With the honour to do nu.nl also came the responsibility to deliver an excellent website. An important part of this was choosing the right tool for the job. As Harrie recently explained in a blog, choosing the right framework can save you heaps of work. For nu.nl this meant that we had two sites with very different characteristics. The front-end of nu.nl is a very static site with millions of viewers, while the back-end is highly dynamic with only a handful of people visiting it.

Superficially the front-end of nu.nl isn't that exciting. It's a news site, with news articles and categories. A common joke was to just install wordpress for the front-end and be done with it. But that's just the surface, in our caching strategy the front-end became a true challenge. With over 9 million hits a day, performance was key in designing the front-end. I'm sure you're all aching to know how we tackled that, but I promised Peter he would get a chance to tell you all about that part of nu.nl. And as lead developer and architect, he is also much more suitable to give you the skinny on that.

While the front-end wasn't a walk in the park, the back-end wasn't a small task either. You might not think about it, but supplying nu.nl with the newest news all the time is a tremendous task, it includes organizing the workflow in such a way that the incoming sources can be edited and published as efficient as possible. Assets like images, videos and of course news needed to be managed and brought together in an easy way.

For the back-end we chose ATK as a framework. ATK excels in making it as easy as possible to create elaborate CRUD interfaces. We also made gratuitous use of prototype and script.aculo.us to further enhance the usability of the back-end. For instance, making it possible to upload a source image at high-resolution, and when needed slice and scale the image to the appropriate size for a news article, while making sure the relation between the now two images was preserved, and making it easy to manage the meta-information associated with the images, like giving it tags, description and of course copyright information.

We also made use of ATK's innate ability to "nest" actions, making it possible to go from editing an article to uploading and editing images, perhaps creating a slide show and finally publishing the article. Behind the scene the back-end would skip trough various different modules and actions to make this possible, but for the user it's like everything is right there in the article edit screen. This is a tremendous boost in productivity, because they no longer need to switch between various modules to do everything, or think about the sequence they need to do certain actions.

One of the features of nu.nl is that all media content is served from a dedicated media server. ATK is very strong when it comes to encapsulating different data sources. By using the atkDataNode we were able to write a sort of 'adapter' to the REST based API of the media server. Making it possible to more or less treat the media that is stored on a remote service as a local entity.

Next to nu.nl, the back-end also controls different sites that are part of the nu.nl family of sites. In particular nufoto.nl and nuvideo.nl. This means that it became very easy to share assets and create an even bigger tie-in between the sites. Nufoto.nl for instance is a website that stands at the front of civilian journalism, making it easy for people to publish their photos of important events and accidents. When nu.nl has a story covering that event the editors can create a slideshow based on the content that is available on nufoto.nl. Because both sites are managed in the same admin, this is very easy to do.

I hope you liked the small behind-the-scenes I gave about one of the biggest website in the Netherlands. I of course couldn't go in too much details but I hope this was enough to give a feel of it. At the end I talked a bit about nufoto and nuvideo, at a later date I will write another blog post in which I will talk a bit about the front-end of both sites, they include a few very interesting techniques which I think you will find interesting.