By WhiplashInfo on

Hi, I’m running a site that really needs development. The site is non commercial and turns to injure persons in common and traffic injured in special. Although many insurance companies, advocates, lawyers and health care persons visit the site, my goal is to help those injured in practically all problem areas they meet as injured. The site has lead to that media, politicians, ministries and so on call upon me to leave comments, point of views and son on different problem areas for injured.

I’m myself disabled after a car crash, and run the site from my home, without any coding skills to mention (running the site has meant my life has a meaning again, and helps me coop the never ending pain from damage spine, and nerves. So by helping other I really help myself :-)).

So far I have built the whole site using Microsoft FrontPage 98-2003, and added some free applications as Snitz Forum 2000, some scripts from WebWizGuide. I'm a member of Microsoft official sponsorship program and have access to Microsoft softwares.

According to FrontPage Report option the site at present consist of the following:

All files - 4100
Images – 750
Un-linked files – 2100
Linked files – 2000
Hyper links – 33200
External hyper links – 3800
Internal hyper links – 29300

I have published my ideas of the future for WhiplashInfo at the site in a map called "NewWhiplashInfo" http://www.whiplashinfo.se/newwhiplashinfo/index.html which I have made in MindManager 6 Pro

Can Drupal solve my needs?

Thanks / Tomas

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

modul’s picture

modul commented

Drupal itself will gladly serve all your needs. The amount of files, images etc. which you describe, is not all that big. The real bottleneck (well, one of the real ones) is the amount of concurrent database queries. In order for one page to render, Drupal easily requires something like 100 sql queries. These need to be done as quickly as possible, because if there are other users wanting their queries to be completed (i.e. their page to be shown), they have to wait. If there are 10 people executing 100 queries each, and if they would be executed one after the other, the 10th user would have to wait several seconds for his page to render. Luckily, both soft- and hardware solutions have been designed to make these queries happen more or less together. Still, when there are many concurrent users (and by this I mean concurrent queries; the fact that they are together on your site reading stuff doesn't actually matter, it's only the concurrent server access which can cause bottlenecks), there could still be some delays.

The problem is: How much is many ?? If we're talking about 10s of users, oh well, there wouldn't be any real problem, no matter what server configuration you're on, either shared, or virtual private server, or dedicated. When there are 100s of concurrent users, hmm, I think shared servers would reach their limits.

So, your question doesn't really concern Drupal, but the server Drupal is run on.

Another matter of consideration could be the effort involved in transferring your current files into a Drupal structure. Drupal does not work with individual files to carry the content. So, your current files would have to be added to Drupal's database. The links would have to be changed etc. This might be quite time-consuming, although, on the other hand, Drupal's internal way of handling links is quite nifty.

Drupal itself is a mighty powerful PHP construction. Don't consider it as the out-of-the-box solution for everything, though. It does allow you to set up a site in 2 minutes, but once that initial "Wow!" moment has gone, the real work starts.

Bottom line: most likely, yes, Drupal could serve your needs, provided you have a decent server environment. Will it take time and learning? You bet. Is it fun? Oh yessss!!!

Ludo

jou00jou’s picture

jou00jou commented

I agree with ludootje. Drupal is very powerful but you need time and dedication to learn this powerful tool.
One thing you need to be aware of though is that you need some basic coding skills in html, css and preferably in php. The more skills you have in those languages the more you get from drupal.