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I met with a company in 2011 that was using Vignette, and was considering creating their own CMS. I said something like, "I know that the really old version us

by reuven 13y ago

I met with a company in 2011 that was using Vignette, and was considering creating their own CMS. I said something like, "I know that the really old version used to work on Tcl, but I assume that you're long past that." I was met with blank, embarrassed stares, until the manager finally said, "Um, we're actually still using that ancient version built on Tcl." So far as I know, they're still using it -- they never upgraded, switched, or developed an alternative. I'm not sure if that speaks to the company's ability to absorb pain, or to the excellent, long-term software engineering that went into that version of Vignette.

buro9 13y ago
That version of Vignette was little more than a wrapper for a TCL web stack. The function of the wrapper was to provide caching and cache invalidation, and some extra things to help make that fractionally easier (dependency management). But... it was always sold and justified it's price on the basis of personalisation. Everywhere I ever saw Vignette the managers believed that they had purchased the holy grail of personalisation. The personalisation stuff was based on server-side includes that pulled in uncached files, and used cookies to track individuals and then would build a file on the individual and tailor the SSI for the individual. Sounds perfectly reasonable. Except I never saw it working outside of a demo for a single user. Vignette was a great "web stack with static file caching", and on the 4 servers we had at British Telecom we could serve our 6 million customers the BTinternet portal when they all logged on the minutes after 6pm (remember when it was free internet in the evening? and BTinternet was the default home page in IE for our users). But if you turned on personalisation, everything ground to a halt immediately.
- reuven 13y ago
  Funny you should mention that... the company in question was a large (by Israeli standards) newspaper, with lots of popular sites. But I don't believe that they have any personalization, or that it's active for any meaningful number of users.

by reuven 13y ago

buro9 13y ago

That version of Vignette was little more than a wrapper for a TCL web stack. The function of the wrapper was to provide caching and cache invalidation, and some extra things to help make that fractionally easier (dependency management). But... it was always sold and justified it's price on the basis of personalisation. Everywhere I ever saw Vignette the managers believed that they had purchased the holy grail of personalisation. The personalisation stuff was based on server-side includes that pulled in uncached files, and used cookies to track individuals and then would build a file on the individual and tailor the SSI for the individual. Sounds perfectly reasonable. Except I never saw it working outside of a demo for a single user. Vignette was a great "web stack with static file caching", and on the 4 servers we had at British Telecom we could serve our 6 million customers the BTinternet portal when they all logged on the minutes after 6pm (remember when it was free internet in the evening? and BTinternet was the default home page in IE for our users). But if you turned on personalisation, everything ground to a halt immediately.

reuven 13y ago
Funny you should mention that... the company in question was a large (by Israeli standards) newspaper, with lots of popular sites. But I don't believe that they have any personalization, or that it's active for any meaningful number of users.