Introduction

Symfony based

Enhavo is based on the fullstack Symfony framework. When we started to create enhavo, Symfony 2.2 was the current release.

We wanted to build our CMS on a good framework, and there are a lot of php frameworks out there. After some research and tests, we decided to build it on top of Symfony, because we liked the modular approach and the awesome dependency injection. So we decided to go on with the Symfony philosophy and build our CMS features as modules, and then build more modules based on the modules we already created.

If you are familiar with Symfony and its structure, you will feel comfortable working on enhavo.

Sylius based

When we say "enhavo is based on Sylius", what we mean is that enhavo is based on the SyliusResourceBundle. If you want to know more about this Bundle, you can read the Sylius documentation.

The SyliusResourceBundle provides a very abstract and powerful CRUD Controller. This frees us from having to implement our own CRUD Controllers in our modules, and we can focus on the models and forms instead. A lot of the configuration is done in the definition of the routes. This makes sense to us, because the route definition is the entry point of every request in the application. It defines the controller action we want use, so why not inject more configuration here and skip the controller completely.

Bring your own domain model

The core functionality of enhavo provides a user interface with a user friendly grid and form. The core doesn't know anything about concrete models. Most of the bundles have no idea how a page or an article look like. Usually those are the classic models a CMS depends on. We have suggestion for the structures of a page and its contents, of course, but you don't need to use those if you don't want to. You can bring your own model instead, and enhavo is helping you to manage it.

We believe that a good CMS should know the model, and not the model should know the CMS. This is a very big difference and has an impact on your whole architecture. For you that means that you can easily switch the CMS, because a lot of the functionality has no dependency to enhavo. This approach is the central statement of domain driven design. Keep your domain away from dependencies that you don't control! You have already isolated your domain? Just bring it to enhavo, again, we provide you a powerfully user interface and functionality that may be useful for you.