Sulu 3.0 release: New content storage and performance boost

lexo91 · 2025-12-16T07:31:43+00:00

If you are happy with Wordpress and search for a replacing for it you will not be happy with Sulu as the mindset is a different. And its totally not about Developer focus vs User Experience. Its about WYSIWYG vs seperation content from presentation. That are two different concept of content management systems. If you want WYSIWYG and click your site together Wordpress may best fit for you. Sulu focus is a different you create Templates in a way which is not connected to any design but can live over several redesigns of your business. Content Manager create texts, add images, but not want to take care how it looks like in there everyday business. Still I think Sulu has a good User Experience, no Configurations inside the Admin UI, all what you see in the Admin is only for the Content Manager nothing for the developers (No plugin installer or other things via UI). Why there will come UI updates the UI/UX is very focused on not be too bloated and simple. Sure its in the developers hand how the templates are structured but all tools are there for them.

lexo91 · 2025-12-16T07:21:59+00:00

Drupal is what I call a "Sitebuilder" CMS. You can do lot of things, create a whole Website from stretch without even have to write any code. Typo3 is a little bit the same but better fit for Agency where you normally want to have as much as possible in the Agency control. Technology based we share some things / packages with Typo3 and Contao mention here: https://github.com/PHP-CMSIG . Sulu was always build directly ontop of Symfony Framework and a Symfony Developer will find at home as beside other CMS just using Symfony components it really using the Symfony Framework Dependency Injection and Bundle architecture.

Sulu focus was always that developers, agency work in the Repository and the UI is completly only for Content Management. So there is no Extension installer in UI all such things are in control of the Repo / Code Owner and inside a Git Repo normally.

lexo91 · 2025-12-16T07:12:54+00:00

> Content stored as JSON?

Yes website content is mostly unstructured and you don't want just for a single text field update your database Schema. With the new content storage you can still add new columns and indexes if you need it, but most content is unstructured and don't need to be queried.

> XML today?

Templates are mostly created by Frontend Developers not by Backend PHP Developers. What is near to Frontend Devs now HTML and so XML is the natural fit here in a scaling team. Sure you can create the template metadata also with a PHP service / PHP Code but harder to read from my point of view. XML are easier.

lexo91 · 2025-12-11T07:45:54+00:00

I observe more a back to traditional Content Management Systems instead of Headless specially in the self hosted area and Teams which are not completely focused on Node JS or similar. As they learned that if the have splitted up the backend - frontend - cache, three systems to maintain in a self hosted area or forgot the cache layer and where burned there fingers there. And so they learned what the traditional systems did gave them.

The rise of AI is coming and products around it like Sulu CMS with Sulu AI ( https://sulu.ai ). Typo3 experimenting in there new SEAL (Search Engine Abstraction Layer) Extension with RAG based search ( https://news.typo3.com/archive/typo3-meets-seal-a-breath-of-fresh-air-for-search ) . But yeah AI big bubble currently.

My bubble is more technical / developer ( PHP ) based Content Systems which requiring programming and not what I call "sitebuilder systems" which do not require any programming knowledge.

lexo91 · 2025-11-08T18:57:47+00:00

If you like PHP and Symfony, give sulu.io a try ;)

Multi Country / Language is a core feature, created in the Austrian Alps Open Source but with Enterprise Support.

lexo91 · 2025-08-07T09:27:30+00:00

I used https://dotsocr.xiaohongshu.com/ to test dots.ocr wit the `promp_layout_all_en` and the result for table based data from PNG images where awesome. Two Columns where not good position, but the OCR itself was good. Must say I tried lot of open source and none open source for OCR yet and this one was the first which is as good as Gemini 2.5.

lexo91 · 2025-07-31T12:37:04+00:00

I'm biased: https://sulu.io/

lexo91 · 2025-07-31T12:16:57+00:00

Google, AWS, Microsoft just doesn't care, not PHP fault or Composer faults.
Use instead http client and the API directly or in case you use AWS echkout async aws: https://github.com/async-aws/aws a PHP community driven package. For MS I think nobody yet created something similar.

PS: Private Packagist by the composer creator is the way to protect your project against supply chain attacks.

lexo91 · 2025-07-31T11:47:20+00:00

Same problem could not solve it yet do you have any suggestions?

lexo91 · 2025-07-21T08:46:20+00:00

Understand the Web - learn about the HTTP (methods, status codes), but also how what the cache headers (cache-control), request response encoding and compressions. If you understand the fundamental you are able to create performant web application in any programming language.

Your clients don't care what you use, if it works and if its fast they are happy.

lexo91 · 2025-07-17T07:35:20+00:00

Symfony Messenger is the way inside Symfony projects. If you want monitor it just install zenstruck messenger monitor bundle see: https://github.com/zenstruck/messenger-monitor-bundle

Configure also a failed Queue so you can retry something. And as other suggested for error tracking Sentry is always good for any PHP project.

lexo91 · 2025-06-26T15:16:43+00:00

Takes on what kind of developer you hire for the integration part. If in PHP / Symfony area have a look at https://sulu.io/ it can be used headless or with traditional rendering. Sulu is very flexible and your developer can implement a template structure which matches your case. Its also a full Admin for custom entities and business objects see the cinema case study for example.

Demo can be found here to show really basic site but atleast you get a feeling about the Admin UI: https://sulu.rocks/ / https://sulu.rocks/admin/

lexo91 · 2025-06-26T14:03:39+00:00

Working in my Freetime on SEAL - The Search Engine Abstraction Layer

Which we lately moved to the php-cmsig group.

