joomla/drupal and then cakephp/kohona

Question

hey there, i have been working on Kohonaphp and codeigniter, today i tried drupal, is it just me or is it actualy tougher to code large sites? for a blog or normal site its ok, but what about a heavy products search and things like that, has anyone used joomla or drupal for something really heavy?

Answer 1

Drupal can be (and is) used for large-scale sites. The Onion I know runs on Drupal, and that's quite an extensive site. More examples here.

It's nice that drupal can be molded to use in just a simple weblog site, or expanded for just about anything you'd need. It can get quite complex, quite quickly.

Answer 2

hey Bill, but would you say its worth the learning curve over cakephp or kohona?

Answer 3

Every system has its pros and cons.

You need to decide which one fits your needs best before committing to one. Using a CMS (e.g. Joomla / Drupal) can save you a lot of time on development that has already been incorporated into these systems. Why re-invent the wheel when you can use and leverage off existing code?

However, these CMS are designed for the most common purposes. If your website has a unique function, this may not be able to be achieved out of the box with either of these systems. You will need to develop / use third party extensions and modules to achieve any extra functionality that is not addressed by these systems. Thankfully, these are both developed using PHP so its fairly easy to extend the core functionality as needed.

If you decide to use kohona / cakephp / codeigniter (which are all php frameworks), you can achieve very fine grained control over your websites behavior and control every aspect as needed, but it will take you much longer to deploy a fully fledged "standard" site than using a standard CMS.

Both Joomla and Drupal have are used on many heavy weight websites:

Joomla

1. http://www.olympus.com.au/ - olympus, camera manufacturer's Australian website uses joomla
2. http://www.li.lv/ - official website of the republic of Latvia uses joomla

Drupal

1. http://www.recovery.gov/ - Recovery.org tracking US economic recovery spending
2. http://www.mtv.co.uk/ - MTV UK website

Answer 4

I've used both Joomla and Drupal as well as CakePHP. I haven't tried Kohana for anything extensive but I can say that using a full CMS has huge advantages. Unless you're prepaired for lots of development, you should go for the CMS.

Taking the time to learn a CMS's framework is just the same as learning the PHP Framwork such as CackePHP. However, you don't have the huge amount of extensions such as templates, and full blown apps, as well as integration already done for you.

Both Joomla and Drupal have a huge number of apps (extensions) and templates available that you can model on. PHP Framworks also have extensions, but they are more in the form of libraries or general interfaces, and not distinct applications. This however, has its benefits if you can spend the extra time building the application on top of these libraries.

It pretty much comes down to how much customization you want. If you looking to put more time and customization into it, and I mean months and years here instead of days, then a PHP Framework is better. If you want a solution quickly, with minimal customization, then you should opt for a CMS.

You should also take into account that CMSs are built on top of their own frameworks and a lot of thought has gone into the design. The CMSs however tend to have more specific functionality, and thus this is reflected in the framework. Drupal and Joomla have gone a long way to separate their API from the actual CMS through the years however, and thus you can somewhat built upon them as if they are frameworks. They still don't have the extensiveness of cakePHP framework in programming functionality, and the frameworks are much more slow moving in development, as redevelopment requires changes up along the line in the CMS. Thus you will find new technology slower to be adopted in the core (framework) of Joomla and Drupal, but much faster in CakePHP.