I started with a single website hosted on WordPress-specific hosting. Decent performance, but there was no way to publish a page or web app independent of the WordPress site itself on the same domain easily. So, chat, forums, courses, interactive elements, and all the other functions that slow a site down, are all piled on top of a single set of finite resources. I couldn’t add all the functions I wanted us to enjoy.
What I’m doing now is adding sub-sites for the various functions. The forums, as an example, are actually on their own WordPress instance, so any impact to site performance is only felt in the forums and is not compounded by the impact of myriad other plugins and functionality.
The sub-sites are installed in folders within the root of the primary site, so they appear to be just a section of that site in the URL. The forums are on a separate WordPress instance installed in a folder called /forums.
The main site will host the blogs and use BuddyPress social/community plugin. People can register and log in there. When they log in on the site, a special plugin syncs their logged in state and roles to all the sub-sites. When they log in or out, or change roles, on the sub-sites, that gets synced up to the primary/root WordPress.
I have to test the sync performance when the full network is up, and it might require me going through a setup for every possible connection- a number which gets exponentially higher with each new sub-site. So there is work and validation to be done before I can declare victory, but I am confident.
