Forum Moderators: phranque
I currently have a Joomla site and I will need a load of modifications made to it as I am looking to enhance my site with a photo gallery, "hot property" method of selling animals, paypal integration, newsletter and a bit more.
I imagine this will cost me quite a bit and I know joomla will release a new version which will not be compatible with the old versions in the next few months. Since there is not as much support and plug-ins available for the new version of Joomla, I am wondering if now is a good time to change.
I hear from loads of developers and software engineers that PHP is horrible and I should really go with C# or Ruby on Rails. So far I have not seen any CMS package that can compare to Joomla and make a site that looks like my current site or can provide me the functionality I want.
Do you all know a good CMS alternative to look at? Is there any solid and ready for live Ruby on Rails CMS? What about dotnetnuke - is that really good or just another half-way CMS?
Thanks!
I hear from loads of developers and software engineers that PHP is horrible and I should really go with C# or Ruby on Rails.
PHP is horrible. It's also the most popular server-side scripting language. Go figure.
Developers tend to recommend what they know. The old "I've got a hammer, so everything is a nail" syndrome.
C# and ROR would take you in radically different directions. And I don't know of a popular, free CMS implemented in either.
C# locks you into the Microsoft world. It's fast, but I don't see any particular advantage over Java, which is more portable. Both are complete, rational high-level languages with good run-time compilers, which can give you very near to the same performance as true compiled code.
ROR is based on a wonderfully expressive language - Ruby - which has quite a way to go as far as implementation. That will change somewhat with the release of Ruby 2.0, which will use a bytecode interpreter instead of the current text interpreter. But it will still be way behind other languages in execution speed. (What with even Perl moving toward run-time compilation - if they ever release 6.0!)
I've cast my lot with ROR, as I think it's golden hour will correspond with critical mass for some sites I am developing. But I wouldn't recommend it for most sites today. It's great, though, if you need to do a conceptual demonstration of a site in a hurry.
I am sure that you can find plugins/modules/extensions for Joomla to do the things you want. As a previous poster pointed-out, these apparently will work in the newer version.
