If I start a Joomla site, can it eventually be scaled and heavily customized?

Question

Hi. So I have about $1000 to build a site that I have an idea for using joomla. Im somewhat of an amatuer though I know HTML and CSS. Im just wondering, supposing the site is oneday a success and it needs true customization and scalability, will it be easy for professional web developers to work on the site since it was started with joomla?

Im just asking because in the chance the site is a success (which I know is veeery difficult) then it'll need proper developers to jump on board to make it a world class site. Also, in the beginning I'll need a working prototype to show to potential investors and partners.

Thanks.

Comments

Some great answers guys. Thanks. I'll let you know what I'll end up using but right now Im leaning towards Joomla as though wordpress seems great it seems if you want to get its plugins to do something slightly different than their intended purpose things get a tad complicated whereas with joomla its much easier to fiddle with things.

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i'd prioritise getting the prototype going before worrying about scalability too much spend the bucks you dont spend on worrying about scaling on things like a more complete prototype

Answer 1

from my experience, Joomla scales no where near as well as drupal which scales nowhere near as well as WordPress

WordPress is probably the better supported of the big 3 CMS/Frameworks

That said - get your working prototype down - chances are 9 times out of 10 you end up completely rewriting

depending on your application it may also be much much better to have your own system written from scratch, especially if it requires some particularly bespoke functionality that doesnt neccesarily fit well into commonly available CMS' out there.

To be totally honest - a good quality developer would develop code using coding best practices which should mean that any other decently competent developer should be able to pick up where the old one left up (this includes documentation and neccesary code commenting) regardless of what system they use - you shouldn't have to "require" the use of Joomla to solve your problem to ensure that other developers can work on it

Comments

i've worked extensively with all 3 myself, drupal can scale well if the custom code is well written, as can joomla and wordpress - i do not deny this, if its crap code you can forget scalability - in my personal experience i have found that joomla developed code tends to be worse performing that wordpress or drupal. the good thing about drupal in particular is that they have a strong set of coding standards that your modules/themes have to stick to if you want to put them on the drupal.org site - i know this as i had to go through the process myself for a module, the point i make here is that drupal tends to have a higher quality of code in the public module repositories because of this

that said with the exception of pressflow drupal, out of the box direct comparisons between WP, Drupal and Joomla puts them in that order for performance with me, with the same default PHP environment installed in Debian linux (without PHP opcode caches) - WP has probably the best most supported caching plugin that helps with scalability a huge factor with W3-Total-Cache and HyperDB - Drupal has the next best in Boost and a few other modules (but there isnt really a single module that does everything) and most of the joomla extensions i have come across haver never had as significant an effect as there equivalents in Drupal and WP - one of these days i will get the time to sit down and actually put numbers to those claims and do a blog post.

i'm not debating which framework to work with based on ease of coding, or ease of updating content or ease of updating - if i was, my personal opinion would still be WP or drupal depending on the type of site that the poster is going for

the question asker is tackling this the wrong way though - they should just spend there bucks getting the working prototype out the door without worrying too much about performance - theres no point spending extra time and $$ making scalable code from day 0 if the idea doesnt take off, its better spending those $$ in making the prototype more feature complete

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how is "from my experience" different to "from my personal experience" the ommission of the word didn't actually change my meaning

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l think from experience might also suggest research experience which in that case will involve data from other people but if u say personal it instantly makes it clear its based on you as one Developer.l agree with u that the asker must just get the product off the ground and think about scalability later to be honest l think the scalability for example Drupal offers is rarely used by normal web apps thus even the so less scalable ones also achieve the goal.From where l stand WordPress is easy to use and wud mainly suit a more UI inclined dev while Drupal wud suit more of a functional/back end programmer and Joomla more or less balances the 2

