I've been writing and maintaining Jomres as a plugin for Joomla since 2005. Ever since then, especially around 2008-2009 when there were doubts as to the security of both Wordpress and Joomla, I've had plenty of people ask "Why is Jomres a plugin? It's big enough to be a standalone system". Indeed, it is and for a while I offered functionality in Jomres to make it standalone, but when in that format I felt that sites built with it lacked a certain something.

The advantage of running as a plugin of a larger, host CMS (Content Management Systems) comes when you realise that no matter how pretty or functional the booking system is, you'll always want the freedom to add and remove other stuff. Be that slideshows or login forms or adding articles, a CMS always wins. Once you realise that, you realise that other standalone booking systems are themselves hosted within their own, simple CMSs. Those proprietary "CMSs" invariably don't offer a fraction of the functionality and plugins that a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress do.

This is why, whenever I consider making Jomres "Standalone" I eventually abandon the idea. It's happened 8 or 9 times over the years. Somebody will say something ( usually derogatory ) about Joomla or Wordpress and I'll mull it over for a while. I'll have a dig around, looking for a framework that we can adopt, I'll explore it and eventually I'll realise that the disadvantages of using it would outweigh the advantages and I'll drop the idea again.

If you're a bit of a development snob, nothing I can say will change your mind. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that being integrated into a CMS allows my customers to build truly unique sites as the tools available to them are virtually unlimited.

And that's while you're still trying to install that piece of crap you bought from a bunch of developers who're better at design than they are at putting their customers first.