Wilfred: After reading Tim Perdue's article on MySQL & PostgreSQL Compared, it's safe to assume that MySQL would indeed be an ideal choice for ARP.
Actually, I think we get anywhere from 8 to 12K unique visitors a day. So, the actual page views and hits are quite a bit more than that.
Do you intend to build up some web-portal (all-in-one with integrated board, articles, news ...) or will the board stay a part of it for its own (hopefully)?
Each component of the site (content, forums, etc) will still remain seperate systems on it's own, just like now with some minor integrations here and there.
We just need to get the new backend up and running so that everyone in the team can really participate in every aspect, from news writing to article posting, etc. That's impossible right now. What's the status of the backend right now?
In planning stages.... will have some sort of a early early early beta ready within the next few weeks to test out most of the concepts and features that's requested on the new backend it's gonna be way cool.... (i'll start a thread on the progress, which section do i start the thread?)
Errr... who told mislead you to think that PHP can't work with Access or MS SQL? It can but it simply do not have native support only.