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my experience is more from an infrastructure side, having hosted, magento, WP, joomla and drupal sites (among a few other PHP and rails frameworks) not specifically from a developer/code side of things

and i'm not talking about cpanel based reseller hosting either

the other things to consider are security as well:
WP - pretty much most popular platform out there, makes it a bigger target but has generally been the fastest to respond to major security issues
Drupal - also popular (doesnt appear to be as popular as WP or joomla which means its less of a target generally) - and very fast at responding to major security flaws (the often beat WP for speed)
Joomla - probably 2nd most popular CMS/framework out there, fairly popular target for attacks - security updates not 100% sure how quick these are but i would hope just as quick as WP or Drupal

the biggest bug bear i have with Joomla sites is this though: most sites never get updated which means they become a big security risk - i mean how many sites have you heard of that get hacked that are all joomla and not WP or drupal? i dont want to say WP or drupal are immune but by far the most commonly attacked (and succesfully exploited) sites are joomla based - and the primary reason is that code wasnt kept patched - there has to be a reason explaining why its not being updated as well as WP (drupal is not as easy to update as WP but it has drush which is equally as good and you find that these sites are supported better because of the slightly more involved nature of developers with drupal sites)

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i figured from your previous post that we might have been arguing from different angles! i now see the value of your posts. unfortunately, i can argue with you on infrastructure. i just dont have exposure.
what i can say on security though is on all joomla hacks i have come across,  either the host or the developer is to blame, especially the developer for not using the latest patches or for using pirated versions of templates/components/plugins/modules that they did clean

Answer 2

I agree with a lot of what @anthony said but disagree on Wordpress being the best in scalability there @anthony. Not a founded conclusion and all opinion. That is, with, scaling meaning the ability of the application to support growth(by usage & functionality) through infrastructure & software.

When scaling, there's a whole lot more to consider than just the product.

Having used all three CMSs in different scenarios, some of the questions are:
1) what you want to use the CMS for (if mainly publishing - Wordpress, Joomla in that order. For more flexibility outside publishing - Drupal,Joomla in that order)
2) when you want to deliver (if requiring a quick prototype - Wordpress & Joomla would be better suited)
3) what your expertise/level of experience is (asker said html/css - Wordpress is best)
4) stability and support of the CMS(ALL are well-supported with good communities & 3rd party modules/extensions)

Without considering hosting environment & supporting tools (like memchached) in terms of developer-orientation(hence more power to scale), Drupal and Joomla far supersede Wordpress.

All three are market leaders in the CMS space but each has its favored audience/users.

Wordpress
- It is originally suited to publish-oriented sites (though can be extended).
- Wordpress is friendlier for the beginnner who wants a quick time to delivery over a good platform.
- Smoothest learning curve
- Very easy installation

Joomla
- Joomla is reasonably  beginner-friendly but also has a more flexible/powerful content structuring ability
- Moderate learning curve
- Easy installation

Drupal
- More technically oriented than the other two. Not too difficult but one needs more understanding of product-specific features to achieve better ability to customise it
- Steepest learning curve amongst the two. The keyword of it all is "taxonomy". Understand that and you will harness its power
- No longer complicated setup a quick website

Where I would agree in part with anthony is investing in learning development. Learning PHP/MySQL would not be a wasted effort as you would be better able to customise.

For a beginner developer, knowing just HTML/CSS means alot of work & frustration getting it to do what you want.

I suggest you download ALL - Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress go to their online communities and post an INTELLIGENT question asking what would be best fitted for what you want to achieve. But do your research first on available 3rd party modules for the respective products. It is good netiquette to reflect an effort in most of these forums and no one wants to spoon feed.

Wordpress Forum - http://wordpress.org/support/
Drupal Forum - https://drupal.org/forum
Joomla Forum - http://forum.joomla.org/

You best friend should be Google: https://www.google.co.za/search?q=drupal+vs+joomla+vs+wordpress

From that you will see how there's no one answer.

Comments

Wordpress is more scalable than Joomla?  I'm certain you're completely misinformed.

