Comments on: Apostrophe: An outstanding Symfony CMS with no backend

By: Tom Boutell

Tom Boutell — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:53:07 +0000

Adam, we accept patches to improve translation coverage. Please attach your patch to a ticket on trac.apostrophenow.org. Thanks!

By: Adam Te

Adam Te — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:52:08 +0000

Language support is in fact awful due to its underdevelopment. I had to spend much time to translate every part of it. In many templates phrases that should be translated are not surrounded by translation function. Besides, Apostrophe is a great piece of software!

By: Geoff DiMasi

Geoff DiMasi — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 21:29:07 +0000

Aaron, your description of “handy in a more light-weight web app” is a common misconception. As the designers and developers of Apostrophe, we use it on all of our client work and that includes some large and complex sites.

By the way, we recently released Apostrophe 1.5 so it is worth checking that out:
http://window.punkave.com/2011/01/18/apostrophe-1-5-released/

By: kris

kris — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:19:19 +0000

robert, would you mind sharing your layout.php for the demo site? im having some difficulties leaving out the subnav for pages that dont have subpages …

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 04:53:03 +0000

I’ve played with both, and I think it really just depends on the application which one might work better.

One thing to clear up is Diem does have version control, just wanted to make sure there wasn’t any misinformation there.

Based on my experience, I can see apostrophe very handy in a more “light-weight” web app. If you’re putting together a brochure site, apostrophe is pretty slick and VERY easy for an end user to administrate.

I’ll admit, Diem took more time for me to wrap my head around, but once I did, it is WAY more powerful. You can put in custom layouts, etc., but you probably need some experience with the framework and should be a solid symfony developer. In addition, if you’re going to create any sort of “hybrid” app that needs both data manipulation and CMS functionality, this is where Diem would definitely be the right choice.

Personally, now that I’ve used Diem, I use it on all but the most simple projects. Apostrophe can get you there for most simple sites, but Diem is packed with features and backend tools that are worth taking the time to learn (imo of course).

Can’t go wrong with either if you know Symfony well because you can always extend what’s “missing” out of the box to customize your app regardless of which CMS/CMF you choose.

By: Sid

Sid — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:14:52 +0000

I’ve used Apostrophenow since it was sfContextCMS, and I’ve played around with Diem a few times.

Diem certainly has lots of initial wow factors, but I find Apostrophenow is better (at the moment) for several reasons:

- Easier to create custom layout. I just couldn’t figure out how to use my own custom layout with Diem. Apo comes with default ones that can be copied and modified.

- Easier to integrate custom actions. I have no idea how to do this in diem. I did struggle a bit on this with Apo at first, but the documentation was there.

- Slot history. Not sure but I think Diem does not support any edit history. If you make mistake, then that’s it, can’t undo.

- Closer to Symfony. Diem feels like a layer on top of Symfony.

Having said that, Diem is a VERY promising project and will check it again later.

By the way, svnforeigncopy way is great! It’s real fast to setup new project, so it’s worth spending time to learn it.

By: Robert Speer

Robert Speer — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 22:41:38 +0000

I do not, I’m looking forward to them as well. I tried out the blog plugin in it’s unfinished state and it was still pretty rough. I suspect it will be announced on the google group when it’s ready.

If you’re feeling like playing with unfinished code you can check it out from the symfony svn repo. However based off input from Tom Boutell check out the trunk version, although this may have changed in the week or so since I tried it.

Thanks for the feedback

By: Sean Villani

Sean Villani — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 22:24:58 +0000

Do you know when will the blog and form builder plugins will be up and running? The links you’ve provided have no info on it.

Thanks for the great article!

By: Closer To The Ideal » Blog Archive » Is Apostrophe the best CMS written in PHP?

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:03:54 +0000

[...] Robert Speer has a great write up of Apostrophe: Apostrophe is the easiest to use content management system (CMS) available to the open source community. An easy CMS means that content managers are more likely to use it, which means consumers will get better information and be more likely to follow the sites profit funnel. [...]

By: Robert Speer: Apostrophe is my new favorite CMS | Symfony Experts

Robert Speer: Apostrophe is my new favorite CMS | Symfony Experts — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:36:02 +0000

[...] Robert Speer has a write up about the Apostrophe CMS, which runs on top of Symfony. Anyone who is building CMSs with Symfony should take a look at Speer’s article: So what makes Apostrophe so special? [...]