Is Joomla A Solid, Sound Base For A High End Website?
February 22, 2010 under FAQ
We are considering using Joomla in a highly customized manner to serve the growing needs of ecoinvestmentclub dot com (now using Firenze from Rocket Theme).
We need to add social networking, and give the site a totally custom look to appeal to our investors. (More of a news format)
Some on our team are saying “go Custom”, while others feel that Joomla is a strong base to build a site useful to the largest of companies.
Do any of you know URLS that you will post to larger companies that are using a customized version of Joomla?
Do you know of Joomla sites that have successfully integrated social networking components that you can share.
We need to make a decision and I like Joomla, but want to be sure it is the best choice. I think we would likely have to pay about $50K US to get what we are looking for in a custom written non-Joomla site.
Your comments will be greatly appreciated and if I can answer a question for you in return, please ask.
Thanks,
Bob
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Joomla is an excellent framework.
It’s totally free, so there’s a good chance you can use it as-is for nearly everything. The community has built tons of plugins to add all the features you might need.
You should still consider customizing. You’ll certainly want to build your own template (based on one that’s similar, but adding your own logos and visual design features.)
Social networking is a very broad topic, but you should be able to find plugins to add the features you are looking for.
If you can’t find exactly what you want, you can hire a programmer to build a plugin. This will be a much cheaper, more focused problem than trying to build an entire feature set.
You could fairly decide either way. I’ve used Joomla on several high-traffic websites (college newspapers, etc) where the ease of use of Joomla as a CMS (particularly for our content writers) was paramount. However, the drawbacks of Joomla are not to be taken lightly.
First, Joomla is inevitably going to be more processor- and query-intensive than any well-built custom solution.
Second, it sounds like your need for the CMS aspects of Joomla is taking a backseat for other features like networking, etc, and this is going to require you to either find existing plugins for Joomla (Can you trust them, are they buggy, slow, etc) or write your own (potentially harder to develop within Joomla).
Third, we found some aspects of Joomla to be really annoying, particularly with low-level details in the way pages are served. We spent considerable time hacking existing templates to get things to work within the set Joomla framework, and I know that it would have taken us a lot less time if it were bare PHP/MySQL.
I guess the short answer is that Joomla is going to help you get off the ground quicker, but for a longer term, more extensible solution, $50K now might be saving you money in the long run.
Hello:
We have built two largescale portals based on Joomla.
One without major customization for business magazine and another one with major customization with social networking as core.
After completely building, hosting and currently maintaining them on behalf of our clients, we feel the following
1. Building a large scale community website using Joomla gives you the edge of “faster time to market”. And if you are looking for faster time to market that means you want the site up and running quickly go for Joomla.
2. Now if you are starting building the site now and if the core features of the site are social networking try “Drupal” instead of Joomla. For social networking site it is worth dumping all your competency in Joomla and direclty go to Drupal and build your skills.
3. In case your site has major information rich features and less of social networking, then consider Joomla against Drupal. But if you are banking on social networking features Drupal wins against Joomla.
4. Now if you are relaxed and say i can build this site slowly and for me time to market is not a big deal, go for custom development using on LAMP stack. Especially you can take this call if your want to release features in a phased manner. Something like LinkedIn which slowly but steadily added features to their site over a period of tim.
With Warm Regards
Ram Kumarhttp://www.bhea.co.inhttp://www.rheakt.com