NYCPHP Meetup

[Art Shectman]

I'm about to undertake the buildout of 3 Joomla backed sites, and 1 of them
will involve quite a bit of custom module development.  I'm looking for
experienced Joomla hackers to fill a variety of roles from Senior Developer
to Project Manager, or even just to drink some beers with me and review my
approach and muse about silver bullets that Joomla might have in store for
me.

Please feel free to contact me off list if you are looking for Joomla or PHP
work, or just want to kick the tires on what we're building.

I'd love to kick off a thread of 'Joomla gotchas' from our collective
experiences using Joomla.

I'll start:
Joomla isn't great with REALLY big numbers of pages and/or categories.
Things to look out for:
I was using Joomla 1.0.11 a while back with OpenSEF.  I had a pile of issues
with my site and the time it took for page loads with 20,000+ pages in my
site.  I tracked it down to a faulty design in how the OpenSEF stuff was
loading , caching (or failing to), and rewriting site friendly urls in my
pages.  I posted some bug fixes on the OpenSEF site and I think the problem
as been resolved.  What didn't get resolved, and I'm anxious to check out
the 1.5 stuff to see if it has, is that when you are on the admin side of
things, lots of categories means HUGE drop down lists.  One of my sites had
30K plus categories, and it rendered the admin inoperable as it was trying
to load a category select list of 30K items on a bunch of the admin pages.
One thing that helped my pages load MUCH faster was enabling query caching.
With Joomla, sometimes with all your plugins, and 3rd party modules, you are
using 'sub-optimal' code, and sometimes queries get run repeatedly on a
page, or across a session.  With most sites, where content isn't really
changing that much, turning on query caching in MySQL helped a bunch in
speeding up page load times, especially with very large numbers of pages and
categories.

Thanks for any advice you may have,
Art

Art Shectman
President
Elephant Ventures
Strategic Digital Marketing

art at elephantventures.com
http://www.elephantventures.com
 
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