Contacts versus Articles

[jmahalo]

I'm very new to Joomla and I'm looking for some general feedback on the best way to use it. Apologies for the long winded background.

I'm planning a site for a nonprofit organization. It is a hall of fame that annually inducts new members and honors others with awards. We've been doing this for 50 years. There's over 1,000 people that have been honored.

An individual can be a hall of famer as well as an award recipient and a member of the board. There are also cases where the same person receives the same award in multiple years. But I only want one bio per person.

The purpose of the site is to allow visitors to search for and view biographies (by induction year, name, etc).

I am planning to use Contacts with several custom fields to capture the data. Repeatable fields provide a good way to handle some of the special cases. I also think using Contacts (not Articles) helps prevent adding the same person more than once.

Here's my questions:
Are there any search or display limitations by using Contacts versus Articles?

It looks like Articles have more out of the box display options. But I would need a lot more custom fields to use Articles.

Are there any recommendations for extensions for Contacts? Display, search, import and export are all of interest.

Is the amount of data a concern for performance on the front end?

Is there anything I am missing?

Thank you in advance.

[gws]

I would suggest you look at extensions like RS Forms or Fabrika where you can setup all the fields you will ever need and that info is posted to the DB and you can then display whatever data you want to, to whatever groups you decide, all totally editable.

[jmahalo]

Thank you for referring me to those extensions. The flexibility Fabrik provides may be what I need.

[Per Yngve Berg]

Her is the link to Fabrik: https://www.fabrikar.com