I am thinking thru the design of a new DNN site & need some advice on whether having a large # of sub-portals will be problematic.  This will be a "Community" oriented site where each user has a page to place their own pics, blog, links, etc.

Expected # of Users:  36,000, all added between 9-1-08 and 1-15-09, the cut off.  The number of registrants is real from past experiece, but we have never built a community oriented web site in the past.

Sub-Portals ??  4,000  The users will all be members of local Groups. 

Needs:

1) Must Have - Each user have their own "personal page" to modify.

2) Would Like - a Sub-Portal for each Group that would have the group member's "personal pages" on the menu.

or,  Is there a way to group pages so that a group member could easily find & view the pages of the other group members?

Concern:  Is 4,000 sub-portals going to be a major performance issue for DNN?

Any advice would be appreciated, Gary

I agree with John on this, based on the information presented.  Multi-portal capabilty is very handy for the right circumstances... but introduces administrative overhead as well.  You would probably be better off to spend some more time looking at your desired workflow, administrative processes and anticipated futures.  Personalization is very achieveable without the use of multi-portals and definitely easier to maintain within a single instance when there is no solid justification for the separation of data.  It is also unlikely that you would want these new users to have complete "Admin" access (in the DNN sense)... even to their respective pages, etc.

Feel free to post more questions.  I'm sure you'll get good feedback.

Good luck!

Are there some example modules that you would recommend?

Jeff Cochran wrote Check into the MySpace-style DNN modules that allow community sites like this. Jeff