PostNuke

initial reactions to the possibilities for
community building, workflow via rss feeds,
and user empowerment in general have been
very positive. we believe we have found
a killer app for our university.

therefore, we have been thinking on how we
could scale postnuke to dozens, later hundreds
of virtual hosts.

obviously, we need to automate the process
of setting up a postnuke site as much as
possible. we are thinking about the following
issues:

• footprint of default postnuke installation
  we could reduce the footprint by having a
  central code repository and symlinking to
  that repository. this opens up a can of
  worms in regards to security, though.



• quota support for the database
  we need to find a way to include the database
  in the user quota. this can likely be done
  very easily by assigning correct ownership
  to the mysql database files.



• customized config files
  we will develop a script to fill in the
  correct values per host into the config.php
  file.



• customized database content
  we will develop an sql dump with sensible
  defaults for our environment that showcases
  the features we care about and drops geeky
  stuff.



• staying in sync with new pn versions
  we are positive that postnuke will evolve
  powerful collaboration features in the
  next few releases, and we don't want to
  miss out on them. we therefore want to make it
  as easy as possible to migrate our user
  base to new pn versions. this calls for
  some scripts as well.



• performance, performance, performance
  obviously, its quite a different matter
  if you run sloppy code on a lone site
  that gets five hits a week, or on a
  busy server that has dozens of pn
  installations deployed. i know that
  phpnuke sucks re: performance, and i
  hope that postnuke is noticably more
  performant. some optimization work
  would have to get into the core.

i would be interested to contribute these
scripts back into CVS to facilitate this
for others.

has anyone done anything comparable? i would
be interested to get in touch with you and
learn about the issues you came up with.
i will make sure that the needs of large
pn deployments are considered in the
development process.

-gregor
postnuke developer