Is using Joomla only for Fabrik overkill?

[hominid4]

I've created a company "portal" for one of my clients with Fabrik. It's password protected and not accessible to the public, only their employees and their clients. The whole portal site is built with Fabrik (approx 20 tables/lists), and mainly only uses Joomla's user management and access groups. There's no articles, modules, menus (except to navigate among the Fabrik lists), don't use any other component/extension (stock or 3rd party), the template is bare bones, etc. In short, for this project, I'm using Joomla so that I can use Fabrik.

My question is, if I don't use Joomla for anything else, is there any drawback of having the whole Joomla CMS with all its files and Db tables installed? Is it causing unneeded processing, server resources, etc? I'm thinking about rebuilding the portal in Laravel or Symfony, which first I would have to learn those more in depth than what I've learned so far with them, to have a lighter package but didn't know if I'd be gaining much if I'm comfortable with the Joomla/Fabrik combo.

A standalone Fabrik/Joomla Framework only option would be great

Thanks!

 

[tali]

Joomla CMS + Fabrik is not overkill as long as you uninstall any component, module or plugin not usefull
and unpublish those that still remain but are not used.

 

[cheesegrits]

You summed it up yourself:

I'm thinking about rebuilding the portal in Laravel or Symfony, which first I would have to learn those more in depth than what I've learned so far with them, to have a lighter package but didn't know if I'd be gaining much if I'm comfortable with the Joomla/Fabrik combo.

So it's entirely down to whether you want to go to the time and effort of learning another framework and coding it yourself. Obviously there is an overhead in using J! / Fabrik, but if it's just server resources you are concerned about ... only you can answer that question. Do you expect resource usage to be a problem? Are you expecting enough usage of the portal that your server couldn't keep up? If not, then it's not a problem. If it is, then the tradeoff then becomes how much additional resources you would have to throw at it (CPU, memory, etc) vs how much time and effort to develop it from scratch yourself.

What I usually advise people in this situation is, think of J! / Fabrik as a "rapid prototype". Build the basics and test it. Get a feel for the performance and resource usage. Either it's going to work with enough horsepower on the server, or it's not. If it does, run with it and flesh out the app. If not, you have a working prototype you can use as a functional spec for developing something from scratch.

-- hugh

 

[hominid4]

Thanks Hugh, that makes sense. And love the "rapid prototype" reference, great way to put that. The site, tables, code, etc, are lean and mean so I'm doing good so far on server resources; I was mainly curious if what I was doing didn't make much sense. Although, what got me thinking initially is I just created a "checkpoint" QR codes list where QR code labels will be placed throughout their client's buildings that the employees (they're a security company) will scan every hour (24 hours a day) to enter data about each checkpoint during their rounds, which will be adding quite a bit more submissions throughout the day. I'll stick with my current set up as it is, will continue to monitor the server load, and may revisit recreating it from scratch down the road (in the spare time I never seem to have). Thanks again for the thoughts and clearing things up, I feel better about it; and who knows, I may end up using other J! components in the future and be glad I didn't switch this project away to another PHP framework.