Implementing a Symfony Based CMS in a Publishing Company

Implementing a Symfony-based CMS System Marcos Labad

about me & this talk ● Since 1998 in the Internet Industry (Kelkoo, Yahoo!, BuyVIP) ● Technology and Internet passionate ● Founder of Acilia Internet, Spanish development company based on Madrid This talk is about real experiences and recommendations

contents ● Project plan: Before hands on starts ● Why Symfony and Doctrine ● Choosing the right partners for usability and design ● Techniques and CMS features to evaluate ● Maintenance and final delivery

project plan ● Imagine the moment of delivery and plan backwards – examine every piece ● Designate stakeholders ● Open communication channels, recurrent follow-up ● Tests beginning the first day Tools like Symfony helps you to predict project timings and efforts dramatically. The more projects you develop, the more accurate you'll be.

project plan ● Project management is people management and organization ● Trained and experienced people performs > x10 more

project success 5% People (55%) Communication (40%) 40% Other (5%) 55% Luck (0%)

why Symfony ● Very active development and support ● Learning curve but really good documentation ● Big Growing Community ● One of the most complete PHP Framework ● Admin generator: Rocks! ● Form framework: Rocks!

why Symfony ● For the final project owner: easy maintenance and support ● Product based on good practices and design patterns: lower risk ● For the development company: reusable developments / development intelligence. ● For the development company: easy to integrate new engineers to the project

why Doctrine ● Hard choice, we used Propel in the past ● Great documentation. ● Our perception: more activity, community support

why PHP ● Used on most of the high traffic websites (Facebook, Yahoo!, Wikipedia) ● Easy to learn, easy to use (Scripting language) ● Nifty vs. tedious languages ● #1 language on the web ● Years of experience and tools If you reach the point where PHP is the performance bottleneck, ● Performance? congratulations: You have a Grade A application faster than 99% webs over the Internet

why not Joomla or Drupal ● If the project has some complexity or somewhat specific features, you'll problably have to dismantle it ● Not optimal for specific data models ● Fast to implement and install. Really hard (or impossible) to customize and maintain ● It has also a learning curve You'll face the question: Yes, but whitehose.gov is made on Drupal!! Whitehouse.gov is a simple project, with common data models

Usability and Design ● Jobeet Chapter 2 - “The project” is great and seems simple, but it is not that simple. ● Reaching a simple mock-up requires quite a lot effort and needs all stakeholders input. ● You should plan this stage carefully

Simple search or advanced search? Unique RSS Feed How will the or RSS feed per results look like? category? How many categories will be Who can post a displayed? job What are the How many results fields needed? should we display Is there any ad Can we sort by? space? How do we manage it?

Usability and Design ● You will have to face many confronted interest in your client (editors want a good backend, product developers a cool front-end with no ads, business people a big ad space, CEOs a cheap and good quality website...) ● UX and Design professionals are out there. Partner with them! You will save time (and health)

Usability and Design ● A great application can be seen as poor because of a wrong graphic design ● A poor application can be seen as great with a good graphic design

CMS Features ● One of the first questions is what to manage. ● Every piece can live without the “administration” software ● The more management, the more complexity

CMS Models Classification ● Content (Articles, Videos, Images, Galleries...) ● Templates (Probably the most complex part) ● Users & Community (Frontpage, Backend, Permissions)

Data ● Data Model ● Do we have data to import? ● Tasks – Initial load. Incremental load ● 301 redirects from old urls to new urls (Important)

Backend ● Intensive use of admin generator ● Fast for models management ● Look for solutions for objects relationships – Pop-ups – Lightbox Extesions of sfWidgetForm Class – JQuery plugins

Shared Characteristics - Behaviours ● Doctrine Behaviours will help to build shared characteristics for models – Visible – Commentable – Tagable – Navigation Related – Attributable – ...

CMS Models - Navigation ● Navigation is the central taxonomy column in the CMS system ● Nested set – Multiple roots ● Content and Template models are related to it

CMS Models - Domains ● CMS accepting multiple sites ● Content can be asociated to multiple domains, but must have a main domain ● Decision: Multiple categories ?

