I'm a Drupal fan myself (thought it is certainly a love-hate thing, which I suppose is true for all CMS's), but I've heard several glowing recommendations on the green for ExpressionEngine. It isn't free, but I don't think it's all that expensive, either . . .

Yeah, I found then when I started looking around, and it does look good - but $249.95 (I'm sure my site counts as "commercial" even though it's not making me any money) is to steep for me. Hell, even the 99 dollar option is. Dang.
Also, I dom't see that it has everything I need even with the buying plan. Hmm.

Dammmit drupal, why can't you just work. aargh.

Database issues are one thing, user management another. Sometimes the twain shall, unfortunately, meet. 45K of posts is not a particularly large number of entries, as database systems go. But in the Drupal installations I've worked with, I've found that the key to segregating user classes is to use the taxonomy to help define roles, by creating content linkages through the taxonomy that are consistent with roles. Unlogged "Visitors" for example, should only get a dynamic navigation menu with public content choices clearly supported in a "public" taxonomy branch. Logged in "users" get "visitors" + "users" taxonomy content. "Editors" get "visitors" + "users" + "editors" taxonomy, the latter including low level content management tools, etc. "Admins" get "visitor" + "user" + "editor" + "God", the latter including full user management, maintenance, and security taxonomy branches, etc.

But migrating a site, which does not currently have a taxonomy, to Drupal can be daunting, as if you don't employ the taxonomy, you're crippling much of Drupal's power going forward. And if you try to develop a consistent taxonomy, and still import all your old content, something inevitably goes wonky, because most small site databases aren't too consistent.

Which brings up my final point: how much effort have you spent pounding your current database for data consistency? What can you fix, now, in place, before trying to migrate the site?

Wow, I guess I should explain what I'm trying to do a bit more and where I'm getting stuck.

Taxonomies is not really a problem for me, I have 101 topics, which I translate to drupals taxonomy and sort that under four categories (news, commercials, other stuff, superbowl ads). No problem there.
I also have user generated tags on my current site, which few users use but hey, I'll bring that over too somehow. (With my luck, it'll be manually. gag!)

So in my little migration I have managed to get the current topics become taxonomy terms - yeay! - but then I have to create a few roles (no problem) and decide how to limit access to some of the categories/taxonomies. Should I use Taxonomy access control? Did that, and since it (at least seems to) store a "role x can see Y node" copy of every single node in node_access, the widget times out before completing all nodes. I asked for help on that, and the suggestions only helped me so far (I can now get TAC on tenthousand nodes).

So I began looking into Categories instead, which seems a lot more fun for what I want to do (make it easier for people to browse the commercials, really) and that's great except I can never get anything but a blank page on cac_lite (the access control settings). Asked at drupal.org and elsewhere about that too, but I'm none the wiser.

The issues I'm having with what I got is that on the frontend, it's ugly with bastard tables everywhere making re-design quite a headache and a the whole thing is a bit bloated. People complain (seldom to me directly though) that they get "headaches" trying to read it and that they can't find anything. I've tweaked things and built things for it (it's a really old patched postnuke and began as a phpnuke site way back when) so that there's tags, search ads by country, previous and next posts links, trackbacks, forums, ratings, users own pages with their favorites, RSS feeds for every article, every comment, every user, everything a user rated, posted and or commented (example Robblink) and loads more, but I am tired of tweaking something that is falling apart at the seams anyway and would really love to start with something that has an active community, so one can share ideas and widgets. Also, something that I can redesign (with CSS only I'd hope) so I never have to hear people complain about how ugly my site is again. ;)

But mainly, it's becoming a data-mining problem. People want to find ads, but don't know the name of what they are looking for, so I want to be able to make ads browsable in so many different ways - which Drupals categories could help me do really. I love that one topic - say ads with cars - can be browsed with the "next 1 2 3 4 5 >> last" widget at the bottom and have been wanting something like that for years.

Hmm. Maybe if I migrate all stories with commercials in them as "story" and everything else as "blog" nodes, and then I just limit the access to "story" for anonymous (not logged in) users.

I think I tried that and failed a few weeks back, but hey. worth another shot.

OK, my Drupal experience is with 4.6/4.7 using PHP4 and MySQL 4. Reading the question you posted to support forums for 5.1, it looks like you might have run into an unresolved bug in 5.1, so I wonder if you've tried reverting to 4.7, with any good result?

And, reading your question posted to the Drupal support forums, the suggestion to turn on query logging and see what, exactly, is causing your timeouts seems germane. Did you ever do that? If so, what results? Unless your site is running in some very resource limited shared hosting situation, I'm kind of surprised you'd be hitting such limits, as 45K nodes isn't all that many, and your taxonomy and user class matrix just isn't all that complex.

What I do is migrate my data to Drupal 4.6 and then upgrade my way to 5.1 - whenever I try 4.7 the whole thing breaks (and I've tried a few times, I have no idea why it all crumbles) so I found that going from 4.6 to 5.1 with a few manual sql changes causes the least amount of heartache.

I kinda gave up on TAC since Categories was looking so much more promising and this morning I've been re-doing my migration here just to try and see what any sql logging might reveal to me, but guess what - I can't seem to get TAC to work properly at all now. ARGH!

*head to keyboard - head to keyboard*

However, categories, category legacy and creating categories from my taxonomies works fine - again, I meet a blank page at cac_lite so it doesn't really help, even though I really like the way I can sort my site with the help of categories.

I'll try again. *dumps the entire database one more time*

I got taxonomy access control working in a drupal 4.6.6 version. I guess it doesn't do what I want as I want people to be able to see that we have 35000 commercials, just not click in and view them (unless they are logged in).

"... I guess it doesn't do what I want as I want ..."

Just spitballin' here, but couldn't you serve a "daily teaser" and features page to visitors, that would hype your 35,000 commercials, and then pass them into the registration process? Let logged in users go to the content retrieval portion of the site directly (via persistent cookies, or some such).

If it's good enough for bastions of capitalism like the NYT, the WSJ, and the Economist, why can't you go that direction, too? And, you might even do some kind of sponsored site pass deal more easily that way, too.

Not tryin' to sell you Drupal, per se, but the visitor vs. logged user content restriction issue is not something I think any CMS package that I know of is going to do, out of the box, as slickly as you'd like.

No, you're probably right. To be honest it's a wet dream of mine to be able to 'set the content free' again (it used to be back when I made craploads of money and could afford the bills) again because it's just more fun that way. :) Postnuke had to be hacked so that people could search and see what commercials are available and once they find the ones they were looking for they figure, 'allright I'll log in for that' - this is why I'd like to keep that possibility.

Might seem kinda silly shopping around for a new CMS that does what my old CMS does, but so many old quirks in postnuke are really grating at me now. Theming it is a bitch when there are hard coded tables in some modules that I've tried to hunt down and kill but never managed. Writing new modules is a bore because I can't share them since I'm on some old version that nobody else has. And a new fresh face on the site might help bring in some type of sponsored dealio that everyone keeps suggesting that I do (seriously) and I'd like to do but right now my site needs a facelift. Badly.

*deep sigh*