The ChefTalk.com story and how Vivvo helped us

ChefTalk.com has been on the web for over 10 years. Like many cooking sites we started out with a static model but as we grew needed to move to a data driven one. At the time I was doing a lot of cold fusion development with MS sql as the database. It was a logical choice to build the cms in cold fusion and worked well for many years.

In the early years our main site was cheftalk.com and our forums were at cheftalkcafe.com. After some time we wanted to consolidate everything under one domain so we moved both sites to the cheftalk.com domain and a linux server. In theory cold fusion should run on linux but almost immediately we started experiencing problems.

I knew I needed to make a move off cold fusion but just did not have the time or energy to write another cms. For the past year I looked very closely at Vivvo, Joomla, and Drupal. I installed all of them and tested them out and was still up in the air. After all, I didn't want to get into another mess right? And, Vbulletin integration was key for us.

ChefTalk had been on a VPS server up until a few weeks ago. Then our server finally just died. Cold fusion was using up so many resources that the site was down for days. ChefTalk hosts celebrity chefs and cookbook authors from time to time and we had Q&A forum with a very famous chef in just a few days. In a panic to get the site back up we purchased a dedicate server and moved the forums and the photo gallery.

After all our testing we decided to go with Vivvo and we ChefTalk.com (cooking articles, cookbook reviews, recipes) etc back up in about 5 days. I some initial concerns about the template engine and how high the learning curve would be, but was surprised how quickly I picked it up. The community here and the support staff have been very helpful in getting us back up and running.

Last week we had our first week in over a year where ChefTalk had a 100% uptime with no outages. Users can now comment on the articles, rate them and even add their own content. As well I have heard numerous comments about how much they like the new site.

The layout needs work no doubt but the site is back up after being down for a little over 5 days.

Here are a few of our stats:
====================
- Over 18,000 registered members (number is actually higher but we prune out old members from time to time)
- Just under a thousand articles, recipes, cookbook reviews
- We average around a half a million page views a month
- We are one of the best places to get your cooking questions answered quickly by the pros.

Thanks to all of the vivvo staff for answering my support tickets. Thanks to everyone in the community for helping me when I didn't want to wait for support.


www.cheftalk.com

Originally Posted by ChefTalk

ChefTalk.com has been on the web for over 10 years. Like many cooking sites we started out with a static model but as we grew needed to move to a data driven one. At the time I was doing a lot of cold fusion development with MS sql as the database. It was a logical choice to build the cms in cold fusion and worked well for many years.

In the early years our main site was cheftalk.com and our forums were at cheftalkcafe.com. After some time we wanted to consolidate everything under one domain so we moved both sites to the cheftalk.com domain and a linux server. In theory cold fusion should run on linux but almost immediately we started experiencing problems.

I knew I needed to make a move off cold fusion but just did not have the time or energy to write another cms. For the past year I looked very closely at Vivvo, Joomla, and Drupal. I installed all of them and tested them out and was still up in the air. After all, I didn't want to get into another mess right? And, Vbulletin integration was key for us.

ChefTalk had been on a VPS server up until a few weeks ago. Then our server finally just died. Cold fusion was using up so many resources that the site was down for days. ChefTalk hosts celebrity chefs and cookbook authors from time to time and we had Q&A forum with a very famous chef in just a few days. In a panic to get the site back up we purchased a dedicate server and moved the forums and the photo gallery.

After all our testing we decided to go with Vivvo and we ChefTalk.com (cooking articles, cookbook reviews, recipes) etc back up in about 5 days. I some initial concerns about the template engine and how high the learning curve would be, but was surprised how quickly I picked it up. The community here and the support staff have been very helpful in getting us back up and running.

Last week we had our first week in over a year where ChefTalk had a 100% uptime with no outages. Users can now comment on the articles, rate them and even add their own content. As well I have heard numerous comments about how much they like the new site.

The layout needs work no doubt but the site is back up after being down for a little over 5 days.

Here are a few of our stats:
====================
- Over 18,000 registered members (number is actually higher but we prune out old members from time to time)
- Just under a thousand articles, recipes, cookbook reviews
- We average around a half a million page views a month
- We are one of the best places to get your cooking questions answered quickly by the pros.

Thanks to all of the vivvo staff for answering my support tickets. Thanks to everyone in the community for helping me when I didn't want to wait for support.


www.cheftalk.com

This is almost identical to the story we have. The only difference is we went from PHPCow to Vivvo instead of using cold fusion. Good choice, we have had a great time with Vivvo and the support staff have been excellent. FYI, if you experience page load time issues, you might want to adjust the cache time to 1800 seconds, we have a high volume site as well and when we moved the cache time up from 30 seconds to 1/2 an hour the performance was MUCH better. We have just under 10,000 articles, our load times were approaching 11 seconds before we made the adjustment. Now we load in a 2 - 3. It seemed like the article count was relevant in that the time to load was getting larger as the count got higher. The Vivvo team told us to increase the cache and presto it worked like a charm.

*note if you add a lot of new content under this method you might want to clear cache after you do so the change takes effect immediately instead of waiting out the remainder of the 30 minute cache refresh.