Website upgrade ideas?

velopeloton

Any advice would be appreciated.

I have a website that is almost 5 years old. The first 2 years it was a html site done in MS FrontPage. I moved on to WordPress which has served me well for the last 3 years. The site has been getting more complex and busy and there are more features I want to add which WordPress can't do easily.
The current site runs on a VPS, a quiet day is less that 1000 unique visitors a busy day is 5000, I have had one day with 30,000.

I have a fare technical knowledge but little or no design skills.

I want:
CMS.
Forums.
Photo Gallery for myself and users to display and share photos.
I want it all to be integrated with a single sign-on for FB or Twitter.
I may want to add eCommerce at a later date.
I would like to move all the current content from WordPress.

Any suggestions on what system might be suitable?
I was looking at vbulletin suite with vbgallery.

Corsica Nazione

In my personal opinion VBulletin is terrible looking. I have a community with 20,000 and moved from VBulletin to Invision Power Board.

Is Wordpress really not suiting you now?

velopeloton

As a personal blog WordPress was great, I want to expand the site and am finding it limited. Plugins conflicting is a problem. The main reason is wanting to try the photo sharing. It is possible with BuddyPress but it really looks ****e.

I looked at Invision Power Board, thought the CMS a bit limited and the look and feel customisations very complicated. I don't think that Vbulletin looks that different, nether look great and not being a designer I'm more interested in the functionality than looks. I'm hoping the photography will be good and make up for design failings.

cormee

Having used Vbulletin for the last five or six years I couldn't recommend it, it seems like every other day I'm patching against a new exploit/vunerability.

Their insistance on having the version number in the footer is another massive vunerability. I regularly have script kiddies coming to my forum, via a Google search for "Powered by vbulletin x.x.x", to attempt exploits they read about on 'hacker' boards.

It's interesting you say you've outgrown WordPress, organisations like Smashing Magazine, and closer to home TheJournal.ie are happily using it to power their sites. Maybe another option you should consider would be to keep using WP and consider paying a WP specialist to troubleshoot plugins causing problems.

velopeloton

I haven't outgrown WordPress, not by a long way, I'm looking to implement features which are not available in WordPress.

Is VBulletin any more likely to be hacked than any other?
I think boards.ie is Vbulletin.

My WordPress was hacked last year, actually the hosting providers were hacked and then all their clients.

cormee

velopeloton wrote: »

I haven't outgrown WordPress, not by a long way, I'm looking to implement features which are not available in WordPress.

Is VBulletin any more likely to be hacked than any other?
I think boards.ie is Vbulletin.

My WordPress was hacked last year, actually the hosting providers were hacked and then all their clients.

In my experience it's more likely to be hacked over WP. The most recent attempt at a hack was some clown trying to run an exploit of the vBulletin CMS, on my vBulletin forum. So that's the sort of tool you may have sniffing around your site. Utterly stupid, and hell-bent on causing damage.

Boards.ie *was* vBulletin, many moons ago. They have their own team of developers working on it, so it really hasn't been vanilla for a long, long time. I think.

fcrossen

Many problems with Wordpress stem from bad plugins and from a poorly optimised server.

Have you tuned Apache and MySQL for your VPS? Have you installed a good Wordpress cache and APC (or similar)?

Wordpress is a bit of a resource hog, but it is well supported and well deployed. It is a much more mature product than when you first started with it, and if well tuned will perform well.

Bad plugins are a real problem (and can leave the the options table cluttered after deactivation), but a well written plugin shouldn't conflict and should perform well. And if you need custom functionality, you can always get it written for you as a plugin.

You mention photo sharing as a main requirement, but what do you mean by photo sharing? I am (wildly) guessing that your requirements could be served by a plugin and I don't see anything particularly funky about your other requirements.

You already have experience with Wordpress, so I wouldn't be so quick to dump it:
- It may take longer to implement your functionality in a new system.
- You have experience with WP
- There are *lots* of competent professionals that provide consultancy for themes, styling and plugins

It might end up being the path of least resistance for you...

velopeloton

Thanks for the advice. It is a difficult decision to make. Better the devil you know?

cormee

velopeloton wrote: »

Thanks for the advice. It is a difficult decision to make. Better the devil you know?

Probably, also better the devil Google knows. You go and change your CMS and your standings with the SE's will be affected, positively or negatively, who knows (WordPress is massively optimised for search engines so my money is on negative if you're switching from it).

So that's another risk to add to all the others previously mentioned in the thread.