Processwire a good choice for magazine/buy&sell site?

[aw.be]

Hello everyone. I've used PW to build a couple of small client sites and enjoy working with it. I'm still a beginner with php but am understanding more and more about the API, so I'm learning.

I have the opportunity to help build a site that will function as a marketplace for art buyers and sellers, which will include a magazine component as well. The other team members have php and design experience but aren't familiar with a lot of CMS's.

I just need to know if PW could handle the following:

• user registration, 1 group being artists, the other being buyers
• dashboard for artists group only
• login/ecommerce for buyers

The goal is to have hundreds of artists and up to 10,000 registered buyers.

I know these are very general requirements, and I know that PW is capable of a great many things. But I'm not sure if the number of users will be an issue. I'd like to go back to the think tank and at least let them know they could consider PW as an option - or not.

Thanks for any opinions you have. If I'm barking up the wrong tree, please let me know.

Aaron

[Pete]

You can definitely do this in ProcessWire. 10,000 isn't actually that big a number really, but one of the main things to consider with larger sites is web hosting as presumably you could end up with lots of images on the site, thousands of visits per day and bandwidth could get quite high.

You'll be fine with a smaller hosting package to begin with, but just bear in mind you probably want to select one that can scale as the site grows rather than move sites around from provider to provider.

I've read elsewhere on the forums that ProcessWire is happy up to hundreds of thousands of pages and beyond, but low server specs would limit you before ProcessWire does

Also, if you are thinking there will be a lot of pages that don't change much then look into caching options, and if you will have many pages like galleries that don't change at all then definitely consider ryan's excellent ProCache module.

[aw.be]

Thanks Pete.

Yes, hosting will be incredibly important to us. We're not going to go cheap on that front and will have hosting in place that will support many thousands of pages, tens of thousands of images, etc. It's exciting to think about.

Your answer reassures me that we don't need to go with a solution ala Drupal, or something as equally huge and complicated.

Aaron

[Wanze]

Hi Aaron,

You can use ProcessWires built in User / Roles Management for the Users, so assign either a "Buyer" or "Artist" Role.

After the frontend-login, you just display different stuff based on the users Role.

As Pete says, 10'000 Users is not a problem – Users are in fact pages too.

I'm developping a custom "shop" that currently has about 2000 registered Users and 90'000 Products – everything modeled with pages.

It's not finished yet but so far I haven't encountered any problems.

Cheers

[Pete]

If it helps reassure you more there is at least one project I have in the works that will be scaling to many thousands of pages, but ProcessWire has already been stress-tested beyond what I'll probably achieve any time soon

It is a reasonable question you've asked though as I remember asking it a year or two ago and, aside from code improvements in the core since then, I remember ryan saying hosting is the key with larger sites.

Hopefully you're more excited now knowing you can build it in a system that you can easily tailor to your needs rather than bending other platforms to your will, which is never quite as fun for me! Elegant coding over forcing things to fit any day.

[pwired]

You'll be fine with a smaller hosting package to begin with, but just bear in mind you probably want to select one that can scale as the site grows rather than move sites around from provider to provider.

Yes, look for a provider where, as your site grows, you can easily upgrade your hosting needs.

[aw.be]

Thanks everyone.

Pete - yes, I looked at the ProCache module and will definitely be using it for the site.

Wanze - thanks for the tips.

Should be fun. I'll post back when I get stuck. Off to study the API again.

Aaron