Chris Shenton

Length: Short Talk

Target Level: Intermediate

Target Audience: Integrator, Designer, Developer

Our client had a 15-year old ASP/VBScript application but wasn’t prepared to rewrite it: the logic was working well enough, but it wasn’t attractive by today’s standards or usable on mobile devices. “Can’t we just give it a new look and feel?” they asked.

We’ve used the Diazo theme engine to build mobile.nasa.gov, retheming www.nasa.gov before it was mobile-friendly, so we knew we could do the same for this client. Our solution for this new project was to build a modern responsive theme, tailored for their each of their different content types and sections.

In this talk, we discuss our experience in building Diazo into nginx with a patched XSLT module, and how we deploy into AWS on a load-balanced cluster of inexpensive EC2 instances. We cover how our front-end developers work with paster, and our full-stack developers work with Docker. Finally, we talk about the challenges of providing too much power and splitting content control between the origin server and Diazo.