Interview with Fotis Evangelou About Gazzetta.gr

About this Blog

This is the second in a series of blog posts about major Joomla websites and the developers who built them. First up was Jack Bremer and the U.K. arts website theArtsDesk.com.

This week we're talking with Fotis Evangelou about the major Greek sports website Gazzetta.gr.

1) Hi Fotis. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I'm the co-founder & managing director at Komrade Ltd. I'm a Geology student dropout (!) and I've been building websites professionally for almost 10 years. I'm also the founder of JoomlaWorks, established in 2006. In late 2007, Komrade was formed and since then we're pretty fortunate to have built some of the world's top Joomla! based websites (in terms of visitor traffic) like Gazzetta.gr and TNAWrestling.com

2) What or who is Gazzetta.gr?

Gazzetta.gr is a sports news website and currently one of the top websites in Greece. It was launched early 2008 and now it averages more than 5 million visitors per month. It was actually our second project as Komrade, the first being TNAWrestling.com (2m+ visitors/month). So you can also say that we got a pretty good start as Komrade! Gazzetta.gr is run by 25+ sports journalists with many years of experience in both print and online publications. It's backed financially by a major IT related company in Greece.

3) How did the project with Gazzetta.gr come about?

The people behind Gazzetta.gr preferred to invest in an "open source" solution, having suffered from "closed source-itis" in the past, which cost them both time and money. Joomla! caught their eye as the best possible open source solution for Gazzetta.gr - especially because it had such a huge community. We were approached by them as we were already acknowledged professionals in the Joomla! community through JoomlaWorks. We sat down, discussed their needs and in 2 months the site was ready to launch.

4) Do you know why they made the decision to use Joomla?

Strong community presence was obviously key to this decision. They would not be tied to one company only for whatever reason. Another big reason was the friendliness of the Joomla! administrator interface, which was (and still is) light years ahead compared to most open source and even commercial/closed source CMSs.

5) Question from Paulo Williams: What extensions did you use in building the site?

Gazzetta.gr is now in its second version, based entirely on Joomla! 1.5 and K2. K2 is used as the main application for articles, tags, comments and more in Gazzetta.gr. It handles around 95% of all publishing/editorial related tasks.

Aside K2, we use the following publicly available extensions: Frontpage Slideshow, AllVideos, Simple Image Gallery Pro, Google Ad Manager from Joomlaworks plus JCE and Update Manager from third parties.

We also developed the following custom extensions:

• A component to administer the "news stand" area of the website
• A multi-use module for K2 that fetches content in various ways and filters as seen on the frontpage of the website and many inner pages
• A modified version of the default "cache" plugin that comes with Joomla!, which deals with page caching/performance and makes sure that the entire website is properly served from two CDNs (content distribution networks) that we use (one from Akamai, the other from Gloman/Live24.gr).

6) What major obstacles did you come across during the build?

To be honest, Gazzetta.gr v2 (the current version) was a joy building, with no real obstacles in the way. We had the right tool (K2) on the right platform (Joomla! 1.5.x), we had a great design and we had the (bad) experience from v1 (which used Joomla! v1.0.x). v1 was a much bigger pain to administer for various reasons. First of all, the core of com_content (the main content component of Joomla!) was significantly changed to reflect the templating needs of the design. So it made upgrading to the latest Joomla! 1.0.x release very hard. Upgrades to public extensions used was also an issue as there was no "overwrite/upgrade" feature in the Joomla! installer. So lots of manual work just for upgrading.

In v2 we wrote a simple migrator from WordPress to Joomla!/K2 (as v1 of Gazzetta.gr included around 9 WordPress based blogs in subfolders), moved Joomla! v1.0.x articles into K2, re-wrote the "news stand" component to an MVC-based Joomla! 1.5 component and then we started integrating everything to the new design. Moving the WordPress blogs to K2 in Joomla! 1.5 really made a difference to the editorial team as they now had to administer just one website (instead of 10 previously). Having all content in one database made it better/faster for Google to crawl content and for people to search the site. And best of all? The editors did not miss one bit of WordPress functionality as it's basically included in K2 features by default. So the work flow changed to better.

