Tuesday 04 October 2005 12:04:41 am

Hi,

It's not easy to answer a simpel yes or no on your main question (will it withstand the load) since it depends on a number of factors:
- how many (simultaneous) editors
- how many edits per day
- how many (roughly) articles/objects
- how much and what parts of the site can be shown statically
- how many hits per day
- what kind of hardware

For a portal of this kind my guess is that you will have large hardware resources but also very many hits. The rest of my comment takes this assumption.

eZ publish has a very flexible content object model that you can use to model various content classes such as a blog entry, an article a forum message etc. The content engine does not support an unlimited amount of objects though and you will (most probably) have a high content load. I would suggest to use the content engine for parts of your site and to write custom modules for the parts with the highest object load.
E.g: Content engine:
- e-commerce
- banners
- directories
- online articles etc.
- Real estate services

custom engine:
- blog
- forums
- chat
- etc.

Your requirements may change this list of course. For the custom modules you have two modules, you can take existing products and embed these into eZ publish or you can write them using the eZ publish libraries. Using existing products is probably faster (in implementation time) but gives you less flexibility since the data and the design from the third party product is in an "alien" format.
If you make the custom modules yourself you can build on the eZ publish libraries (most notably the persistent object, or the content object system itself) which will ease the development considerably. Also since you are using eZ publish directly it is much easier to facilitate built in functionality like the role system.

When it comes to design many low end open source CMS systems generate HTML in their code. This limits the design possibilities. The high end (like eZ publish) have all their HTML in templates which means that you can change the design exactly to your liking.

Hope this little introduction is helpful.

Cheers