Nils Langner introduced us to his project “CMS Health Checks” for the CloudFest Hackathon.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon
What is your project called, and what is it all about?
Niels
It’s called CMS Health. So we are testing CMS system for their health, basically.
So there’s much more behind that, but…
Simon
Obviously.
Niels
Obviously, yeah. So when you normally test your website, it’s just the uptime check, right? So you do like a curl request and just check, is the server still up? But modern websites, normally, they hide their broken stuff. So it could be that things on the website do not work, but still an uptime check would say, yeah, everything’s fine.
So when we want to have more detailed checks for that, something like, okay, I can deliver data, but the database is down or the hard disk is almost full, something like this. And this was the basic idea, right?
And then we started to think about, but this is not a WordPress problem. This is not a Joomla problem. This is not a Typo3 problem. This is a problem everybody shares. So the idea is, why not create a standard for that, that everybody can use, and just send the data to any monitoring system out there?
Yeah, so this is a problem every CMS system shares, right?
We now have somebody from the WordPress hackers in our team. We have Typo3 guys in our team. And we want to reach out to every CMS out there. So the idea is every CMS is able to create those JSON files and there’s a monitoring system, a standardised monitoring system that just can read those files and then can return the data or can then alert if something fails.
Simon
So that sounds like a bigger project that will go beyond the limited time of the hackathon this weekend.
Niels
Exactly. Exactly, exactly.
Simon
What is your near-time goal? What is the increment you would like to end up with after the hackathon ends?
Niels
So the basic idea is to have this standard. We are already having an implementation. We also have a mobile app that checks that.
So this is pretty cool. This is pretty cool and it works for TYPO3, for WordPress.
But the most important thing is the standard. I work for a monitoring system for WebPros and we would implement that standard, right? And then it would be great if we already can monitor everything out there, but therefore you need an open standard because otherwise nobody will implement it.
And we will also contribute.
Yeah. And so when the standard is out there, so everybody can take that standard and then hopefully all the monitoring systems out there, like Pingdom, like Koality, like 360 monitoring, like New Relic can take that standard and then build the monitoring on top of that.
Simon
Cool. So this is very much in the spirit of like cross open-source CMS collaboration and then also an open ecosystem basically for like different providers to hop onto this standard. Exactly. That’s super cool.
Niels
Yeah. Yeah. And it tests this commercial part, but you don’t have to do that. So we already implemented an open source system that can do that as well. I mean, all those professional systems out there, so where you have to pay money, I guess they will be better.
But for 80% of all those agencies out there, the open source solution will be enough. So, and that’s important.
Simon
Thank you for the insight into your project. Thanks for taking the time.