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[Dustin <nfhostnet AT gmail.com>]

I'll echo Richard's uneasy feelings about Plone and zope.

I sysadmin a plone install for a small to medium traffic university site and it infuriates me on a regular basis.  

Plone is sloooow. Real slow.  I can't stress this enough.  

Because of this, you have to worry about scaling problems way sooner than if you use a PHP blog or CMS system.  

Right now our infrastructure looks sort of like this (with mini-rants between each piece):

*varnish cache server*

needed because plone takes forever to process pages. A non-scientific benchmark I did a while back seemed to show that apache+php+a standard drupal install could load a page 200x faster than an apache+plone+a standard page could load on the same hardware.  Also, don't get me started on Varnish's config.  Defaults are enabled even if not listed in the config.  You have to define things just to override them.  Varnish eats RAM, but that's understandable and to be expected from a caching server.  

*Apache*

directly serves static content.  Does some god awful rewrite rules and proxying for "web host monster" plone sites.  It is an atrocious looking config file.   The rewrite proxies send plone requests to pound on other machines that host plone client (http servers) that actually do the plone work and talk to the zeo db. 

*Pound*

A simple load balancer.  Not a bad piece of software.  

*Plone Clients*

These things monopolize processor cores, are slow at doing there work and unless its changed recently, are recommended to handle 5-10 concurrent connections a second.  A quad core machine can handle 40 concurrent requests while being maxed out, not impressed.  This is another reason why varnish is important.  

*Zeo DB*

An object database.  Last time I checked, there was no easy or free way to do replication or carving up of stuff to be hosted on different zeodb servers.  With that said, I haven't seen performance problems with it.  Since its an object database, don't expect to be able to do any SELECT, etc queries.  I've never dug enough into it to figure out how you actually get data, but I think you have to do python programming to grab info.  That may or may not be acceptable depending on where you are in the chain and what your background is. 

With all those rants done, I'll close by saying I grew up in a PHP and MySQL world and inherited this Plone setup.  Lots of big players run plone, so it is possible to make it work and it is nice from a content creator perspective.   I just want to strongly suggest if you go down the plone route that you either find somebody that has already drunk the koolaid and knows how to sysadmin all of this stuff or find someone who wants to drink the koolaid to get involved and manage the system(s) it will take.   Otherwise, if a standard old-school geek is put in charge of admining it, they will not be happy and the site will not work well.  And, should that person ever leave the group, finding someone else to administer it will be more difficult than if you stuck with one of the more popular PHP packages. 

Dustin