Advice for powerful enterprise CMS

[Ward]

I need an extremely powerful CMS that is customizable, scalable, secure, and capable of well over 250,000 pages and a potential user base of up to a million with heavy database usage.

My question for you is, what CMS would you think is capable of handling www.yelp.com, www.homeaway.com, and www.howstuffworks.com?

I figure this is the easiest place to start...asking for what CMS you believe is capable of handling these heavily used sites.

Thanks.

Ward

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Ward.

You would need to customize anything you got, so it may not be totally fair to compare them off the shelf. It would really depend on the routines you had running in addition to the CMS.

Barack Obama ran his campaign sites off MovableType. I've seen other impressive sites run off Drupal like The Onion. I don't know how heavy those sites were in terms of database load though.

[lorax]

WordPress or Django would be high on my list of research. I can't vouch for WordPress's ability at that level but I'm pretty sure Django (actually a RAD CMS tool) could.

[ergophobe]

Since The Onion serves up mostly to anonymous users, the DB load on drupal would be light, and not really comparable to a site where the primary mode is to be logged in. You can still do a lot of caching of specific objects, but with authenticated users, you can't statically cache entire pages, so the DB load goes way up.

WP can certainly handle that sort of load - Wordpress.com just runs on WordpressMU (which, not counting the multi-domain wrapper, will be fully merged with Wordpress for version 2.9 or 3.0).
See: [en.wordpress.com...]
To see what Worpdress.com is serving with their own dogfood.