Custom PHP vs PHP and Joomla

What's the best way to build a new social media site that will be sold B2B? My company is a b2b social media company. We've Been trying to determine if we should build from开发者_如何学Go scratch or leverage Joomla.

We have 3 months before our first customers will deploy.

We have received lots of varying suggestions, it seems to be a "religious" debate.

Our platforms contains both standard as well as unique features. It is critical the themeing can be quickly and easily changed regularly. It is a SaaS.

Users will not be extremely savvy, there for the UI must be intuitive, simple and easy to use.

So, is it JOOMLA and PHP? or PHP from scratch?

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3 months? Unless you have a VERY capable team that can crank out bugfree code, you're building on something else. Like syrion mentioned, coding a good CMS is not as easy as it seems. Sure, anyone could put something basic together in couple of days or ever a few hours with the right framework, but doing it right and making it scalable is a whole different story.

Joomla has its issues as does every other open source project out there. However, Joomla also has 2 very important advantages when it comes to SaaS - first, the admin is fairly easy to understand for non-tech people. Not quite as simple as Wordpress, but much more powerful. Much easier to teach than Drupal, your clients will not need to grok nodes or taxonomy. Second, Joomla was written specifically to be extended. templating is a breeze as is extension development. Their MVC is a little different but not hard to grasp. If you have decent programmers they will be able to make Joomla do anything.

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Please dear god if you have the choice, don't start from Joomla. You will be much better served by picking a framework like CakePHP, Symfony or CodeIgniter. The MVC model in Joomla is essentially wrong (views pull directly from the database? yuck) and there is so much legacy code and simply bad code that your developers will end up throwing out and rewriting most of what Joomla comes with. I should know, that's what I have been doing for the past few months at work.

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Joomla bundled with community builder is a viable option.