A few years ago I looked around and found a CMS that I hoped fit the needs for a non-commercial encyclopedia type site. Lots of time has been invested in creating 1000+ pages using it. It has reached a point where the backend is not exactly fast - front end is not bad so far. Besides the slow back end and related memory issues it has also become problematic when upgrading, because the upgrade process itself has memory issues and things don’t work well after moving up versions. Several attempts to make the site manageable have failed so…
My question is this, I am at a point where I am considering moving the site to local set up if possible. I have come across Webmerge (and similar tools, some of which are command line) that may work and if they do at all it means that I have to use an export of the existing site DB and play around to make it a readable (probably .csv) format for those tools.
I am looking for advice and if anybody has experience with those tools that generate pages using a template offline and generate pages ready to upload? In the back of my mind I am also thinking about switching to another 1000+ page memory friendly CMS but so much content (and content blocks) are probably close to impossible to convert, at least without a high budget?
You know, Adobe has a moreless “local” tool (called “Contribute”) for managing and authoring content that I believe simply pushes content as static pages from your local machine.
Apple also has something that’s pretty ridiculously simple to use (but severely lacks flexibility and features). I think it’s called iWeb or something goofy like that. I used it before for a client, and like all things apple, it was pretty dumbed-down and user friendly.
Honestly, though, I have no idea why your site would be screeching to a hault like that … even with 1,000+ pages of content. If your pages are pretty straight-forward in terms of content and features, then it’s likely that there’s a pretty simple and obvious bottleneck somewhere that could be worked out. Could just be an issue with resource bandwidth limits with your hosting situation – probably could be rectified by moving to a slice of resources on a VPN or something like that (but obviously I have no idea what your hosting situation is).
I mean … I’ve got a Real Estate site running on Joomla for a client that literally stores and queries 100,000+ properties and it’s still pretty quick to manage. And that’s running on shared hosting for like 20 bucks / month!
The host is one of the better reviewed and more expensive ones, it is not purely a host resource issue, though of course more RAM/CPU won’t hurt since I am on shared.
I have minimized frontend SQL queries and use only its core modules so the frontend is good. Optimizing the backend is something else and asking for help on its forums hasn’t yielded much. There are mistakes that I made early on because there might have been better ways of generating pages (using cataloger module instead of creating straight pages…may be you can guess which CMS I am talking about ) Loading the backend takes resources and attempts to upgrade the CMS to latest version made it worse.
I think I am left with 3 options:
-Get commercial help to fix current CMS … probably not cheap and besides it is questionable if it’s suited for that many pages.
-Convert to another … probably not cheap at all, since there are no conversion scripts that I know of, I am not a noob but who knows how much of it I can manage.
-Experiment/attempt more of those offline options.
VPS is an option too I guess. Probably not much more to say but CMS Dude or any others reading this, any other thoughts are appreciated[B][COLOR=#0071d8][/COLOR][/B].
Or option 3 … hire someone to write a migration script.
I think your biggest problem is there just aren’t a lot of CMS-MS developers out there. If this were a Joomla or Wordpress issue, then your problem would likely have a solution already … and/or there would already be some sort of migration script floating around out there. There’s a lot to be said for having your site running on something more ubiquitous. Just the sheer number of people involved on the project and the mass of the community.
The usual ‘depends on the cost’ applies but I will have to at least look into it. CMSMS is not bad - and it’s widely used too, not as much as Joomla or WP of course - at all but not exactly for large number of pages.
Regarding WP…at the time my site started (and I would argue even now to some extent) it was close to impossible to set up multiple content blocks or even proper custom posts for that matter. There are some useful plugins now but I would still call it iffy for multiple content blocks…but that’s another topic.
Any suggestions for sites to look into to hire someone?
) Loading the backend takes resources and attempts to upgrade the CMS to latest version made it worse.