New project, thoughts welcome

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Hi,

I have completely moved one of my existing projects from Wordpress to Kirby, so much better. Now I want to look at moving my other project as well. It’s currently built with Laravel, a bit more complex and significantly larger.

My real issue is that as a non-developer having built up a reasonable knowledge of PHP over the last few years Laravel is just moving faster than I can keep up with, in fact, want to keep up with. Kirby is just so much, more obvious in how to use it if that makes sense.

It is more appealing to me that the site could be so much easier to backup, move and generally manage without a database and complex framework that changes so much, so quickly.

Anyway, before I consider another licence and start work I wanted to see what others thought.

The site is historical, all about the holocaust. To give an idea of what it has.

Blog
Gallery
Timeline
Quotes section
Guides section

My real issue and question are around size. For example:

Gallery: 4,000 images
Timeline: 2,500 entries
Guides: 800 pages

So if you consider the timeline it would mean creating 2,500 pages, 4,000 for the gallery and so on. There are a few challenges but I have thought them through. The time challenge of moving all the content is an issue but also an opportunity to fix past mistakes :slight_smile:

At a very high level, do you think this would work with Kirby and that it would remain pretty performant as people search and visit through the site?

Even with potentially 10,000 pages, I suspect these days that my server with very fast NVMe drives would be just as capable of handling the content as having everything stored in MySQL.

Thoughts? I am thinking, sadly, that sticking with a database-driven solution may be the most appropriate option.

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I have a site online that has 1500+ pages and easily 10000+ images.
Serving content is not going to be an issue. What’s going to give you problems though is searching through all that content. If you need to do anything that requires sorting/filtering through the entire collection that’s probably where performance is going to be a problem IMO.

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@bnomei’s boost plugin might help to improve search performance: GitHub - bnomei/kirby3-boost: Boost the speed of Kirby by having content files of pages cached, with automatic unique ID, fast lookup and Tiny-URL. (although I’m not 100% sure when this plugin helps or not).

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i do not see an issue with the amount of pages or image either. it strongly depends how many of them you need i a single request. as long as you can avoid calling site()->index() or have some caching layer around those calls you will be fine.

in regard to my boost plugin. the setup is not too complex and once done you do not need to do anything special further on when coding.
it basically caches all content files into a cache of your choice. cachedrivers exist for php, apcu, sqlite and redis (sorted by performance). this will speed up any task related to content including search, filtering by tags, sorting date etc.

you can find tips how to use kirby performantly throughout the forum but my 2c would be: do not put too many pages in a folder. split the timeline into years etc. that improves performance in various places.

warning: shameless self advertisement follows… you can also hire me to consult you up front or work with you on the project. :wink:

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I have a project with more than 161,300 objects in the content tree. Kirby doesnt even blink.

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Thanks for the comments. Will think it through and decide what to do. I honestly just want to remove as much complexity as I can, Kirby over Laravel is a no brainer for me personally at least. Just need to weigh up the options.