infrastructure

The first revision control system I ever used was called RCS. It was the pre-cursor to CVS and stored all revision data locally. It was nifty but very limited and not suited for group development. CVS was the first shared revisioning system I used. It was rock solid, IMHO. But it had a few big problems, like the inability to rename or move files. Everything had to be deleted and re-added. 

Since those days, I've used several other revisioning systems: Perforce, Bitkeeper, Clearcase, Subversion and GIT.

You say you want to build a website? It must be feature rich, flexible, extensible, powerful, and very web2.0. This is an important site, and you don't want to be locked in to someone else's framework, so you have decided the smartest approach is DIY. You have a small team of very experienced LAMP developers who have track record building successful sites. They've promised to meet your every requirement.

The importance of project management tools is almost never fully appreciated. I am shocked at how common it is for a group of developers to go working without version control, ticket tracking, development documentation and so on. The very first thing I do when working with a new client is to make sure that they get these tools in place if they haven't already.

Those who are used to working without a complete set of project management tools never fail to appreciate the benefits of them once they are introduced. I consider it next to impossible for a team to work together without managing code and tasks in an efficient and highly organized way.

Hopefully you do not need to be sold on this idea and are using CVS or SVN to manage your project already. You likely have some sort of ticket system. It is a little less likely that you have both of these components integrated with each other.

When it comes to choosing a solution for project management software, a die-hard Drupal user has a dilemna. On one hand, Drupal seems as though it should be the perfect solution. It's fully customizable, has lots of nifty project management related modules and, most importantly, it's Drupal! Why would you not use it? "Eating your own dogfood" is the way to go, right? Meh...

This is a very insightful article on MediaTemple's efforts to build one of the first massive web hosting grid: Anatomy of MySQL on the GRID

Drupal is as scalable as the applications it relies on. While there's nothing preventing Drupal itself from being scaled across any number of web servers, scalability of open-source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL is an ongoing issue. While these databases do support replication, that's not always enough. For a very small percentage of websites, daily user visits are counted not in hundreds or thousands but in hundreds of thousands.