Migrating from Mambo to Another CMS?

Pikoro asks: "I put up a website a while back for personal use and I have been using Mambo to keep the site in order. One problem though. It seems that Mambo is not all that scalable. The website I started in January now gets almost 20,000 unique users a day and Mambo is very SQL heavy. The database is running on a P4 2.4Ghz machine with 1Gb of RAM, and the database server is on it's knees. Do I need to just upgrade the database server, optimize the MySQL installation, or switch to another CMS system. I would prefer the latter since I have had issues with Mambo and wanted to move to more of a weblog style format. Was considering Slashcode as well. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated."

Comments

I've written my own CMS

[cniebla]

Duh... I've been using a variety of CMSs since I started to realize that it's just silly to mantain too many HTMLs by hand. I've always seeking to achieve simplicity, ease of use, features I use every day, etc... and through these years I've found many shortcomings, setbacks and a very deep dissapointing of them all.

The last packaged CMS I used was PLOG, I've even recommended the thingie here on Slashdot, but the thing just was smashed with too many comment-SPAM, and my google ranking hit the bottom (watch the trackbacks!!!). Even worst: when I decided to upgrade to the last version, it doesn't work with the last version of PHP, so I make the change and it took me about 1 week to write my own CMS.

The first thing I realized was that I've to keep all the past URIs working (so all of the search results keep coming to my site, to the articles they mean). So all the scripts check the way they're called to render the appropiate content. This is a pretty serious matter: if you switch a CMS there's a BIG chance your site it's going to plummet in search-site rankings, unless you can "emulate" the previous CMS behaviour.

Next: there's no-way to beat static VS dynamic performance, so unless you have the bucks, your CMS must render static content if you have too many hits (not an issue for me, but I'm working on it, and expect to have this feature ready in this week).

I think the CMS wars are a little out of hand when it comes to "easyness" - "features" - "performance". There are not simple CMS available anymore. And that's a shame.

I really doubt you can switch your CMS to another without loosing all hits stored in current search engines DBs without emulation, and I know no-one emulate other CMSs.

Your road looks pretty bad if you can't write programs, mess with URI rewriting and MySQL/HTTPd tweaking. Either you assume the losses in switching, or get your hands dirty plotting the best way to go.