CMSMS Large Scale Deployment & Support fesability

[bavmower]

Hello all.

I have a question about using CMS Made Simple for a very large implementation.

We're currently using a large hosted CMS vendor for our site, which gets about 5,000,000 page views/month, and 800,000 unique visitors.

The problem is that this vendor is rather costly, and in this economy we don't want to have the extended commitments that their contracts require.

So four questions:

1. Will the CMS handle that kind of traffic without issues?

2. Is some sort of professional/enterprise level support offered for the CMS? If so, what's the cost?

3. Would a high-end Rackspace package be appropriate for hosting this deployment?

4. We are a publication and have a dedicated editorial system that exports content in a dedicated NITF XML format. We would need some sort of functionality that allowed the CMS to ingest this content and display it appropriately. Is this possible?

We have development resources and programmers familiar with PHP and Perl on staff. We are used to working with Templates and our corporate site is driven by CMSMS already.

[calguy1000]

Well the short answer is 'it depends'. The devil is always in the details, and there have been very few provided.

The long answer is:

What you have asked is like 'could I use frontpage and microsoft access to handle the US government site?'.... the answer is, 'yes you probably could... but there are various advantages, and disadvantages and only when you do a complete set of requirements and compare them against the features and capabilities of the package (and available addons) will you have a reasonable answer.

Keep in mind that CMSMS is not geared towards the enterprise market. It's geared towards the small to medium (dozens to hundreds of pages) organization like your local charity, or small to medium business. There are key pieces of functionality that an enterprise website would want that we don't handle (and probably have no intention of handling in the core). like: multisite, multilang, and workflow/versioning.

Whether CMSMS will work for you depends on the way your site will be organized, its content, your usability requirements, what code it is using, and how optimized that code is, and the capabilities of your host and many other things.

For a comparison, the CMSMS site itself gets around 1.7M to 2M visits each month (last time I tracked it). It is hosted on a VPS, with a few other (lower traffic sites). We have no difficulty whatsoever with performance. However, the CMSMS website itself (not counting the forum) is pretty light weight and simple. Just straight content. We use a few modules here and there for minor things, but that's about it.

There are various tools provided by the core and third party modules to implement caching in various ways for 'semi static' websites that will reduce the load on the server (particularly when talking to the database)... and of course there are public online tools that will CDN'ize your whole website to improve performance and reduce the load on your server. And of course you are also dependent on the efficiency of the third party modules you will need.

Regarding the XML integration of content, I don't know of any modules that allow any XML integration (except for integrating RSS feeds from other sites)... and I can't give a more reasonable answer without researching the specific technologies and standards

So there... I gave a vague response to a vague question.

[bavmower]

Thanks for the quick reply;

I apologize for not being more specific;
I was trying to ascertain at a high level if it was actually possible or if there was some inherent limitation that made it unworkable.

The site itself is fairly simple, with a few third party integrations that I've already duplicated in CMSMS. These don't rely on modules - things like Disqus for comments, etc.

There is some functionality like versioning that would be missed, but is not utterly crucial.

Let me ask this: is it possible to feed content into the CMS via API?

[kendo451]

You could hire one of the dev team members to write an XML import module for you.

There are already existing modules to "slurp" content from an old website and create the pages in CMS Made Simple.