Whats the best CMS System for bigger sites?

Expression Engine is better !!

It really does depend how big the site is going to be.

The nice thing about wordpress is its easy to scale as you grow - it takes minutes to roll out a CDN service for example or move it onto a more powerful server.

I have a site with around ~900 pages running Worpdress without issue.

You also have to consider that sites like mashable.com and makeuseof.com use wordpress and they are huge sites.

Edit: Sorry missed the forum discussion - probably not allowed to link to it directly but I integrated a forum seamlessly with my wordpress install (link in sig)

CMS using WP will do fine. It's all about the hardware and web server software that makes or break WP site.

Well-tuned WP site on real hosting/powerful server can scale up easily to handle millions of pageviews/day.

Duffers5000 said:

I've got some pretty big sites running on wordpress. I was convinced a few years back that HTML was the way forward with big sites but I don't think there's much you can't do with wordpress.

A friend of mine develops plug ins and custom themes, he keeps raving on about concrete5 might be worth having a look at that.

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Concrete5 is has an awesome UI and great code. I am not using them yet, but will switch over this year. Drupal is a pain in the ass to work with - over engineered. Wordpress is decent but getting more complicated and bloated.

Give a try for joomla, I've made many portals with it long time ago. They have tons of modules and componants.

My vote is with Drupal, but I work exclusively in it so I may be biased.

This is due to its powerful ability to create database queries in it's views module, CCK module to creating Custom Content typing flexibly, Delta and Context modules for individual page theming which makes it super powerful out of the box if you master Drush.

If you want to create something with very customised taxonomy, site structure and views (or views of views which is often the case) then I highly recommend learning Drupal.

That said, the tool is only as good as the toolmaster. If you want true flexibility, you might want to build your own system in Symfony or CodeIgniter/CakePHP or some other traditional MVC framework.

The reason why I use Drupal so much is that you can literally create anything without touching code if you know the modules well enough. So for example, a website might have article series so I can create a content type for that that fits into rules within the taxonomy and views of the website. Or, I might have cross-website promotion so I could have several websites running off the same Drupal install. The only thing with Drupal is that you have to know the core (and recommended core) modules rather well to truly explore it's flexibility. If you want to see what kind of big boy websites can be made, check out the work of FourKitchens who developed The Economist, Yale, Aljazeera within Drupal.

Still not sure what to do, but I have to do something, just upgraded my web server, but my site still seems to be crashing every few days, and server has to be rebooted. I'm wondering if its the cms eating resources.

davids355 said:

Still not sure what to do, but I have to do something, just upgraded my web server, but my site still seems to be crashing every few days, and server has to be rebooted. I'm wondering if its the cms eating resources.

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If you are in any doubt, look at these big sites using Wordpress ...

http://techker.com/major-sites-using-wordpress-as-their-preferred-cms

davids355 said:

Ok, thinking about trying Drupal maybe. Does that have a good forum module or should I use something like phpbb?

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You can integrate it into your drupal site and synchronize so users only have to login in one place. Pretty awesome drupal. especialy with the views and panels modules

dollarzz said:

You can integrate it into your drupal site and synchronize so users only have to login in one place. Pretty awesome drupal. especialy with the views and panels modules

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I vote DRUPAL. If the built in forum module isn't up to par for you then you can integrate something like phpBB.

Zapdos said:

Wordpress was designed as a blog, not a CMS.

Joomla = The beginner CMS. Lots of plugins, lots of functionality, lots of slowness and problems.
Drupal = The advanced CMS. Not as much plugins, not as much functionality, used on very large sites and "easy" to modify.

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This is what I have experienced. Joomla is next up from Wordpress. Joomla is a CMS out of the box. But with some work, Wordpress can be made similar to Joomla.

dollarzz said:

You can integrate it into your drupal site and synchronize so users only have to login in one place. Pretty awesome drupal. especialy with the views and panels modules

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I stopped using panels/panels everywhere. Once you know how to use Delta and Context, that is a more elegant and flexible solution then panels is (even though panels is awesome)

dubious said:

I stopped using panels/panels everywhere. Once you know how to use Delta and Context, that is a more elegant and flexible solution then panels is (even though panels is awesome)

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Thanks, I will have a look into that ! Since some parts of panels is freaking me out...

wordpress.... just suck it up and buy a good hosting package. If you want to play with the big boys you need to pay like the big boys. On some of my largest sites i have had great luck with wpengine.

Most of the badass CMS for big website/portal is from China.
But it is difficult to understand the Chinese language.

If you are really serious about that website then nothing beats custom stuff. It will exactly fit your needs.

Drupal is good for seo. SEObook.com uses it. So does word(spamming)stream.com which dominates for every freaking keyword related to ppc.
There is a page post issue in wordpress that can kill its efficiency.
For example,
Same structure, when used for pages and posts, wordpress cannot be used for large quantities of posts
So permalink structure of posts have to set properly, using date or post number making them unique.
instead of domain.com/post title
domain.com/page title
What happens when post and page have the same title? This is a problem in WP that I dont believe is cleared yet.

When attempting to set up a big site i'd reccomend to first try to identify possible future bottlenecks of your site. Here's Why: There are lots of big sites out there which were forced to be redeveloped from scratch midst in their growth for as they werent be able to handle the traffic or the userload... You'd obviously want to avoid this.

What kind of bottlenecks are there?

Database-related bottlenecks:

• Number of queries
• Running queries
• Joins fucking up your memory
• To big for your RAM
• Large joins taking up memory

Server

• CPU overload
• Too many threads on a core
• Too many system calls
• IO waits
• CPU Caches
• Local disk access
• Random disk I/O
• Disk fragmentation
• Out of Memory

Network:

• Soft interrupts
• DNS lookups
• Dropped packets
• Unexpected routes with in the network
• Network disk access

Caching

• Not using memcached, Varnish, APC, etc...
• In HTTP: headers, etags, not gzipping, etc..
• Forgetting the Browser's cache
• Byte code caches (PHP)
• L1/L2 caches

Programming

• Threads: deadlocks, non-linear scalability,...
• Event driven programming: callback complexity
• Not scalable, Not horizontally scalable, etc...
• Bad design
• Algorithm complexity (messed up Big O)
• Stack space

Choosing a CMS can be a pain in the ass (assuming there is one out there wich will fit your needs) - depending on the site (applies especially to big sites) it may be wise to develop from scratch...

What kind of questions do you have to ask yourself when deciding upon your solution/architecture/cms?
- Can i scale the database? Do i need to be able to scale the database? Do I even need a database?
- Can i distribute among several cores/servers... Will i need to cluster?
- Can i scale the memory? Do i need to scale the memory in the future?
- ...

I think you catch my drift

How about you elaborate about the planned/intended "size" of your site?

Cheers olystyle

wordpress on a 7 dollar a month low budget host gator hatchling plan will handle half a million pages before the isp starts crying.

Edit: nevemind I already posted