When comparing Joomla! vs Zend Framework, the Slant community recommends Zend Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Zend Framework is ranked 18th while Joomla! is ranked 19th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Highly customizable templates
Joomla allows for heavily customizable templates to be changed from the admin interface without needing to hack.
Pro Powerful and user-friendly admin interface
Admin interface is constantly being iterated on to remove unnecessary legacy features and to streamline the interface. Resulting in a very clean and easy to understand interface that also offers a wide range of options.
Pro More than 8000 extensions
Which can be found here.
Pro Easy to pick up
Pro Great for social networking and commerce sites
Joomla has both a good native support and a great list of extensions that make creating either a social networking or a commerce site easy.
Pro Well architected
Pro Enterprise ready
Zend is the most used PHP framework by big businesses. Zend is widely used and tested by a large number of banks, as well as companies, such as Allied Beverage, BBC, Shaklee, CarinBridge, BNP Paribas and more.
Pro Corporate backing
Partnered with Google, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft
Pro Extended predefined classes
Zend has a large library of predefined classes with which developers can create maintainable and stable web applications. This is done if the developer works within the constraints and with the components of these different predefined classes, which makes the application more maintainable.
Pro Wide database support
Zend supports almost all kinds of databases out there. From MySQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL.
Pro Allows customization
For developpers not used to Zend, they can use a predefined structure and use preloaded components and classes to build and maintain their application. But for advanced developpers, they can customize the structure to stick to their needs (or their likings) and extend primary Zend components for fine-tuned apps or replace the initial predefined Zend components by third parties components such as Doctrine ORM or another logging or templating framework.
Pro Easy to build an API with Apigility
Apigility is a collection of Zend Framework modules. It's useful for building the API architecture of a web app quickly and painlessly by providing a flexible engine.
Apigility also has a web-based UI that allows developers to quickly create and modify API services, configure authentication, set authorization rules, set up validation and write new documents.
Cons
Con Insecure
It's common-place for a Joomla-based website to be defaced, often very quickly. This is most often due to the low quality of extensions.
Con Extensions are scarce, badly maintained & rarely good
If it's not part of the default Joomla installation, quality extensions are rare. Joomla has a extensions library, but it is full of abandoned, dated or bloated components, modules and plugins.
Con Loose documentation
Since Zend has a loosely-coupled architecture, it means that the documentation will be quite loose as well. Even though there's a lot of documentation for the framework, it's still hard to use it as a guideline to create a completed project. Although this can be less of a problem considering all the tutorials and guides out there.