Symfony 1.4 - Backend creation vs complete app creation

Question

I'm starting to develop in Symfony since I've started working with it in my job. To justify why the Symfony 1.4 choice, I need to practice for this reason.

I have a doubt regarding something very simple. I want to do a website with a back end so people can change it's contents like what's in the slider, the news on the site and their products and collections (create, edit, etc).

So, what would be better: To do a normal website and echo the stuff that's on the database and have a Symfony back and app managing that? Or should I migrate my website to the Symfony structure and then do the back end on top of it? What's the correct approach?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Concerning your backend symfony 1.4 is very easy to use as a beginner instead of version 2 and its so easy to manipulate the CRUD with the powerful admin generator feature. For the frontend, my advice is to rewrite your code with symfony but before doing it take a look at documentation espacialy the MVC and Doctrine.

These are useful links:

• Symfony legacy offical documentation: http://symfony.com/legacy/doc
• useful blogs: http://symfony-world.blogspot.com/
• useful french blog: http://gilsrc.wordpress.com/category/symfony/

Answer 2

So, I'm answering my own question, because I decided based on a few points. So why?

1- I have a page in which I have to manage multiple contents including a products page. What does this mean? It means that I'll display the products easily by using Symfony helpers.

2- I will also have a much easier task while creating the backend since I won't need to do anything extra (like creating .php pages for each product which would be very stupid) besides a simple CRUD to manage the contents of a webpage.

3- It will be simple to maintain the app and change on the go, with less files and in a more structured way, which is what a framework does.

So anyone having a time deciding on whether do everything in symfony or just the backend, I recommend doing everything.

Thanks to Haithem Rihane who provided nice resources.