CMS Models - Articles ● Texts with several images (or other objects) associated ● Cover Image – Representative image ● Creation time, Publish time ● Multiple templates system ● Virtual fields vs. Real fields ● Inspired in Radius - Radiant CMS (http://radiantcms.org/) and Liquid - macro language, similar to HTML ● YAML

Multi-template Articles Template (Backend) Article (Backend) Article (Frontend) * Gets template and * Renders the * Skeleton fo the final ask for necessary content, based on layout. It contains the information. the template and the HTML + tag based template engine + * Generates Form = data stored in the backend. syntax Widgets. * Virtual fields - YAML Designers / Front-end engineers Editors

Article Multi-template system Template Example <div class="post_content"> <div class="photo_container"> <snippet:showImage config: { name: vertical_image } > <?php echo $record->tag (236,356) ?> <ul class="options_pics"> <li class="full"><a href="<?php echo $record->url(350,450) ?>" rel="facebox">full picture</a></li> <li class="author"><p><?php echo $record->caption ?><br /> <b> <?php echo $record->copy_right ?></b></p></li> </ul> </snippet:showImage> <blockquote> <span></span><br /><snippet:fieldText config: { name: quote } /></blockquote> </div>

YAML Storage vertical_image: id: '190784' quote: 'Zara to land in India in 2010' main_text: Text: " Zara group is opening new stores in India, starting with a major shop in Delhi, .....”

CMS Models -Images ● Elements (name, file, width, height...) ● Resize on demand (GD, Imagemagick) ● Storage – CDN – Custom server optimized (lighthttpd, cherokee...) – Every server (Rsync sycronization, reverse proxy)

Original Image Thumbnail with Gravity Top Thumbnail without Gravity

Template Management - Navigation ● Ability to manage and automate layouts, templates and modules: not only a template language. ● Layouts (decorators) and templates are associated to a navigation points ● Hierarchical Inheritance ● Backend controls template system

Template Management - Navigation Template (Backend) Template Configuration Page (Frontend) (Backend) * Renders the * Skeleton fo the final * Gets template and ask content, based on layout. It contains the for necessary the template and the HTML + tag based template engine + information. = data stored in the backend. syntax * Generates Form Widgets. * Virtual fields. Designers / Front-end engineers Editors

Template Management Template Example <ul class="home_links"> <li> <ul> <snippet:eachArticle config: { name: enlace_articulo_moda }> <li><a href="<?php echo $record->url ?>"> <?php echo $record->getTitle() ?> </a></li> </snippet:eachArticle> </ul> <p><a href="/moda"> ver todas las noticias de 'moda'</a></p> </li> <li>

Template Configuration

Other Features and tools ● User Management and permissions (sfGuardUser) ● Comments Moderation ● Custom data models (sport standings, real state listings...) ● Sphinx search ● External Feeds ● Git

Infraestructure Web Users Internet Load Balancer Web Server 1 Web Server 2 Multiservice Backend Write Queries Read Queries Master DB Slave DB

Performance $timer = sfTimerManager::getTimer('myTimer'); // Do things ● Symfony timer ... // Stop the timer and add the elapsed time $timer->addTime(); // Get the result (and stop the timer if not already stopped) $elapsedTime = $timer->getElapsedTime(); ● Routing cache in versions 1.2.x

Performance ● Doctrine Query and Results cache ● Control Hydrations Cache Manager ● Symfony View Cache Load Testing ● Memcached

delivery and acceptance ● Maintenance is another topic, will the final customer/users need it. ● Identify what to maintain from the beginning (infraestructure, templating, design...) ● Many times, you'll find yourself maintaining not being able to leave the project! Plan acceptance

Some Clients feedback ● “I expected bugs!! Where are they?” (Or where are they in the planification?) ● “I expected a traffic drop. It is increasing since first day!!” ● “Symfony is slow? My site is fast!!” - Many times performance issues are not in the framework or language (PHP) itself.

That's the Symfony Way

Thanks! reach me @ my company: http://www.acilia.es blog: http://www.quevidaesta.com twitter: http://twitter.com/esmiz mail: marcos@acilia.es

http://acilia.es	564
http://symfony.com	173
http://www.symfony-project.org	155
http://www.quevidaesta.com	149
http://swik.net	74
http://www.slideshare.net	58
http://www.phphatesme.com	36
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	2
http://pt.minichiello.name	2
http://www.sfexception.com	2
http://blog.hemu.us	2
http://www.symfolive.com	1
http://feeds.feedburner.com	1
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Implementing a Symfony Based CMS in a Publishing Company

by Marcos Labad on Feb 18, 2010

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Implementing a Symfony Based CMS in a Publishing Company — Presentation Transcript