I’ve been using EE since December, 2006 and I gotta say that I’m really happy with it. I’ve reached the point where I’m at a fork in the road and I’m hoping that I’ll be taking the right road.

The site deals with celebrities. So far the site has about 50 weblogs, one weblog per celebrity. One of the weblogs called “Other Celebrities” is for articles about celebrities that don’t have a weblog, so there are actually 49 weblogs for specific celebrities. Each celebrity has a biography page, an archive section and an index page for when there are articles written about the celebrity.

So far this set up works really well for 50 celebrities, but I’m planning to add more celebrities over time, and really I don’t see an end to adding more celebrities. My concern is that eventually it’ll get too large to be able to manage because of the number of weblogs and template groups (There’s a template group per weblog). 

Let’s say that my goal is to profile and keep track of 500 celebrities; will I be making a mistake by moving forward by building a weblog per celebrity? Is there a better solution?

I could provide the URL of the site for anyone who wants to take a look at it so that they could get a better understanding of what I’m talking about.

Unless you have a different look for each celebrity you could use categories to do this, and try the new Pages module to do the profile pages.

Also if you have different Field Groups for celebrities then it’s a good idea to use different Weblogs.

Say for example you split them up into Male and Female celebrities or TV, Movie and Music celebrities then you could create Weblogs based on these, create Categories to represent each Celebrity then Entries for the news on each.

if all your weblogs share one custom field group and the weblogs are “only” used for separating the celebrities, I recommend using categories instead.
The data migration is not hard to handle, it just needs some careful planning.

With the new category custom fields in EE 1.6 you could setup one category per celebrity,
and have one template to show them all, and all you’d need to do is link to the category url_title to automatically fetch “this celebritys” latest data.

Instead of having this:
celebrity_1/index
celebrity_2/index
celebrity_3/index
..and so on for each celeb

you would only get one template group, like this:
celebrity/{category_url_title}/

If you are having different designs for each celebrity, you can create a custom category field to target “this celebritys” css stylesheet or whatever.

good luck!