Derivante

Turning the page — PHP, Symfony, ORM

Written By: Justin Leider
Framework, Web Architecture, Web Technology

I have come to the conclusion that I should be cataloging my work, thoughts, theories and activities for others to read and learn from my experiences as a web engineer. Let me begin by mentioning I work at a company called CitySquares and for the last year I have been working diligently on the current CitySquares site.

This has been a great year for me as I was given the opportunity to learn the inner workings of the Drupal CMS. While Drupal is a great CMS/Framework, it is inherently still a prepackaged CMS designed for things that 99% of the community needs. CitySquares unfortunately falls within that other 1%. I must say that we have accomplished quite a bit using Drupal's community modules in conjunction with our own custom written ones. However, there are plans in the works that we would like to implement but just cant within the Drupal framework.

Although all is not lost. With the current iteration running and stable and gaining traffic every week I have the opportunity to turn the page and begin work on the next phase of development. This is an exciting time and I will use this medium to convey the successes as well as the issues as development here continues.

That said, we have decided to scrap our Drupal based architecture in favor of a more extensible framework, Symfony. Symfony is a PHP based OO architecture that resembles Ruby on Rails. Not only will we gain the benefit of switching to a OO style framework but we will be using Doctrine as our ORM and Smarty as our template engine.

The idea is that this combination of technologies will help us alleviate two of the major problems we have with Drupal, essentially scalability and codability. Ive been toying with some ideas to help eliminate these two thorns in our side that I will discuss at a later time but look forward to hearing my ideas on a full stack horizontal architecture.

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Tags: CMS, codability, Drupal, Framework, horizontal architecture, maintainability, oop, ORM, PHP, scalability, smarty, Symfony