As some of you may have noticed, the latest releases didn't contain large improvements. So some of you may think Fork CMS is dying. Not at all! Fork CMS is very alive and kicking and we are preparing major changes.
Fork CMS uses the open source Spoon Library. While Spoon Library is great, it adds an additional learning-curve for most new contributors. The development on Spoon Library has stagnated and will be discontinued in the future. Therefore, we have decided to move to Symfony. We've picked Symfony for several reasons: it has a large community, great documentation and large codebase with a lot of existing functionality.
A second reason for moving to Symfony is that we want to concentrate on stuff that makes Fork CMS kick ass, and not the basic handling of URL's, a custom template-engine, ... So by moving to Symfony we think we will have more time to concentrate on new features that improves UI, usability, extra modules, ... .
A third reason is the large community of enthusiastic developers behind Symfony. We believe that by moving to Symfony it will be easier to find people with Symfony knowledge that are willing to contribute to Fork. In time we hope that Fork can contribute to Symfony as well.
How?
Moving to another framework is a major change and we can't accomplish this in a few days. So we are going to do it step by step. By replacing parts of Spoon Library by their equivalent Symfony component, we think we can move piece by piece, without halting the development of Fork CMS for several months.
Each change will be developed in a seperate branch and added as a pull-request on the master-branch when ready. So feel free to follow the development, add comments, add tips, ... on Github.
What does this mean for you?
Most internal components can be replaced without too much hassle for existing modules. We will try to provide backward compatibility where possible. In the end though, we will probably end up breaking backward compatibility for several features to be fully compatible with the Symfony framework, but this is something that will be discussed when we are at that point.
Contribute?
If you like to contribute, let us know. We are looking for people with a decent level of knowledge in Symfony, people who have experience with migrating codebases between frameworks are welcome also. Actually, everyone is welcome to contribute, provide us with tips.