Joomla! VS Next.js

Joomla! is one of popular PHP content management systems (aka CMS). It is good for portal-like websites as well as blogging platforms. The first version was released in 2005 and, after long progress, the latest major one was done two years ago (on 2021-08-17).

CMSs have long been the backbone of digital content creation and delivery. Traditional CMS platforms, including open-source solutions like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, have been popular due to their ease of use and integration of content creation and presentation.

This post will be discussing a cutting-edge concept known as a Headless Visual CMS, or Headless Visual Content Management System. This is not your ordinary CMS; we are not referring to platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Sanity.io, Contentful, or anything like that. Instead, we're talking about a fusion of the best headless CMS features and the simplicity of site builders like Wix or Squarespace.

Website: https://www.joomla.org/

To help illustrate my point, here's a short rendition of my personal career trajectory. I started out studying Marine Biology. Then taught ESL. Then worked in non-profits in Mexico and Central America. Then became really interested in building online businesses to related to the travel industry. So while living in a small jungle community in Honduras, I decided to teach myself how to make websites. I chose PHP as my first programming language to learn (with CSS and HTML) using the Joomla framework. Living in a small town, which just received dialup internet and lacked running water, I wasn't exactly in tech-hub. But I dedicated the hours and spent many long days (and nights) wrestling with the concepts of a CMS, learning CSS (for IE6 no less) and figuring out how to make a really ugly website. Then an amazing thing happened. Word got out in the town I was living in that I knew how to make websites, and suddenly owner of the internet cafe I had been living at for the past 4 weeks asked me to make them a website. So I did! Then they referred me to others in the town who needed websites and soon I had a side hustle that was allowing me to learn and earn at the same time.

1. Joomla

Content/learning management systems, such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento and Moodle are fullstack web applications that you can configure and customize for course websites, blogs and e-commerce. Many if not all of these options are popular and open source.

You are complaining that the oldest PR (https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/21775) is 4 years old but you didn't talk about the very important truth you already know: it was a code dump, the contributor showed zero interest in making any improvements from the time they made the PR. Nobody can merge it if it's not worked on and as you can see the leadership DID ask the contributor in January if he's interested in addressing the problems. Zero feedback since.

Next.js has long cemented itself as one of the front runners in the web framework world for JavaScript/TypeScript projects so we’re going to be using that. More specifically we’re going to be using V14 of Next.js which allows us to use some exciting new features like Server Actions and the App Router.

Web frameworks like Next.js will usually include this feature, but do check that they set the caching headers correctly!

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

> It’s important to be aware of what you are getting if you go with React, and what you are getting is a far cry from what a framework would offer, with all the corresponding pros and cons.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

In my experience, with something as great, size/ecosystem-wise as React, there will almost always be at least one "mainstream" package for whatever you might want to do with it, that integrates pretty well. Where a lot of things might come out of the box with a framework, with a library I often find myself just needing to install the "right" package, and from there it's pretty much the same.

For example, using https://angular.io/guide/i18n-overview or installing and using https://react.i18next.com/

Or something like https://angular.io/guide/form-validation out of the box, vs installing and using https://formik.org/

Or perhaps https://angular.io/guide/router vs https://reactrouter.com/en/main

Even adding something that's not there out of the box is pretty much the same, like https://primeng.org/ or https://primereact.org/

React will typically have more fragmentation and therefore also choice, but I don't see those two experiences as that different. Updates and version management/supply chain will inevitably be more of a mess with the library, admittedly.

Now, projects like Next https://nextjs.org/ exist and add what some might regard as the missing pieces and work well if you want something opinionated and with lots of features out of the box, but a lot of those features (like SSR) are actually pretty advanced and not always even necessary.

Next.js: For the website and the admin dashboard

Until the time of writing, there is no official example of how to enable runtime environmental variables in a Dockerized Next.js app, as utilizing unstable_noStore would only dynamically evaluate variables on the server (node.js runtime). There is also an interesting discussion regarding this topic on GitHub.

next.js is a very popular React framework. remix-adonisjs includes more functionality through the AdonisJS backend ecosystem, and should be easier to self-host and self-manage.

Cheryl Murphy is not only a dedicated full-stack web developer skilled in technologies like React, Next.js, and NestJs but also a community-driven professional who recently took on the role of volunteer project team lead at Web Dev Path. With a dual Bachelor's degree in Computing and Chemical Engineering from Monash University, Cheryl’s journey in tech is marked by a passion for building accessible solutions and a commitment to fostering community within tech.

For more information, check out this issue.

Remember to start the Next.js server with pnpm dev.