Interview about switching to Symfony

After we released version 3.5, Eric Herrmann from the german php magazine phpmag.de contacted us to ask a few questions about our switch to Symfony. Because a lot of people that are working with Fork CMS don't speak german, including ourselves, we publish our original answers here:

You already did a statement on why you do it. But when was the point of time you said "the solutions those Symfony guys deliver are actually better than what we can achieve on our own"? What was the tipping point?

At some point we had to choose between working on the library we used in Fork CMS (Spoon) and Fork itself, or using an existing framework such as Symfony or Zend Framework, ... Because we want to build more features instead of extending the underlaying framework, it was an easy discision.

We compared and tested some frameworks to decide which would fit the best in our codebase and community. There can't be pinpointed one single reason why we choose Symfony over the others. There were several arguments, eg: the vibrant community, and the bundle structure we would like to integrate in Fork CMS to be able to build a modulair CMS.

What were reasons that made you hesitate giving up on your own coding? There must have been members in your team that were opposed to that decision. What were their arguments?

It was such an obvious decision that we can't say someone was against it. Although it requires a big amount of time, that otherwise we would have used to work on even better marketing features for our users. But it was - and is still - clear for everyone that on a long-term it was the right decision to start using Symfony's code.

What are other major steps you took with Fork 3.5.0 that you consider remarkable? (Facebook SDK, MIT License?)

Before our 3.5 release we always used a custom license but now by choosing a public known MIT License we want to be more transparent to our users and community. We took an extra step aside from our history as a private CMS and establish a clear open- and public position.

With the same though behind the switch to Symfony we implemented Composer. This allowed us to stop syncing dependecy code and focus more on want our users want.

Got some questions yourself? Feel free to ask!