Hello:

I am ready to assign someone to redeploy two Web sites I run -- http://my.highschooljournalism.org and http://my.schooljournalism.org. Both are ColdFusion sites running on a Windows box using a SQL Server backend.

I have studied DNN enough to know it might be a good solution for this redevelopment, so that is why I have come to you.

Please visit the sites, but in summary, they are individual newspapers for high schools (my.hsj) and middle/elementary schoold (my.sj). There are about 400 newspapers on the first and 90 on the latter, and about 90,000 stories on one and 19,000 on the other. Students can post audio, video, Flash, and photo galleries on the sites, which they can somewhat individualize on a per-paper basis.

We would like to make it better in many ways, but I wanted to run some initial stuff by the community. I can hire someone to do the heavy lifting, including additional scoping, etc.

My goals are to:

1. Reduce crashes (presumably by reducing the overhead caused by running CF on the box.)
2. Decrease the money it takes to deploy new features to users.
3. Decrease the money it takes to fix problems.
4. Work with the existing SQL Server data.
5. Handle RSS, audio, video, etc. in a rational way.
6. Allow users to create their own templates based on automated reading of their existing MySpace/Xanga/LiveJournal etc. templates.
7. Replicate the current sites' functionality.
8. Combine the sites (they are actually separate now) and differentiate them within the system.

Now, my guess is that DNN -- and probably any solution, really -- can do the job. My real questions are threefold, though:

1. Given DNN's functionality and assets/strengths, do you think that it would perform well in a 500 "user" environment like this one?
2. Would it do it better than CF? Why (briefly)? (This is the key question for me.)
3. Would its server profile be more robust than CF?
4. Do you think programming such a beast would be more expensive in CF or in DNN?

Thanks for your thoughts.