Joomla versus CodeIgniter/YII

Question

A partner has a website that needs to be rebuild from scratch as it simply can't cope with the large number of visitors (currently build using SilverStripe). The site should be able to deal with 5 million or more members using 20+ languages.

We were considering using CodeIgniter or YII because from research both appear to be excellent performers. However several people advised that we should consider the latest version of Joomla for this. For small websites we are happy to use Joomla but for a heavy load website our feeling says that we have to stay away from that. We are however not able to find any comparison between both from a performance point of view but we do require good arguments why Joomla would or would not at all be a good candidate for this. One comparison can be found here: http://vschart.com/compare/yii/vs/joomla/vs/codeigniter however this doens't tell me what to expect when the number of visitors is really high.

Can some advise how Joomla compares to CodeIngitor or YII considering that the site will receive a very high number of vistors and will use a 20+ languages (for silverstripe we build a translator module as the build in CMS was not usefull when using so many translators).

Answer 1

When you're dealing with a site of that scale, it's probably best not to shift to Joomla. Joomla can handle a fair bit, but I'd suggest that it would be far easier to have a Joomla site that large when the site has been adapting as the traffic increases.

Part of what makes your question hard to answer is that we don't know much about what your current site does.

• Is it mainly a CMS? If so, Drupal may be a decent fit for you.

• Is it a custom web application? It sounds like it could be, based on the number of translations you're handling.

• Is it somewhere in-between? This could also be what you're dealing with.

If you're looking at either of the bottom two options, yes, shifting away from SilverStripe (but not to Joomla) sounds like it might be a good thing.

Given the volume of traffic you're dealing with, it sounds like you probably already have a revenue stream and a development team. In that case, it might be worth having a few of your developers play with CodeIgniter and Yii and see what they think.

I wrote up a detailed answer to a question about what type of framework to choose a while ago, which you can look over here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10095906/yii-or-zend-or-other-frameworks-under-the-following-requirements/10115678#10115678

I'm a Yii fan, having checked out a bunch of other frameworks. Regardless of which framework you use, I'd like to offer one piece of advice that I've found key on all projects I've worked on.

You want to work with objects, not data arrays

The reason for the above is that your models (and the objects they produce) can end up having your business logic built into them. Doing this makes life far, far easier in the long run. A great book on the subject, aimed at manager's and quite high-level (there is no code, although there might be a few lines of psuedo-code), is Object Technology: A Manager's Guide. I'd highly recommend it.

Framework thoughts

CakePHP

I started dabbling with CakePHP until I found out it didn't hand back objects (just arrays), at which point I ran screaming.

CodeIgniter

Looking at what CodeIgniter has for database model support, I think you would quickly hit its limitations with a site of your size, so would recommend against it. And having EllisLabs deciding to leave CodeIgniter behind (see their website for more details) is not a good sign. The signs say stay away.

Of the PHP frameworks out there, these are the ones I hear the most things about:

• Symfony 2
• Yii (disclosure: I work with this one daily)
• Laravel

Symfony

From what I can see of it, has been a huge stimulus to the PHP community and many best practices have come out of that community. Unit testing, Composer, pushes for PSR-1/2, the ideal of modularity of code (some of their core code is ending up in Drupal 8) are all great things that have spurred the PHP community into writing code that's better than spaghetti code. With that said, it feels kind of heavy and enterprise-y and looked to have a pretty heavy learning curve.

Yii

When I was looking for a framework, I had a lot of legacy code that needed migration. Yii's way of handling things, although opinionated at times, has done a lot for me as far as exposing me to good practices that are used heavily on the web. Highly recommended as well.

Laravel

When I was looking for a framework (2+ years ago), Laravel didn't exist. It's apparently quite slick and cutting edge (haven't looked at it yet, I've been busy landing new work regularly in the Yii world), but I am interested in dabbling with it. That said, here's a thoughtful article about Laravel and couple of considerations that I've wondered about.

1. The main developer, Taylor Ortwell, seemed to be a dominant force. That's a great thing while he's making money doing this and enjoying it. Not sure what would happen to the framework if he decided to do something else.

2. The speed of development on the framework is an awesome thing and means that all sorts of creative juices are flowing. It's a great place to go look at cool new things. That said, you're going to want your developers to be able to easily find information about the framework they're working with, which in 3-6 months may be severely out of date in the Laravel community. The Ruby on Rails community has the same type of good/bad problem when I've looked around over there; there is so much information about the new stuff that sometimes it's hard to find information about the version of the framework you're dealing with.

That said, there are lots of cool choices out there :-) I should probably wrap up, as this has gone on far longer than I'd intended. Let us know what you end up deciding and how it ends up going.

Answer 2

How big is the site really? Bigger than joomla.org?

Are you talking about big in terms of the amount of content in the database or in terms of the number of visitors.
Joomla really does not have problems with scale unless you are on an older version of MySQL in which case it slows down.

Answer 3

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

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CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.

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Yii is a free, open-source Web application development framework written in PHP5 that promotes clean, DRY design and encourages rapid development. It works to streamline your application development and helps to ensure an extremely efficient, extensible, and maintainable end product.

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Joomla can't compare with CodeIgniter / Yii. But, If you need any CMS for your project, you can use Joomla (or maybe Wordpress). If you want to create any web application, then you need to decide for any PHP Framework. I use CodeIgniter for years, and I like it. They have a huge community, and the best user guide. Yii also has a great community and a lot of features. So, you can decide depending on you demand.

Answer 4

Well it's like compare green and salty. Really joomla is CMS, and Yii and CI are frameworks. If you considering make highload on joomla - it's not your job. If you have high frontend load - maybe watch on js frameworks? Yii+backbone.js or ext.js for frontend is awesome, since you'll move alot to clientside. CI is dead. I honestly like it, but its dead already. No extensions, no namespaces in future, nothing. I can say + of Yii:

*faster then CI;

*have great documentation and wiki articles;

*have great and active community and developers;

What else i can add? Active record is good for small databases, but not usable for highloads. Also as i said on yii you can easily make js framework+yii composition. Yii have good caching system. Long time support of stable versions.

I personally manage highload now, but its more backend/api/database. 150+ thousands database records daily, 300+ thousands requests to api, 50 milions records data table. It works like a clock for more then 2 months already.

Choose what you like, or write on native php if its really big system - best choice from practice.

Answer 5

It depends on what kind of application you want. If you want a CMS, Joomla is the way to go. Because this is what it was build for. If you are about to create a real "custom" application Yii/Codeigniter is the way to go. (This is what yii was build for)

Regarding performance, from my expericnece Yii is a lot faster, because it comes with way less overhead. You can build the application just as you need it.