We are in the process of sketching out designs and features for our new website. Our existing site was written ten years ago and is sorely in need of an update.

To this end, we are looking to add a whole bunch of community features, such as user profiles, comments, blogs, buddy-lists, ratings, user-submitted articles, reviews, image uploading etc. We'll also need ad rotation, company-provided content (such as articles, data searches etc). All this also needs to be integrated with our own data - the reason people visit our site in the first place.

We've been looking at a number of different frameworks to provide a lot of this functionality out of the box, and so far we are tending towards DotNetNuke or possibly Drupal[^]. The existing site is written in Perl and runs on 4 load-balanced Linux servers, but it is ten years old and we are not constrained to keeping it on Linux. In fact, we are pretty much a .NET shop now.

We would like to use .NET, since that is our area of expertise, but the cost of licensing the software (SQL Server 2005, Windows 2003 etc) is going to be rather high, hence the alternate possibility to go with an open-source Linux configuration. This has the side effect of giving us experience in developing on a different platform and learning other technolgies, but the downside is that none of us really know too much about site development on Linux...

The current web site generates about 15 million page views per month and has about 100,000 unique users per month. Does anyone have any experience or know of any sites that are successfully running DotNetNuke on a site of this size? Are there other choices that we should be looking at? Is it possible (or practical) to run DotNetNuke on Mono?

As I said, we haven't even settled on the platform yet and are very open to ideas, so any suggestions or tales of success/failure are greatly appreciated!

-Greg