The Secret In The Dirt project was a large consulting project that deserves a bit of extra mention here because of the various technologies it touched. The project involved a re-implementation of an existing site that was based on Joomla and the JomSocial social networking component. At the time the project started, they already had a user base of 15,000 registered users, and had hundreds of visitors a day. The original implementation, however, was plagued by numerous performance and scalability issues and needed a fresh start to enable the site owners to potentially scale to at least an order of magnitude larger user base.

The solution involved redoing the existing functionality, while upgrading core components (including Joomla, which was very out-of-date) to manage their social network and proprietary video library. Additionally, the site was moved into the cloud, using Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) infrastructure to enable the site resources to be easily scaled as demand increases (the user based is at over 17,000 as of this writing).