NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Peter Becker <peterbsemail at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, So thank you so much for the input, but now here's the funny part
> Mitch....the first prototype site that we somewhat inherited and are
> completely redoing from scratch (nearly), used a combination of Joomla and
> PHP :-))  This was less to get away from anything in particular, just that
> we know a lot more about what we need to do now and the business is smart
> enough to let us do the right thing (so rare these days).
>
> There are some great things about Joomla, but the site implementation felt
> somewhat schizophrenic in that there was the Joomla half and the PHP half.
> I'm sure there's better ways to integrate between the two than was done, but
> we had no deep expertise in Joomla and managing the site between/across dev,
> staging, preprod and prod, became quite onerous with separate instances of
> Joomla on dev, preprod and prod.  Felt almost like it was defeating the
> whole purpose of a CMS.
>
> As we're at the beginning stages of spec'ing out the new site, nothing is
> off the table, and maybe there is a clean way to integrate Joomla into Zend
> (and this is a consideration), but it seems like a lot of overhead for
> things we just don't need....ergo trying to do a more clean break between
> the style (handled through Zend) and the content (handled through ?).  The
> challenge with most of the tools/frameworks out there is that they want to
> make building a site as easy as possible which usually means mashing the 2
> together.  But there always seems to be that point of diminishing returns
> where you start spending more time on the work arounds than you ever saved
> in the beginning - ahh the trade-offs.
>
> Anyway - really appreciate the input and the team here had not heard of the
> other suggestions that were made, but are now looking at and evaluating.
> Thank you, this really is a great group and think I (or my team) may have
> even met some of you at Code Works 09 in Manhattan.  We're going to try and
> get down to the next local meeting if we can (we're in CT).

What a small world - I was a morning speaker and talked a little about
Dojo and Thin Server Architecture; and might have met some of you
while hanging out...

As always, the devil's in the details. You have to balance the
advantage of having a CMS that gets love from an active community
(free updates and maintenance) versus the flexibility of a do it
yourself approach (which would call rather for a framework like Zend
or KohanaPHP).

Joomla is a great platform, as long as what you are doing can be done
within Joomla. You start to lose the benefits of a full platform when
you start coding outside of it, which you obviously noticed ;-)

To take advantage of a full platform like Joomla you do need to
approach your implementation the Joomla Way(TM), otherwise consider
eschewing a CMS and go one level lower to a glue framework that gives
you the flexibility you need.

-- Mitch