I have a few general questions.
1. I plan to build a website where users should be able to upload their own photos, add comments to them with the possibility of others adding comments. The forum should be very open, by that I mean that guests should be able to upload and there will be no private albums, only public albums for everybody to see. The categories are the letters A-Z with every letter having around 200-300 albums (no thumbnails when entering a category, only the names of the albums). The absolute total of albums on the entire site might reach a maximum of around 5 000, and the total amount of pictures on the entire site might be a maximum of 500 000. Banners and Google AdWords should be able to add. (I've already accomplished to add a banner, so it doesn't seem too hard, but then some code for counting etc, haven't worked with banners before). Best case traffic scenario might be up to 150 Gb/month. Okay, I'm aware this might sound very ambitious and perhaps over-enthusiastic, but I'd rather not find out later that I have to change engine just because the one I'm using can't handle the above. Basically we're talking much data transferring and multiple users (hundreds?) working at the same time.
2. Can Coppermine handle the above in the first place or will it be too slow or any similair problem?
3. If any expert here see some major problems with the above, can you recommend any other webgallery-CMS, or should I program everything by myself? Basically: How do I best accomplish the above in (1)? I think it could take some time to program it by myself, having worked with HTML, CSS etc but not with php, the best would be to start with an engine and then re-construct it after my needs.
4. Later, I might plan to add a webshop. Would it be easy to “bridge”? (Perhaphs I could just add a link to a shop I build on another domain to skip this step? Users have to register again of course...)
Regards,
Nick