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wordpress is more scalable than joomla and i say that from experience of having to scale some particularly huge sites that i cant specifically mention due to NDA but one was before it closed a network of blogs that there were 30k blogs and the other was for a US political party and they had over 50 servers in operation at the height of there biggest convention for 1 single WP based site, joomla would have needed double the number of servers!

tinman is right though - its 100% dependant on what your site does and needs - you may find that none of the "big 3" meets your needs you need to throughly understand what your requirements are and research if any solution can meet the majority of those needs - if they cant, custom code is likely the way to go!

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I would not like to keep going on over the same topic, but I find your sweeping statement of Wordpress being more scalable than Joomla as lacking in fact and figures.

It reveals nothing to state that there exists a certain site done in Wordpress, with so so servers, one Wordpress site...and Joomla would have needed double the number of servers....only to hide behind the NDA. Better not to have mentioned it.

Examples are actually good. And examples from big companies or institutions. Go through those sites and see if what you see is what you want.

Wordpress
+ PlayStation Blog,
+ New York Times Blog,
+ Ames Research Center ( NASA ),
+ Mashable

Drupal
+ The White House  <- Fanboy favorite

Joomla
+ MTV ( <- MEDIA Alert),
+ Harvard University

I will reiterate, if its scalability, its not just the products. You look at many things... scalability through the environment(hardware infrastrastructure, DB, OS, system sofware) and (CMS)application level tuning.

And since all mentioned products are PHP-based, the PHP configuration/environment also plays a role. They are also limited by the performance of PHP (ref Hip Hop project by Facebook - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP).

Looking at how far they have all come, their performances are reasonably ok and could easily match each other if tweaked well. Drupal is known to be resource hungry.

Scaling is a function of many things. Primary concern being stability, resource usage and performance given a certain amount of traffic. There are dedicated professions for that. Integration/dev ops

The best,beginner-friendly item I could find find through a quick Google was this : http://www.slideshare.net/Webnific/cms-comparisson-3850088

I will still say that ask yourself what you want, see whats there, see the problems experienced by using whatever CMS for what you want(you said media).

Also remember that hosters throttle huge bandwidth consumption for the average shared hosting.This is a typical issue for media-heavy sites. Even on VPS. Most webhosting

Google!

P.S. It may be too soon to be worrying for scalability as that can be addressed when it is worth it. Most start-ups cannot avoid re-writing when their project gains traction. The first version is almost always a prototype that will be discarded. You can spend alot of time worrying about the technicalities of scaling before knowing if the start-up will actually be worthwhile.

For quick, simple-functionality web apps, go Wordpress. For complex, social, ecommerce types go Joomla/Drupal. Drupal being more flexible in terms of features and power to bend to your will.
Good luck!

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i think you answer is more worth of the selected answer - you are 100% right that when you think about scalability you have to consider the whole infrastructure and stack from the OS you pick, the PHP modules you install (and opcode caches), to other memory caches and php/mysql configurations - and thats all before you get to the application code itself!

Answer 3

"...Also, in the beginning I'll need a working prototype to show to potential investors and partners..."

 

What is it that you are doing or you intend to do that you need  potential investors and parteners?

Comments

Pretty much a media rich and interactive site targeting a certain niche and demographic.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

I can build you a high end site in Joomla with thevery best componeents for $1000. I have over 600 Joomla clients in over 14 different Countries. We are located in Toronto, Canada.

Comments

he is clearly asking a question of scalability not the best and cheap coder out there. lts always nice nice no answer what is being asked, should the person get interested in your answers, they might ask you for more services!!

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If you read his post you will see he has a $1000 he wants to spend on a Joomla site. Of course Joomla is scalable and others have answered that part of his. I was responding to the $1000 to spend. While we are the best we are not cheap coders.

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My bad!! Sorry for that, its true that he has some dollars to splash and might need a hand.

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no problem and it was thoughtful of you to apologize. Tony