Symphony.

Hi,

So I'm a beginning PHP developer with a decent background in HTML and CSS. I am looking for a CMS that I can use to let clients control their content easily. I would ideally like the backend to be completely editable, in that I can style the backend and basically give the user a form to fill out to create or edit page content. Something like this: where I create the form and then link it to the frontend content.

I also want to be able to have user permissions, where an admin can delete a page, but a regular user can't, so that I can make sure that the design is protected and all they can change is exactly what I want them to change.

Will this CMS work for me? Is there something better out there?

Hey Extreem,

With Symphony you can generally customise the backend as heavily as you need to with extensions, or you can entirely model a new backend as you please using events. Making a(some) front end admin page(s) sounds ideal for the way you want to go.

The members extension should handle what you need as far as granular permissions go, if not there's the Author Roles extension which should do what you're asking for with a little coaxing.

I'd say Symphony is great for a budding PHP developer as long as you're comfortable learning the API and willing to experiment a little. You can essentially add custom PHP to most pages/views using custom events and to the data model using custom datasources.

Extensions should handle most other things although you might want to fork and modify, or write your own from scratch if you can't find the exact functionality you need. Don't worry too much though, the community is very helpful on this front. Learning how to use github effectively will also help you a lot when it comes to developing your own stuff. This is the stage of Symphony I'm just starting to embark on myself after making a few commercial sites with Symphony over the last couple of years.

Hope this helps! Sam

Not sure if this was just an example or actually the project you're working on, but some community members already built some kind of framework for church websites based on Symphony.

Very cool guys. Thanks for the tips.