Joomla capabilities for content authoring

Question

I am busy with an enterprise systems development project that needs a content management component.

I have three main requirements:

• Allow admin user to configure specific landing pages, and render these for distribution to a CDN (like Amazon Cloudfront), or an online storage mechanism (like Amazon S3)
• Programatically add images to the CMS, for distribution to and usage from a CDN
• Have some pieces of page in a .NET MVC website where admin users can change the contents on that page, without requiring changes to the code to roll out new content

Can I use Joomla to achieve these three goals? What extensions should I look at?

Answer 1

The short answer is "Yes", mostly because technically you can build systems for all of your tasks on top of Joomla. The better question though is should you build these things on Joomla. And my answer to that is "probably not".

One of the biggest benefits to working with Joomla (at least in my experience) is the plethora of existing components that you can utilize to complete tasks without having to code. And more importantly, these components have already been tested at least to a degree, so they are likely to be more robust and less buggy than new code that you write.

While all of the things you list can be done in Joomla, I don't see anything that matches with how most people use Joomla. It looks like you want a piece of the admin interface (maybe) but none of the front-end display. This means that you will likely not find prebuilt pieces to fit your needs and will build a lot of this from scratch. And honestly, if you're going to build from scratch, your best bet is to build it in the language and framework that you know. (Which for me and others here, is Joomla, so we would build it in Joomla. If that is true for you, do the same).

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As an aside, I would recommend taking a look at the Joomla Framework (http://framework.joomla.org/). With this, you won't have a prebuilt CMS with an admin side and such. So you do end up building every piece you need, but the framework provides the structure for many of the base pieces (application, models, views, controllers, routers, etc.)

The framework also utilizes Composer (https://getcomposer.org/) and Packagist (https://packagist.org/), which allow you to pull in other packages into your application easily. I've used this to include, for example, the AWS SDK, which it looks like you will need.

You can also use Composer and Packagist without the framework, so you still aren't really locked in to Joomla to get this done.

Answer 2

Joomla can do all those things, but because it appears to be highly specialized, you will almost certainly have to do some custom coding. There are hundreds of extensions that could do part of what you're doing, so it become a case of determining which Extension comes closest, and what custom code you'd have to add.

We use jQuery to create customized UI's for content editing, then a series of PHP scripts to trade all the info between systems, servers, and databases.