I'm thinking about moving my current Drupal portal to a new design portal of news, including a private zone (with login and interaction with customers). I want to build a scalable architecture with mobile implementation.
What do you consider to be the best starting point?
Everything you describe is easy to achieve using Drupal. Login, private zone, user interactions are all provided by your CMS configuration, customization and theming will provide mobile friendliness. The main development effort will go to theming, most of non visual aspects are achievable through existing modules and configurations. The main complexity and unknowns (and this should therefore be tackled first) will come from the scalability. PHP can do shared sessions with a custom session stored in MySQL to allow for seemless load balancing. The main issue will come from anything that relies on local data (such as files). This can be addressed by having your webfarm Drupal instance and data files stored on a networked file system shared by all servers. Cheap software load balancing can be achieved via nginx proxying. The database itself can also be clustered subject to MySQL or PostgreSQL limitations such as multimaster potential race issues on MySQL and multiple cpu utilisation for a single query (in case of heavy long running queries that are served from database RAM cache) being impossible to achieve with MySQL and hard to achieve with PostgreSQL.
