, to ensure the Hispanic community could be effectively reached with Spanish content.
• Able to provide blog functionality and integration with Flickr, YouTube, and other systems easily.
• Commercial support, because there needed to be a professional firm responsible for delivery.

Following this we discuss the various traditional and Web 2.0 features of the website, characteristic of a more IT-savvy political campaign. We show and explain screenshots of the content authoring interface, providing insights into how a busy Denver team worked around the clock to update the website with speech transcripts, and other critical information.

We also talk about the technical infrastructure: five Redhat Apache servers, a CDN, and separate infrastructure for the Silverlight streaming video. We noted that the interest in Obama's nomination, combined with a Slashdotting, surpassed the 1000/hits per second mark, yet the website remained responsive to visitors.

With the talk hosted in Washington DC, the talk also mentions some of the non-technical details such as how the convention needed to contain a Colorado voter focus. It also meant we had a very active audience who asked plenty of useful questions. It was well worth the jetlag to do the talk, so we hope that it makes for useful viewing!

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