Hi. I am a developer at an organization whose website gets *a lot* of traffic (about 18 million unique page-hits per day). The majority of our content is dynamically generated, but we do have a lot of static content which we would like to begin managing in a CMS.
We are considering Drupal because we know it is a popular CMS, and we don't want to have to build our own. I understand that we can use Drupal to store, edit, preview, and render content, and also manage workflow. But can we:
1) easily access the content-database for objects (like HTML chunks or images) and export them to a file system? Our site gets so many hits, that we are wary of hitting the Drupal database every time we want to serve content that doesn’t change for months. We also might want to use our existing home-brewed middle-ware app to be a proxy for the objects stored in the Drupal database.
2) is the API robust enough to allow a lot of customization. For example, we'd like to integrate things like trouble ticket generation, markup/XML validation and accessibility checks?
Can anyone chime in on whether Drupal would be the right tool for this? Or is there something else out there (either open-source or not) that may be better suited?
Comments
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I know that others have used their own caching methods in the past. I think there are a couple of relevant case-studies.
As well, there's the high performance working group.
The API is robust enough to do all of that. In terms of testing, there's the not-so-simple simpletest. Drupal core developers create tests using the simpletest framework to test Drupal core, and it is gaining popularity among Drupal contrib developers as well.
Trouble tickets, i.e. issue queues, can be done yourself with CCK and any of the workflow modules, or there are a couple of other self-contained modules out there.
Since you're starting from scratch from a development standpoint it's important to learn the terms and flow of drupal components, and then you can get over the initial learning curve.
We use JIRA and would like to
We use JIRA and would like to integrate that. Has anyone done that?
Right Choice
Drupal is absolutely the right choice for your CMS requirements.
"Our site gets so many hits, that we are wary of hitting the Drupal database every time we want to serve content that doesn’t change for months."
Drupal has a Boost module that saves your static content in physical file system that save you from database hit. Apart from this there are several modules that can help improve performance.
This is just not sufficient, you will need to deploy hardware accordingly (load balancing & all) to handle high traffic of your site, which is mandatory irrespective of whether you choose Drupal or not.