Need Advice on Powering Very Large, Content Rich Website

[playXray]

Hi guys,

I'm working with a friend on a new website that is going to need hundreds of thousands of pages, and some very large databases. I need to come up with a solution to power this site that is easy to set up, but highly customisable. I can't give many more details about the site at the moment (I've promised my friend that I won't mention anything specific yet) but it's essentially a cataloguing website where people will list and rank their favourite stuff.

I've used Wordpress many times, and Joomla and Drupal on a couple of occasions. I set up a test installation of Magento once, but I didn't get very far with it.

Does anyone have any recommendations of what to use? Will one of these CMS installations do the trick, or is it better to try and write something bespoke? I'm not a programmer myself but we will be getting one to work on this at some stage.

Personally, I think Magento might be the most flexible and powerful, but it seems much more complicated than the others, so I'm not really sure.

[Site Lab]

CMS wise, id say Drupal over Joomla. (Personal preference.) For this amount of pages .etc you would be better off with something bespoke. Also make sure the actual server can keep up with the amount of page requests.etc. (NGINX instead of Apache and a fast I/O on the server.)

[Lingwo]

Is it going to have hundreds of thousands of pages? or a few pages that pull data from the database? Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or Magento should handle it but if you're not programmers then you won't get very far. I'd get a prototype working first. Perhaps grab a few CMS' set them up locally and test them and see which one does what you need.

I definitely wouldn't the bespoke route if you're not a programmer.

[Site Lab]

I suggested the bespoke route because he put:

I'm not a programmer myself but we will be getting one to work on this at some stage.

Obviously, if he was not a programmer then there would be no point trying to create something bespoke but since he said he would be getting one to work on it then thats why i suggested it.

However what +Lingwo said is a good idea because you could then get a feel with each of the CMS soloutions. Depends what kind of site is it. Is it like a tutorial/news/articles.etc site?

[firey]

You really only need a few pages.. not hundreds of thousands.. Maybe 50 tops... but really it should all just be PHP that pulls the page content from a database, and uses .htaccess and routing to make the url look pretty.

[playXray]

It's basically going to be a big database of stuff, and you can talk about, review and rate this stuff. There will be news etc on there, but that's not the main aspect of the site.

I want to really keep costs to a minimum so I'm hoping to get something very basic set up before we need to get a programmer to sort out the hard stuff. Going fully bespoke would require just far too much money, at least at this stage.

I guess it's looking like Drupal or Magento at this stage. It will acually have hundreds of thousands of pages as far as I can tell - they'll all need fully worded URLs (as opposed to mysite.com/p34) and will have static content as well as generated content.

[Site Lab]

Hmm, fully worded urls as like:

/articles/article-name/

or

/stuff/stuff-name/

That would be easy to do with something like Drupal.

[playXray]

You really only need a few pages.. not hundreds of thousands.. Maybe 50 tops... but really it should all just be PHP that pulls the page content from a database, and uses .htaccess and routing to make the url look pretty.

Oh ok, well that sounds cool. I used to run a gaming website on Wordpress, and we reviewed games etc, as well as posted news. Would those pages have been 'real pages' or would they have just been a few templates pages that pulled content from a database?

For example: http://www.playstationfuture.co.uk/2011/11/11/dark-souls-review/

Is that a 'real' URL?

[Site Lab]

Yes thats a real URL. The pages you are talking about are they all of a similar layout? If so, you could basically make like 3 or 4 templates, then just add the pages in or import from a database.

The pages you talked about would be real pages, what I think firey was going on about is that Wordpress has a template. The template via PHP then pulls the content in from the database and shows it on the page. The .htaccess provides the stuff like /date/time/article-name/ .etc.

If your using the 'stuff idea' think of it like this:

Page listing all of the 'stuff'. (1 Template)

Page for each 'stuff', with options to link to reviews, comments, photos.etc. (1 Template)

All other pages. (1 Template)

News page (1 Template)

Home Page (1 Template...)

There we have 5 pages really that have been designed, then the ammount of real pages depends on how much stuff you have.

[firey]

Oh ok, well that sounds cool. I used to run a gaming website on Wordpress, and we reviewed games etc, as well as posted news. Would those pages have been 'real pages' or would they have just been a few templates pages that pulled content from a database?

For example: http://www.playstati...k-souls-review/

Is that a 'real' URL?

I haven't done php routing in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it is.

http://www.phpaddict...h-php-part-one/ gives some examples ie)

http://examples.phpa...ogl/rorar/magic

http://examples.phpaddiction.com/urlrouter/part_1/test/l

http://examples.phpaddiction.com/urlrouter/part_1/

all link to the same page, just the things passed are arguments

So you could have

http://examples.phpaddiction.com/urlrouter/stuffA/reviews/

http://examples.phpaddiction.com/urlrouter/stuffB/reviews/

And have your index know if it's stuffA then it pulls stuff A from the DB that is a review of it, iff StuffB pulls the stuff for stuff b.

Then you could have like

http://examples.phpaddiction.com/urlrouter/stuffA/discussion/

http://examples.phpaddiction.com/urlrouter/stuffB/discussion/

Pull discussions out of the database. You would have templates for how the review page looks, and the discussion page, but if it's the same all through out, it could be 100% Database driven.

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

atleast wordpress has a full worded option ^^