Following an article of enthusiastic blog, I found your solution. I have long been an old project that I would like finally materialize. One could say that technically it looks like imdb.com or more discogs.com
My project is a website dedicated to songwriters. It will include in particular the detailed pages of their songs (credits, list of performers, adaptations, discographic media, clips).
Do some of you have already developed this site and have used some plugins?
I hope my English is quite good (I’m a french user).
I would start by breaking your site down into modules and then figure out what each module needs to do. You can then figure out which plugins you will need.
There is Modules plugin and a Builder plugin that will help a lot with a site like this.
I think more important than thinking about plugins is thinking about:
the functionality you need for your site
how big your database (i.e. number of entries) is likely going to be and - related to that
how you want to structure your content
If you have a lot - let’s say more than a couple of hundreds to a 1000 pages - you are better off with a tree-like structure (instead of putting all songwriters into a single folder) to avoid possible performance problems.
What’s the scope of user-facing features you need? Should visitors of your site just be able to read information, or should they be able to have accounts, enter information, discuss things, maybe have the information they entered go through a validation workflow?
Just displaying information that a few trusted users (site admins) have entered = well in the scope of a CMS-based site.
User accounts and messaging and workflows and what not = not managed by a CMS (and probably not by available plugins), so you will need to code that yourself (or hire people who can), and budget is likely in the tens of thousands or euros (if not more).