Hi, I’m going to coordinate my first big project, a website that is going to be used by at least 3000 people. (But it might grow to 10000 soon).
Each member would have a personal homepage and there are going to be several tools and questionnaires of which the data has to be saved and displayed later for them personally. And also a document archive, both for personal and in-group use. So, rights and permissions are a big issue here.
What could / should the system be based on? I’m looking at PHP and MYSQL.
Should we build on an existing CMS and build the modules we need as add-ons, or should we start from scratch? For this I am currently looking at nuke or any other proper opensource cms. Or possibly an advanced framework like Drupal.
So, you can see I have some thoughts myself, but because this is my first big project I’m trying to find as much input as possible. If you think you know something that could help me, please don’t hesitate to respond, because I would really appreciate it!!!
Cheers
I would consider Joomla. Its a solid extendible framework and application platform.
You can code (or have coded for you) the bits of the site that are specific to you, but there are all sorts of other functionality and extensions available, many open source and free.
I have used Joomla on a few sites, but not done any customisations yet.
Regards,
Mike
Thanks to the three of you!
The project is coming along nicely, but slowly.
Is it ok if I reply to this thread with how I am doing to show progress so people can comment and give suggestions?
I have to agree, unless your user base is going into the millions (or in the rare cases - billions), you shouldn’t really have a need to even consider optimizing (let along producing a custom solution) for your sites goals. Most environments like Wordpress are built so they can scale to handle a tonne of traffic in heavy bursts, if your host has a good infrastructure you should be able to go with whatever you like with relatively little impact on your service. 
With so few members there isn’t really a need to consider custom solutions unless there is some other aspect of the setup that existing solutions can’t cater for. If you expected to have a lot of members (say hundreds of millions) then it might be a different matter.