Case Study: Barcelona World Race achieves a high-traffic, high-availability multilingual CMS with Ibexa (eZ Publish + Symfony)

A CMS for a Complex and Demanding Website

The Barcelona World Race is a biennial, double‑handed non‑stop round‑the‑world regatta run by the Fundació Navegació Oceànica Barcelona; its website must serve a global, multilingual audience with real‑time tracking, multimedia streaming, sponsor analytics and secure services for partners like Salvamento Marítimo. The platform had to withstand huge, spiky traffic (past editions saw ~2M visitors, 18M visits and 80M pageviews), be mobile‑friendly, easy for editors to use, and highly available during the 100‑day race.

Microblau Colt implemented eZ Publish 5.3 fully integrated with the Symfony2 stack, delivering a responsive, four‑language site with tracking, streaming, social integration and sponsor reporting, deployed on a high‑availability cluster with Amazon CloudFront CDN and Varnish reverse proxy. Delivered in six months and on budget, the solution gave editors autonomy, global low‑latency performance, ~70% reduced server load from caching and the scalability and reliability needed to handle peak race traffic.

Barcelona World Race