Thoughts on large-scale deployment
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Is WordPress suitable for large-scale use, say for 7000 users and 1200 categories? What would it take to make it so and more importantly, is this an appropriate direction for the project?
Here’s the situation: I work at a small university and we’re looking to implement blogging software. We have about 7000 active faculty, staff, and students, and 1200 class sections (750 classes in 100 deparments.) The lists of users and classes are dumped daily as text files so populating the database automatically shouldn’t be more than a short bit of SQL and perl, php, whatever. We use LDAP for authentication but we may wish to grant external users access to the blogs and authenticate them locally (not via LDAP), meaning there should be a provision for failing over from one authentication scheme to another.
It’s not clear whether instructors would want to keep blogs private within a department, class, or class section, so there’d need to be some simple/flexible access control for users and groups. Also, we’d need a simple (hierarchal) means of navigating to a particular blog, e.g:
Spring 2004 : Physics : 302 : Section 6
Finally to keep the database from growing without bound, we want to archive (and possibly delete) the previous semester’s content.
Note that only a small fraction of these classes might have use for a blog, at least initially. I could just manually set up the 50-100 users for the handful of classes that used the system. However, if we can programmatically solve the problem for one class, we can solve it for the whole institution. And if we can solve the problem for my school, we’ve probably solved it for every school our size and smaller.
The obvious question is why do this with WordPress and not with a commercial blogging server or service? First, I don’t believe it’s appropriate to put student data on a commercial service (there are regulations about this), I don’t know that there’s a commercial tool to do what we need, and my experience with educational software has been bad. The commercial educational tools are often outrageously expensive, with egregious vendor lock-in, poor extensibility, awful standards compliance, lousy performance, and even worse support. In short, commercial offerings all seem to be glossy expensive crap.
I like WordPress due to its simplicity, clean presentation, and ease of installation and administration. Ideally, I’d like to preserve those qualities while increasing the scale of the system. I’m not sure it’s possible or even desirable but I thought I’d ask and see what people thought.
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