CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm not sure which forum is most appropriate, so I'll try here and see if it gets moved.

My organization's website is in Joomla 1.0.15 (and CiviCRM 2.04).  I am sure there are plenty of arguments for why Joomla 1.5 or even Drupal would be better overall, but I have done extensive custom component work to facilitate core operations for our org and its working well for us right now.  "Updgrading" to Joomla 1.5 is really not upgrading, but migrating.  I would have to re-write all the custom work I've done to fit the new architecture.  So I plan to keep our website as is for now.

Yet, I do want to keep moving with CiviCRM and now I find that we are at an impasse because the Joomla-CiviCRM version 2.1+ requires Joomla 1.5.  So I am wondering what the feedback would be on the idea of just pulling CiviCRM out of Joomla and keeping it standalone.  I do not use any CiviCRM front-end stuff.  My front-end interaction with CiviCRM is all done through the API from my custom components.

What are the pros/cons of the standalone version?  Is the DB schema any different?  Is the API different?  Has anyone done this before?

Thanks for the reply, Dave. 

I try to use the v2 API's where I can (the only exception I can find is the UFGroup API, which isn't in v2 that I see.)  I guess I would just need to figure out a new way to link the Joomla user account to the CRM contact as I use it to enable the editing of the full user profile (Joomla account + CiviCRM contact info).