Thread

Hi,

I run a big site with numerous sections (forums, news, classifieds, cooking…). Our current traffic is over 1 million pageviews a day. It runs on 1 web server and 1 DB server with extra server that can replace either of them in case of hardware issues.

We’d like to move the whole site to a platform which allows:
- single login for all apps
- social components across all apps
- profiles
- user rating (by other users)
- content rating, voting, tagging

To build this we first need to solve the single login, access lists, etc. I planned to do this in CI as explained here:
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/75571/

Now that the new version of EE will be on top of CI, maybe the right thing would be to use EE’s features for other CI apps.

So, my questions are:

1. How flexible is EE to be used as a basis for user, group management for all custom built apps?

2. What about EE performance? I hate to hear that I need a server farm for a site with 1 million page views a day. Our site runs on Double core with 2GB or RAM. The load on the server rarely goes above 1. The site is cached with Cache_Lite PEAR library.

3. Granular cacheing - CI has Khcache which works great and allows one to cache and expire views, functions, objects, anything. What about EE?

4. Content expiration seems to be pretty manual on EE. We want to have a CMS that can trigger expiration of certain pages every time a page is updated. For example, if a blog posting is updated, the blog page and the category page of the blog should be cleared, but not all categories. How hard would this be to implement in EE?

5. In doing the above changes, would I have to change the EE core, or (like in CI) build on top of it? I don’t want to reapply the changes every time the core changes.

Thanks in advance

Hi BorisK,

It sounds like your questions are really geared to how CI and 2.0 will work together versus what’s possible with the current version of EE. This makes giving a concrete response difficult since 2.0 is still in development. The following answers are based on 1.6.3.

1. EE’s member system is based on Member Groups, which provide a lot of default options. If the majority of your requirements revolve around groups of users you’ll likely find that EE does what you need. The limitation is that a member can only belong to one member group.

2. Performance is highly dependent on a number of factors outside of EE. It depends on the site design, the type of site, the servers, etc…

3. EE has a number of built-in cache mechanisms. You can find an over view of them in the Optimize EE wiki article.

4. If the “page” is really a weblog entry (most content in EE is managed this way) then its likely to be straight-forward or accomplished via a custom add-on. EE can automatically expire content based on date. You can also determine the number of entries that are displayed so that would be another way of pushing content off a page when a new blog entry is added, though that’s not a true closing of an entry.

5. EE is made to be extended so its highly unlikely you’d have to “hack” EE. The majority of custom development can be accomplished via a module, plug-in, an extension or a combination thereof. The Developers section has more information.

If you want entire control over your app without having to wade through code, pick CI. If you would prefer a more built-up solution, use EE. Each man’s to its own.

Until 2.0 is released there isn’t any way for the community to make recommendations on this question.

To date on 1.6.x releases the ability to use custom PHP has been enough for most of my requirements. There are plenty of hooks in the code that allow you to take over and do your own thing.

That said CI is a great framework. If you want to get your hands dirty and are comfortable with PHP this may be your best option.

So the short answer is that it depends. Why not try downloading the core version and understanding how it works? CodeIgniter has a number of video tutorials too that will help understand how it works.