Unexpectedly we’ve figured out that there are at least 4 big symfony CMS frameworks (honestly until now we’ve heard only about Diem and Sympal). We are going to consider here specifically only CMS frameworks b/c there is also whole bunch of symfony CMS plugins: sfSimpleCMSPlugin, sfDynamicCMSPlugin, sfW3studioCmsPlugin, etc.
Basically symfony CMS framework is not really new framework but it is rather bunch of CMS related plugins on top of symfony framework (they include e.g. plugins to modify content, add comments, generate SEO friendly URLs, other content-related tasks).
In fact each such symfony CMS framework worth separate article but for now we just want to provide some basic overview, so here are ours players:
First of all it’s worth to mention that only SteerCMS is Propel-oriented, other 3 requires Doctrine. Also Diem, Sympal and SteerCMS provides not only actual CMS features but additionally extra functionality like email messaging, caching, commenting, internal search engine, etc. Apostrophe looks pretty young and it still needs more work to become really comparable to other 3 CMS frameworks (it still can be used as good light weighted alternative which you can embed into your existing project).
So we prepared this quick comparison matrix and planning to keep extending it as soon as we will figure out anything else we missed here. It’s also very welcome to put in comments anything which you think worth to add to this matrix:
| Diem | Sympal | SteerCMS | Apostrophe | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ORM | Doctrine | Doctrine | Propel | Doctrine |
| Internal Search | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Slots/Inline editing | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Blog | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Commenting | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Menu | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Breadcrumb | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Extra Cache | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Versioning | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Command Line | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Custom Features | Multi sites mgmt | Engine modules |
By the way, when we create this matrix we were inspired by another one provided on Sympal’s site which compares Sympal to other CMSs (e.g. Joomla and Typo3).
We are also sorry in advance if we made mistake regarding any feature of provided CMS, we are promise to fix it it happened.
To Symfonians!
* updated comparison matrix (03/15/2010)