CBS Television Stations Digital Media group sought out Treehouse to find a new content management platform for their 39 locally-owned and operated stations. Plagued by outages due to spike traffic events and complexities around their then-hosted solution, they engaged Treehouse to help maintain the existing Zope-based web server while exploring other options. Treehouse collaborated with the group to build a strategy outlining ongoing support of the existing system and guidance in the evaluation of both off-the-shelf products and open source solutions. At the time, very few content management systems supported the multi-tenancy model that was required to provide multi-directional syndicated content across all sites.
Given the complexity of the situation and lack of existing toolset capabilities, they decided to build a new content management platform from the ground up. Treehouse partnered with the CBS engineering staff to build this new platform later coined "Iris". The CMS took a customer first approach and leveraged the knowledge and experience from the national team as well as the feedback from all the local web managers across the US. The system delivered a uniform toolset for content management, including support for multiple custom content types, a full asset library, integrated digital rights management, advanced role-level security and semantic search functionality. The system allowed the station editors to design a custom user experience using a drag and drop interface with modules to dynamically create new sections, subscribe to syndicated content, and produce staging and production instances.
To simplify site maintenance, at runtime, the local station page URL is generated and page content modules are loaded dynamically. SEO was considered and integrated at the very start from clean URLs and cascading META tags to integrated image titles and RSS feeds. In addition, taxonomy structures were created and maintained by the CMS to allow tracking and targeting for both their analytics system and ad delivery applications respectively. The platform currently handles upwards of 150M pageviews per month and leverages the latest in technological advances from integrated in-memory caching to high performance Layer 7 load-balance appliance integration. At peak times (8M pageviews/hr), the web and database servers barely break 10% CPU load, allowing for plenty of room for scalability.
Product integrations on this engagement:
- Entriq/Dayport - Video Content Management
- Hitbox, Omniture & Google Analytics - Site Analytics
- DoublClick - Ad Platform
- Endeca - Web Search / User Generated Content Platform
- Akamai / Limelight - Content Delivery Networks
- F5 - Layer 7 Load Balancer - GZip / Content Caching
- Microsoft - ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 / C#, SQL Server 2005
