Wordpress limits - system design consideration.

Question

I am designing a system for a customer. We are thinking about using Wordpress as a main platform (instead of writing our custom software), and customize it using addons or hiring developers to write some custom modules. We need to have an ability to have some static pages, few php pages, and lot of user generated content.

What limits do Wordpress have? I have searched website, but did not found any info about for example max number of users. I am interested in experience-based opinions.

So, how Wordpress performs on multi-user websites? Or - do you think it is better to leave Wordpress, and swithch to some other open-source CMS?

Edit

The core functionality about the system will be to allow user to put text content and photos on categorized pages. Some users need an ability to have classic blog on the site, while others will only occasionally publish some content. Some data will be polled by RSS from users’ blogs on the other platform (with a respect to copyrights and legal stuff).

So as far as now I have identified a lot of blog-like functionality.

Answer 1

If your doing a lot of User stuff then it's probably worth starting with BuddyPress instead of WordPress, you can still use a lot of WordPress plugins but it's better to start with a framework which is built to deal with a lot more users.

Answer 2

If you are interested in WordPress for a multi-user environment, perhaps you should look at WordPress MU, which is the software that runs WordPress.com. I'm not sure how the plugins work with WordPress MU as I've never looked at it in-depth.

If you need more of a social aspect, then you can refer to Tom's answer of using BuddyPress, which adds functionality on top of WordPress MU.

Answer 3

WordPress places no maximum on users, posts, etc. beyond that of the underlying technologies (your database, mainly). WordPress.com runs on the WordPress MultiUser platform and it has six million blogs, a billion monthly pageviews, and 200k new posts a day.

Your limitations will be more structural - WordPress is designed first and foremost as a blogging platform. If its interface and methodology fit your project well, go for it, but if you're going to be hacking the shit out of it, a more generalist system like Drupal may suit you better.

Answer 4

If it's a blogging platform you are designing, then WordPress should fit you needs. You can also look into Movable Type (Perl). If you are looking for a Content Management System (CMS), then you should look at Drupal and/or Joomla. Movable Type is actually starting to integrate with Drupal.

Wordpress has some performance issue, about a dozen pages/sec in default setup. But using plug-ins like SuperCache, it can get it to scale pretty well fairly easily. You can do anything you want with a custom "theme". But WordPress isn't going to manage the content in the "theme" for you, just display it.

Answer 5

I have had some pretty good success using Drupal. If you aren't trying to build a blog there are much better things out there for dynamic CMS. Wordpress is a great piece of blogging software. Try to make it do something else? It becomes a big pain to do. Having developed "applications" in both. If a blog is not the primary component (which a news site would also follow suit) then use a true CMS and not a blogging platform.

Answer 6

Depending on the type of User Generated content WP might work. You could use the Contributor Role to allow users to create content that site admins could then moderate before making it live.

Drupal seems to have more tools for Community type sites, but I have very little experience with it.