Considering using Atahualpa - is it the right start?
 

I'm going to be migrating a descent size news site (60,000 monthly pageviews and growing) from modx to wordpress and have been researching starter themes to build the site on.

I've used atahualpa 3.5.3 for smaller sites with great success but nothing this large with this many features. I've been using wordpress for about 5 years and my php/mysql chops are decent. My questions to the community are:

• will this theme handle the traffic?
• are there any problems i need to know about integrating 3rd party ad servers?
• what version of atahualpa should i be using? 3.5.3 ?
• how easy is it to reference a cdn or subdirectory for media assets in this theme?
• what else should i be asking?

Thanks, i look forward to your feedback and i hope flynn and juggledad aren't going anywhere and will continue to do a great job on here. this is a really helpful, vibrant community.

I used WP and Ata (various versions) for my community newspaper. The theme works beautifully for a news site. With help from Flynn et al., I had a lot of custom coding for widgets, but most of that functionality is now available in off-the-shelf plugins.

I've shut down the site now, not publishing anymore except for a few obits, but you can still see it:

http://larchmontgazette.com

I'm still not sure version i should be using. I decided on 3.6.1 because that's what's offered on wordpress.org.

THe way it works is when a version is released, it has to go thru a 'verification' process at WordPress.org - this can take a month or even longer, so the theme is available at http://wordpress.bytesforall.com/ and announced in the "new Versions & Updating' forum.

This way, you don't have to wait for the WordPress approval process and have access to the latest version with the most new features and fixes installed.

ok. i switched to ata 3.6.4 AND donated, you guys have a great theme and support here.

That sounds like a good combo. Our server is caring nearly two dozen blogs in multisite mode with the WP MultiNetwork plugin. One of those is for a 2,000,000 member multinational organization.

We currently are migrating ALL our sites to Atahualpa 3.6.4.

As for 3rd party plugins etc. Atahualpa should not be significantly different from any of the quality themes.

LAN