Overblog - The new generation of blogs is built on Symfony thanks to SensioLabs
Overblog, a leading provider of blog management and hosting for the general public, successfully engaged SensioLabs to train and implement Symfony. The result is a stable, secure and powerful platform for bloggers.
The Project
Overblog, a leader in the management and hosting of blogs for the general public, chose the Symfony framework for its platform revision. The SensioLabs Support Team played a key role in getting the framework functional, up and running. At the 2012 launch, the new Overblog platform, fresh with numerous functions, was deemed a stunning success.
Primary benefits:
The framework lends itself to industrializing development
Benefit from state-of-the-art to offer a new blog generation highly (fully) configurable
Symfony security is a major benefit
Framework is easily handled by the Overblog teams who engaged in complete SensioLabs training sessions. Increased team competence levels and provided challenges on methods and best practices for the framework.
The Stakes
Overblog, founded in 2004, a platform for managing and hosting blogs, almost immediately became a major player in the worldwide blogosphere and counts approximately 2 million users and 35 million monthly visitors. With this success, the company soon realized the limitations of its infrastructure’s ability to handle massive user needs, especially those concerning social networks. In 2011, Overblog had to admit their need to completely revise their platform both on a technical level as well as for product offers.
The stakes were high and Overblog had to evaluate and choose a new structuring framework that could handle all the critical requirements for their business, process the explosion of activity and provide a solid technical base that would not only allow them to continue innovating and evolving as a company, but also offer their teams a simpler, easier development process.
We wanted to enjoy the development process, it was imperative for our teams.
Xavier Hausherr, Overblog’s CTO
The Solution
After extensive study of available solutions on the market, the Overblog team chose Symfony. What motivated their choice? Symfony offered Overblog a comprehensive, flexible platform that could grow with their business. Interoperability among components, development and frame standards, an actively contributing community, scalability: all qualities that Symfony alone could offer.
In an effort to meet delays and insure project quality, the Overblog teams called on SensioLabs to shoulder them from beginning to end. SensioLabs was involved for about three months doing not only general training, but also specific training and technical and methodological coaching in order to build the project’s global architecture. They also assured team success in SSO authentication, Twig integration, security coverage Web services and more.
The Benefits
Between the high performance of Symfony and the SensioLabs training teams, Overblog enjoyed the best and most efficient development choices and tools available for their project. "The operational implementation of the platform for Overblog was a great success, thanks mainly to the quality support SensioLabs provided", says Xavier Hausherr.
For the CTO of Overblog, the infrastructure handles all the platform demands for both performance techniques and for stability. The first oversees migration seduced many hardcore bloggers who are thrilled with this new platform that keeps good to its promises.
