- TODO: will be changed
The Web Platform is the Symfony2 Standard Edition plus a lot more. If you already know Symfony2 then go ahead and read the following lines. If you don't know Symfony2, go to http://symfony.com and find out what Symfony2 is.
This is a small list compared to the amount of code behind it. It should give you a good idea what you can expect.
- Administrator Control Panel
- Style System
- User and Group system
- Language system for user-generated content
- Package system for installing applications/plugins that depend on this platform
- Project system
- you can decide which of the globally installed applications are available for the project
This list of features is only a small subset of what is delivered with the platform. There are many things coming as simple library functionality that is not actively used by the platform.
Another important difference: The Web Platform is an actual application with accessible frontend. It provides some collection pages for the frontend that allow plugins and applications to plug them in and display their stuff.
The Web Platform requires the Symfony2 Standard Edition. It has therefore the same restrictions:
Symfony2 is only supported on PHP 5.3.3 and up.
Be warned that PHP versions before 5.3.8 are known to be buggy and might not work for you:
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before PHP 5.3.4, if you get "Notice: Trying to get property of non-object", you've hit a known PHP bug (see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52083 and https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50027);
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before PHP 5.3.8, if you get an error involving annotations, you've hit a known PHP bug (see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=55156).
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PHP 5.3.16 has a major bug in the Reflection subsystem and is not suitable to run Symfony2 (https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62715)
The best and easiest way to install the Web Application is downloading the bundled archive (TODO: link) which provides a graphical installation process.
This graphical process provides these features
- multilingual installation process (German, English as of now)
- composer.phar already bundled (will be updated with selfupdate)
- unpacking the archive (the download archive contains both installation process files and the source archive; the latter is unpacked here)
- using Composer to install the dependencies (no dev requirements)
- configuration of global database (parameters.yml)
- creating needed contents (user groups, package information, etc.)
- creation of first user (member of admin group which has access to all ROLE_* controlled areas)
- switching to ACP
- cleanup (removing installation files)
- post-install configuration (each bundle can specify steps, the user
is guided through all of them)
- this configuration process is optional and can be skipped
- for beginners it is highly recommended to use this guided process
The final possibility is to install this Web Platform only with Composer. For details on how to do so, refer to the 2martens/web-platform-edition GitHub repository.
The Web Platform extends the functionality of Symfony2. It provides documentation on the platform-wide level (2martens/web-platform-docs plus documentation for each bundle (under Resources/doc). This documentation is limited to the added functionality.
If you are just starting with Symfony2, you should refer to the "Quick Tour" tutorial and then to the official Symfony2 documentation.
The Web Platform is an open source and free software project. We follow mostly the Contributing rules of Symfony2. Therefore you should take a read on the Contributing Code part of the Symfony2 documentation.
For more information refer to the CONTRIBUTING.md file in this repository.
For information on how to run the tests, refer to Testing which contains information on how the tests of the whole library can be run.