Question

Is it at all practical to try to use Joomla or Drupal to design anything but brochure-ware or a blogging website? Are the modules/extensions frameworks really flexible enough for designing web applications that have a lot of data entry and reporting capabilities, or would you just be better designing it using a MVC framework, ASP.NET or just plain to-the-metal PHP?

Say you want to design a web application that is primarely used for entering in data and reporting on that data. For example: you want to design a website for people that own race horses.

• Primary data entry involves user entering in the
  physical attributes and race records
  for all their horses.

• Reporting is available for finding statistics and other metrics based on the physical attributes and race records for all the horses in the database: the users and what others have entered.

What would be the reasons or benefits of doing this in a CMS?

Answer 1

I do it all the time with a proprietary CMS. I’m sure it’s possible to write any kind of plugin/subsystem for drupal etc.

Benefits:

• Hopefully familiar MVC codebase, you get something out of the door quicker.
• Integration with website for free in case it is needed, since you are already in a CMS environment. Otherwise you’d have to implement basic CMS functionalities on top of your custom web application.
• Dependency with underlying CMS. You benefit from updates such as new features, security fixes, performance optimizations etc.

Drawbacks:

• Carrying the “weight” of the CMS. Maybe it has tables, objects and subsystems that you’ll never use.
• Larger code base. Steeper learning curve for maintainers who now have to understand the CMS and your business logic.
• Dependency with underlying CMS. At least your controllers (and maybe the persistence layer) will be bound to the way the CMS does it. Try to keep your model and business logic independent of the CMS’es MVC framework.