Symfony and Content Management

About me

• I'm Jani Tarvainen and I've been making websites for a while
• I work for Exove, we do a lot of CMS work there with WP, Drupal and eZ
• Please stay awake and draw your own conclusions
• Me on Twitter: @velmu
• This event on Twitter: @symfony_fi

Agenda

• What is content management
• Brands and Communities
• A closer look at Symfony and CMSes
  • Bolt
  • Drupal 8
  • eZ Platform
• Content Management in the Future

My Agenda

• I work with (LAMP) content management
• Diversity is good
  • I should do more things outside of LAMP
• Routine is good...
  • ...but repeating is for robots
• PHP CMSes have strong product communities
• Try different things to gain perspective

What is Content Management

• A commodity
• Bulk of web development
• Easy to get started with
  • Working with CMS
• Hard to Master
  • Building a CMS
• Boring, but enables exciting things

Brands and Communities

• North America of Content Management
  • Elsewhere there be dragons
  • Parallel dimensions outside of LAMP
• To be a viable option, you need to be known... and used!
• Pure technical excellence is worth nothing
• To me Symfony is above all, a strong Brand
  • Genuinely high quality, trusted, widespread...

About developers

• Developers gonna
  • face the same basic problems
  • do it themselves, because they can do it right
  • have to keep learning new mad skillz
• PHP has reached the maturity level where code sharing is easy
  • developers learned to share

Meanwhile in China...

1. What's the #1 Search in China?
2. What's the #1 Forum software in China?
3. What's the #1 Microblogging site in China?
4. What's the #1 CMS in China?

Meanwhile in China...

1. Baidu
2. Discuz!
3. Sina Weibo
4. DedeCMS

Symfony can be your US Dollar in the LAMP CMS world; A universally accepted currency

• I would like a bottle of water
• That will be 4 eZ Francs, please
• Do you accept Drupal Kronor? I've got 7
• Sacrebleu! eZ Francs ONLY!
• How about 2 Symfony Bucks?
• I'm sure we can figure something out...

Symfony and Content Management

• Symfony in it's different forms are everywhere
  • as Components, Silex, Full Stack
  • in CMSes: Drupal, eZ, Bolt, Concrete 5, Pagekit...
• Symfony is technically capable
• Symfony did not invent / is not
  • YAML, Twig, Console, Composer, modern PHP...

A closer look at Symfony and CMSes

• Bolt CMS (hobby experience)
  • A CMS built from Scratch on Silex
• Drupal 8 (hobby experience)
  • Uses Symfony Components for key functionalities
• eZ Platform (work experience)
  • Built on Symfony 2 Framework

Bolt CMS

• https://github.com/bolt/bolt
• Installation
• Quick look at templates
• Config

Drupal 8

• https://www.drupal.org/drupal-8.0
• Quick look at internals
• Importing / Exporting configurations with YAML
• Twig templates

eZ Platform

• https://github.com/ezsystems/ezplatform
• Content, User and Media management for Symfony2
• Site configuration and mapping
• Proven multilingual concepts
• Integrated Solr search
• Semantic content model

eZ Platform features

• Integrates with Symfony2 user sessions
  • Use same session for CMS and Apps
• Language mapping
  • www.site.fi to fin-FI (fi)
  • www.site.no to nor-NO (no)
• Extendable REST API
• Pluggable storage
• Integrate functionality with separate models

eZ Platform, key bundles

• Doctrine DBAL for DB abstraction
• Flysystem for file storage to local, AWS, etc.
• Stash for Caching with Redis, Memcached
• FOSHttpCache for cache tagging, etc. for Varnish
• Liip Imagine for image manipulation

Same skillz, different tools

• Bolt, Drupal 8, eZ Platform all share
  • HttpKernel
  • Twig templates
  • YAML configs...
• Recycle your skills from blog to a clustered personalised news portal
• Don't forget to keep learning and looking for the best option! :)

Content Management in the Future

• A melting pot of content feeds?
• Automatic personalization? Algorithm decides what _you_ see?
• Content Repositories?
  • JCR is NoSQL, rising but not significant yet
• A full front end CMS?
  • All logic in client, only persistence via server
  • You can ever only really trust the server
  • Is it any better? Is it what things just "will be"?

Graph Databases in Content Management?

• Graph DBs Rising in popularity, mainstream for some use-cases
• Neo4j was created for a CMS
• GraphQL from Facebook
• Can give you an alternative view to your data, but won't turn your bad content to gold
• Learn more tomorrow at "Thinking in Graphs" at Fraktio HQ

Links

• Symfony and Content Management: Comparing Bolt, Drupal 8 and eZ
• Prototyping Web Apps with Structr and Neo4j
• Symfony has no model, but many
• eZ Platform and a Graph Database?
• GraphQL is SQL for Knowledge, not Data
• Thinking in Graphs video stream
• Learn Symfony with Silex, the Demo App and the Best Practices Book
• The Worst Programming Language Ever

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