Website of African students association in CULS

Wossenyeleh Merid Mekonnen

Master's thesis

Abstract:

Websites have been the pillar of information dissemination across many platforms and with the growth of technology, the way websites are developed is constantly changing and evolving, giving rise to a more stable and reliable content management systems. However, most content management systems are being used as a one solution website system, where they are offered as the answer to most website needs. Although this approach enables development to have a small life cycle and encourages better upgrades, updates and security, it also neglects the fact that, new different content management systems can perform well depending on the need of the website. Due to this, there have been many new content management systems offered freely, that are focusing on different aspects, like development language or performance optimization. For the case of a small website serving an African Student Association with in Czech University of Life sciences, this study covers the comparison between WordPress, a commercially known content management system and, a new content management system called Grav, that is based on a flat file architecture. The project moves from developing and hosting the websites, to load and stress testing them via simulating traffic from virtual users. Finally moves to a survey to scale user experience and attitude of selected students with in the university. The comparison is then made through recorded response times, error rates and questioners. The project concludes that even though the survey didnt show a significant difference between the two websites on user experience, response times and error rates showed that for a small-scale website like a students association, Grav Performs better and utilizes very little resources. Future development of this project should cover possible extensibility and optimization of Grav.

Keywords

Content Management Systems, Grav, WordPress, Load testing, web development, website resources utilization

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 30. 11. 2016

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: Ing. Václav Lohr, Ph.D.

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Economics and Management

Master programme / field:
Systems Engineering and Informatics / Informatics