IPPC Design Docs / User/business cases for using Django web framework for www.ippc.int development

Subject: User/business cases for using Django web framework for www.ippc.int development
Author: Simon Griffee, International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) Webmaster
Last Update: Wednesday, 29 June 2011 at 15:48:02
URL: http://hypertexthero.com/ippc/work/User-business-cases-for-using-django-python-git.html

User/business cases for using Django web framework for www.ippc.int development

IPPC.int is slow

Users prefer fast to slow.

Too many database queries are generated by Typo3.
Lots of superfluous markup is generated by Typo3. This is chiefly because Typo3 is a CMS (Content Management System) rather than a web framework. A web framework utilizes the model-view-controller architecture which separates data/logic/presentation concerns and lets developers, designers and writers work simultaneously without getting in each other’s way. This makes all the people working on a website more efficient.
Page speed is now factored into Google search rankings: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/page-speed-search-rankings/
The Google Webmaster tools’ site performance overview results for www.ippc.int show that on average, pages in the site take 7.7 seconds to load (updated on May 15, 2011). This is slower than 89% of all sites tracked by Google Webmaster tools.

IPPC.int URLs are not user-friendly

Users find it difficult to remember URLS, URLs take up too much space on documents, messy URLs embedded in documents don’t work for many users.

BAD: www.ippc.int/index.php?id=1110798&txpublicationpi1[showUid]=184204&frompage=13399&type=publication&subtype=&L=0#item
GOOD: www.ippc.int/standards/ispm-02
URL design is important - we need a web framework which gives us complete freedom in designing our URL structure - http://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/
While Typo3 (and other CMSs) provide ‘clean URL’ plugins, these still have limitations inherited from the CMS architecture, and Typo3’s documentation is lacking (also, compare the speed of searching in http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/ and in http://docs.djangoproject.com/). Django’s URL Dispatcher gives us complete freedom in designing URLs and mapping them to Views.
https://www.ippc.int/faq/#ClickedLinksOnDocumentsDoNotWork

Too many clicks are required to perform basic tasks in IPPC.int’s Typo3 backend user interface

Users get frustrated and inefficient.

Instead of being able to perform simple tasks themselves, IPPC Secretariat staff need to request a programmer or webmaster to do things such as publish new articles, reorder pages, create (and close) new polls, and assign group permissions to uploaded publications.
”Computer and network speeds will change over the years but human beings will evolve much more slowly. Thus we should start by considering limits derived from the humanity of our users. The experimental psychologists will tell us that short-term memory is good for remembering only about seven things at once (“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”, George A. Miller, The Psychological Review 1956, 63:81-97; http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html) and that this memory is good for only about twenty seconds. It is thus unwise to build any computer application in which users are required to remember too much from one page to another. It is also unwise to build any computer application where the interpage delay is more than twenty seconds. People might forget what task they were trying to accomplish!” — http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/content-management - Eve Andersson, Philip Greenspun, and Andrew Grumet, MIT

Typo3 is a difficult CMS to secure properly.

Users risk having their login details compromised and site data risks tampering or loss.

We experienced our own security breach with Typo3 when a tool which generated links to Viagra/other pharmeceutical products was covertly embedded in the site. More details available here ( username:ippc-hypertexthero password:ask simon ): http://hypertexthero.com/ippc/work/security/google-search-spam/index.html
Typo3 advertises itself in the source code of every website it powers, which gives potential attackers valuable inf
ormation: what CMS the site uses. For example, this is present in the www.IPPC.int (and www.FAO.org) homepage HTML source (as well as references to folders such as typo3conf and typo3temp): 
See the large amount of security updates on the following page: http://typo3.org/teams/security/security-bulletins/

Django is a popular, well-documented open source framework

See the following Google Trends search for most popular web framework (Google Trends allows one to perform a direct comparison of various search queries over time. The ‘-reinhardt’ argument was used to avoid picking up articles about the famous Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.)

Django vs Ruby on Rails: http://www.google.com/trends?q=django+-reinhardt%2C+ruby+on+rails
Django vs Apache Struts: http://www.google.com/trends?q=django+-reinhardt%2C+apache+struts
Django vs ASP.net MVC: http://www.google.com/trends?q=django+-reinhardt%2C+asp.net+mvc
Django vs Zend: http://www.google.com/trends?q=django+-reinhardt%2C+zend+framework