I am working on developing a weksite using a Java based CMS and had a close look at dotCMS community edition. The website will initially hold some 500-600 pages, with good seo integration, performance, search capability. The pages will have images but no videos. I want to run the site with dotcms community edition for a year or so and then upgrade to a licensed edition. Can anybody please suggest if dotcms community edition can help build & run the site covering my above requirements. Any pointers in this regard is appreciated.
Unfortunately the community edition does not support integrated search (the licensed edition uses elastic search), so you'll have to add third party search. All the other requirements are not a problem. I've build many many sites with dotCMS and I have never had a problem with those aspects of the CMS.
To figure out what is in and what is out, check out this list: http://dotcms.com/explore/editions/