Ive had to use Joomla in the past, and I agree with you. I hated it. A CMS is good to get you kick started, after all who wants to build another boring login s

Ive had to use Joomla in the past, and I agree with you. I hated it. A CMS is good to get you kick started, after all who wants to build another boring login script? But if you are serious about your app, I think you have to roll your own. Simply because with any set of code provided for general use, it will never fit perfectly to your needs. And I think it is that extra bit of perfection, the 'icing on the cake' that makes your app special and stand out. It is much harder to accomplish that using someone else's code than writing your own specifically for your own purposes. Cal Henderson in his excellent book 'Building Scalable Websites' mentions writing his own file transfer protocol for a middle-ware file storage system. His reason was that it was custom made for Flickr's needs and thus was faster than anything available. A quote I heard somewhere about Catering Fake, when asked what tools she recommended to build a web app, she responded 'PHP' (in other words, she suggested using no tools, and to build your own).