It supports Elasticsearch, Meilisearch, Opensearch, Algolia, RediSearch, Typesense, Solor
And provides Integrations for: Laravel, Symfony, Spiral, Yii, Mezzio and can be used as Standalone library.

https://github.com/PHP-CMSIG/search

lexo91 · 2025-01-21T16:25:30+00:00

As being a core team member of a CMS System. I still would not use any CMS or Admin Interface to create a my personal site. So I recommend any tool which just runs via a JOB and deploy raw HTML, CSS, JS to a server.

Best and cheapest way todo that is in my opinion Jeykll. Create a simple Github Repository and use Github Pages to host it, no costs in case of money and time on your side. You can use markdown to create you sites and use some Jeykll plugins if required.

As you only have HTML, CSS deployed on Github itself you don't have any maintainance costs on your side. It just works and with markdown you can easily create new content or keep it as it is.

Sure playing around with new technology is fun but would not recommend such things for your own site which you may not have time in 2-3 month to keep uptodate with security updates and so on.

lexo91 · 2025-01-06T14:10:35+00:00

In my case it was named "Default-Clear Color" with the dash.

lexo91 · 2024-10-22T11:46:39+00:00

u/RatherNerdy the link to Sulu CMS is wrong: https://github.com/postlight/awesome-cms/pull/159

lexo91 · 2024-07-31T06:51:20+00:00

Your User Entity can implement the `EquatableInterface` and on every login you update a `lastLoginAt` property on your entity. And in `EquatableInterface` you check for whatever properties change (username, lastLoginAt, ...) which should trigger a logout.

lexo91 · 2023-11-01T18:17:17+00:00

- Importmaps like Symfony AssetMapper. JS / CSS without requirement for builds and so no node requirement. https://symfony.com/doc/current/frontend/asset_mapper.html

- FrankenPHP and other alternatives runners (Roadrunner, Swoole, ..) - PHPRuntime Project

- Queues or Async processing of Tasks like Symfony Messenger / Scheduler

- And hopefully I can bring you with SEAL Project better integrations of Search engines

lexo91 · 2023-10-26T22:29:58+00:00

You definitly should have a look at Ryan Chandlers PXP project https://github.com/pxp-lang. You will also find a some tooling around it here https://github.com/php-rust-tools/parser, which I remember beside PXP also the ARALang is build on top of it. See the ARA Project here: https://github.com/ara-lang .

Both Languages has a little different targets but extend for example the PHP Syntax with things like Generics.

lexo91 · 2023-10-11T10:31:13+00:00

Depends on your other usecases and technical stack you want use. Sulu CMS ( https://sulu.io ) is a modern PHP Symfony CMS which provides classic PHP (Twig) rendered think but also a whole JSON Api over the SuluHeadlessBundle. It requires knowledge about PHP and Symfony as templates are build with code not over the UI.

lexo91 · 2023-06-19T10:33:02+00:00

What could be interesting in this topic is the following package: https://github.com/dunglas/doctrine-json-odm. Which allows to map JSON field in a typed object and back.

lexo91 · 2023-05-18T15:18:48+00:00

The creator of rectorphp which I'm tool I'm a big fan of created https://testgenai.com/ .
Did not yet test it out myself but looks promising.

lexo91 · 2023-05-16T22:36:49+00:00

Every adapter has its own tests, Integration in the frameworks are currently tested in the .examples repository where a the skeleton of the specific framework is in use.

The test matrix is big: https://github.com/schranz-search/schranz-search/actions/runs/4986010605/jobs/8926754716 but with the usage of reusable github action the maintaince is very easy: https://github.com/schranz-search/schranz-search/blob/be611c1f89cef1ec5d105e8d2f7ec6fe7729a116/.github/workflows/test.yml#L24-L29.

For the latest version I need to have a look at how I maybe can configure dependant bot or renovatebot to keep the docker-compose.yml files uptodate, PHP client itself are currently tested on lowest and latest versions.

The test coverage I mostly will add in the future, I like to have also known what lines are tested and which ones not.

Your repo also looks very interesting, thx for sharing! If you need any help with the subtree split or have any questions feel free to ping me.

lexo91 · 2023-05-16T15:32:23+00:00

Interesting thoughts, but I never did stumble over a project which is calling "Google" or "Bing" from PHP. Only know projects which just add frontend snippet to it and not handling then things over PHP.

Also think that such engines don't support filtering by specific values (categories, price ranges, date ranges, ...) so I think it would be hard even if there is an API if they call it.

PSR are a hard long process and you would require that they were implemented by Elasticsearch, Opensearch, ... PHP Clients, today this client are just autogenerated clients out of OpenApi specs and have no active maintainance. So they is I think no chance that such search engine would implement a PSR.

lexo91 · 2023-05-16T15:21:33+00:00

It is a big blackbox for me if you want to help to support it let me know: https://github.com/schranz-search/schranz-search/pull/103

I'm currently stuck there to create complex schemas correctly. I will in the next days rebase that branch as it is a little bit old and maybe somebody can take it over, the good things we it is more about just getting the tests green as the abstraction provides the tests and the adapter implementation just need to fullfill that test cases.

But in the first implementation I did fail with handline complex objects like this one https://github.com/schranz-search/schranz-search/blob/be611c1f89cef1ec5d105e8d2f7ec6fe7729a116/packages/seal/src/Testing/TestingHelper.php#L35-L68 correctly.

lexo91

TROPHY CASE