[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Hi,
Given my requirements, situation/constraints -- would appreciate if folks here could help guide on whether CodeIgniter would be right, or something else might be better.
Requirements:
- Upto 20k users (in next 1yr), 10k page views per day (dynamic ones, managed by PHP)
- Users have roles (1 user, can have many roles), mapped to specific privileges
- Access to content - audio, video, images, reports -- is based on roles (as in privileges). Per-se content is private i.e. not shared between users, by default.
- Content can be recent (s.a. direct file access, thus faster) or archived (extracted, from compressed archives on slower storage)
- Users can form groups, and groups can have specific privileges (s.a. access to shared content)
- Certain amount of personalization of look-n-feel needed for users or group-of-users
- Certain roles are "free" (of payment), others require one-time or monthly/qurterly subscription payment, thus need ability to enforce this, and also integrate with payment gateway.
- Users can be invited, or join proactively on their own
- Users can refer other users, and there needs to be a way to give incentives for same
- Show some usage analytics to users, and some gross analytics (devoid of user-specific information) for management planning
- Serve mobile web-users, and also users viewing with mix of desktop-browsers
In all... to me, looks like a kind of CMS with strong social-network style of usage, but instead of content being largely public and of mass-viewing, this one has content that is largely private and little sharing, with the ability to monetise service directly.
Constraints:
- Very small bootstrapped team, with very little PHP or web-dev experience (mostly embedded system developers), on shoe-string budget
- As such team is programmer heavy (strong in computer science fundamentals, algorithms/data-structures, data-bases, network-programming, filesystem programming, IPC, multi-threaded programming etc.)
- Common concerns like strong-/robust-security for our web-site/application, and keeping things performing well under load, is what we possibly are really weak on.
- Short time-to-market (say about 12 weeks).
Given our requirements and constraints, is it feasible to pick CodeIgniter as the framework of choice ? We are somewhat comfortable with basic PHP, and understand MVC concepts, but not much more.
The options we are considering --
1. CodeIgniter
2. Symfony (possibly Symfony2 due to the many improvements we see being talked about, but confused since we see most of the users to be on 1.2/1.4)
3. Spend time to learn PHP better, and develop around a home-grown mini-framework suited to our needs.
At the moment, the contest (in our minds) is between 1 & 2. And to be honest, reading around, we see a lot of comparison between CodeIgniter and Symfony1.x, but nothing with Symfony2 (which claims to have fixed all the shortcomings of 1.x, including speed).
We'd be happy sticking to something which is easier for us to pick-up, get us going and help us achieve our goals in the short time available.
Thanks in anticipation.
Jay
