Getting started with eZ Publish 5 and Symfony

Recently, eZ Systems announced that the next major version of eZ Publish will use the Symfony framework. Having heard good things about Symfony as a modern, robust web framework, I am pretty excited at the announcement, and have already dived in to the new eZ Publish 5 code.

As one of the first steps to becoming part of the Symfony community, I will be representing Mugo at the upcoming Symfony conference in San Francisco on September 27-28. The conference schedule boasts some intriguing presentation topics on security, Solr integration, Symfony components, Composer (a package and dependency management tool), templating, and a lot more! The full schedule is available here.

eZ Systems is a sponsor for the Symfony conference. If you will also be attending, let's connect on the eZ Americas Meetup group! 

In the meantime, I've been getting acquainted with the Symfony framework with and without eZ Publish. There are a few good tutorials out there, such as this remake of a "how to build a job board" tutorial originally written for Symfony 1.x and adapted for Symfony 2.x. I also recommend this "create a blog" tutorial, which is a bit lighter but still goes through many aspects of the framework.

Once you've gotten a little more familiar with Symfony itself, you can explore eZ Publish 5! Detailed installation instructions are available at the root of the eZ Publish 5 GitHub repository. The first eZ Publish 5 release will essentially preserve the eZ Publish 4 "legacy kernel" within Symfony. Therefore, once you have followed the installation instructions, you should be able to view pages served through the Symfony framework but more or less generated by eZ Publish 4.

You can then explore how to manipulate eZ Publish objects in the Symfony environment. Check out this post on fetching an eZ Publish object and displaying its information in your custom bundle; also see this other post focused on migrating a module from the legacy kernel to Symfony. I look forward to building sites with Symfony and contributing to the growing material about it!