One thing we seriously took into consideration was making v2 as modular as possible, with no hacks at all in the core of Joomla! or any other core/third-party extension. If we wanted to extend the functionality of something in Joomla! (like the default "cache" plugin) we took that "something" and cloned it, then extended it. For that matter, we wanted "clean" solutions for everything and solution that we could re-use. We used Google's Ad Manager heavily, so we wrote an extension for Joomla! which we later publicly released through JoomlaWorks. We did the same thing for many of K2's now default modules. Our needs "translated" into modular solutions, which we were able to contribute back to the community.

7) Question from Jack Bremmer: For those of us that haven't done it, what challenges do you face developing and coding in Greek rather than English?

In the Joomla! v1.0.x days we used to maintain a different distribution to the original build provided by joomla.org which was UTF-8 optimized. That way we could easily work with non-latin languages (like Greek) within Joomla!. Joomla! 1.5.x is now using UTF-8 by default, which was a natural step, since the CMS became so popular worldwide and had to address regional/language related issues once and for all. The use of language files also makes localization a lot easier. So developing a Greek website now is identical (as a process) to developing an English based website.

8) How do you handle 5+ million uniques per month on a Joomla site?

We use two content distribution networks (CDN) as I mentioned above. They handle 99% of the load of the website and they serve content extremely fast. If we didn't use that solution, we'd have to setup and maintain a stack of servers to simulate just a portion of the performance of a CDN (note that we use 2 CDNs because we needed to break the bandwidth costs differently - one is used for articles the other for the "news stand" area). If you're into that kind of traffic, using a CDN is the only (and most cost-effective) way.

But I'll give you a great tip here... Joomla!'s built-in "cache" plugin, which is "off" by default is simply amazing. It can "convert" Joomla! web pages into static HTML pages, thus serving the website *extremely* fast. This is a hidden gem in Joomla!. For a couple of days, we run the website with our modified version of the "cache" plugin, while being hit by thousands of users and serving a few million page views. You know what? Joomla! would hold on just fine without the CDN if Apache could handle the gazillion connections and didn't run out of memory!!! It was amazing what performance can be enjoyed from just a plugin of less than 100 code lines. Of course it's the architecture of the Joomla! framework/API that permits such a little plugin to provide this performance gain! I doubt any other open source CMS can do that!

Of course it was more cost effective to continue using the CDN. Otherwise we'd have to add new hardware. And of course the imminent addition of a Gazzetta.gr iPhone app and the release of a widgets area would demand even more bandwidth...

9) Question from James Frisen: How does K2 fit into your business model?

K2 was built to address professional needs within our industry, not just the Joomla! community. It combines the best concepts from the top open source CMSs into the flexible platform that Joomla! is. Every website we build now is based off K2. Instead of keeping this "tool" of our work for us, we decided it was best to release it to the community, so other people could benefit from it. In a little less than a year, we've managed to build a great community around it (as people realize the potential of using K2) and we constantly improve the component to address new needs and improve performance.

We don't make money directly off K2, but indirectly: we can build feature rich websites for our clients in less time compared to deploying separate extensions, with better flexibility and no hacks to core files. That means an advantage for us and our clients in using the Joomla! platform. Clients can't come up to us now and say "can we do this with Drupal or WordPress?"!! Allow me to say that Joomla! and K2 is THE killer online publishing combination. Using K2, we can build a news/magazine/portal-like site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing and more the easy way! And since K2 is extensible with additional fields to its base item form, we can create category-specific content types, e.g. article, blog post, product page, directory listing. It just makes sense!

Final thing I'd like to say about K2 is that we built it because we know and appreciate the power of the Joomla! platform. But we also know its weaknesses, which lie with content presentation and ACL (access level control). With K2 we are able to fill these gaps in and, the same way people use VirtueMart for e-shops, we believe that people can use K2 for their content related needs as well.

10) Do you have anything else special planned for Gazzetta.gr?

Version 2 saw a massive increase into traffic for the website. From 3.5+ million visitors we went to 5+ millions in just 2 months and the numbers are still increasing. I guess the goal of the editorial team is to make Gazzetta.gr the top sports news website in Greece. Our constant goal is to push the limits and try new things where possible. There are many thoughts right now to extend the current content, but I'm afraid I'm not allowed to discuss in detail. What is sure is the addition of a RESTful API into K2, which will enable us to provide various services to other websites and applications at some point in the near future.

Over to You ...

Do you know of a major or particularly interesting site that we should feature here? Email your suggestions to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Be sure to include:

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• Why the site is interesting
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Next week we'll be interviewing Dan Lopez who helped build Linux.com. If you have any questions you'd like us to ask him, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .