I'm new to October CMS and this forum - hello to all :)

I'm gathering requirements for a new project based on a Laravel 5 / Doctrine stack. This is when I came across October CMS which sounds very interesting for our needs, but I have some questions regarding the technology stack:

1. What version of Laravel is October CMS based on?
2. Which ORM/DBAL is it build upon - Eloquent or Doctrine? Does it support either one?

Thank you in advance,

Phil

Hey Phil,

October uses Laravel 5 and Eloquent. The Eloquent ORM has been forked and improved to add some useful features like simplified relation definitions, model validation and deferred binding.

Thank you for your prompt answer - this is really helpful.

Please forgive me if this is a silly question, but I have never worked with October CMS before... Is it possible to integrate Doctrine with custom modules on October CMS and is it hard to do so - or do we have to stick with Eloquent?

Last updated 9 years ago

Integrating with Doctrine would be quite a challenge, most of the internals of the back-end are expecting the Eloquent library. However on the front-end it would be possible, since it makes no assumptions. Doctrine would need to run in parallel with Eloquent for this to work.

The path of least resistance would be to use Eloquent.

I hear you. I can see on this page what you mean with 'least resistance would be to use Eloquent'.

So, ok, let's assume we create our plugin following the best practice approach and using Eloquent for configuration and interfacing with CMS features and content. Let's assume we want to create a reporting module - querying and parsing data from standalone tables using Doctrine. To implement these reporting features with Doctrine in parallel - would this be hard? Where do you see friction / issues? Are there any examples you can point me to?

Basically we want to keep our domain logic in Doctrine but can live with developing CMS features using Eloquent.

I'm unsure about what you referring to as "the back end" and what as "the front end" in the context of October CMS though.

Thank you so much for all your help.

Last updated 9 years ago

The back-end is the administrative area, it has a set of tools that make managing data easier, such as automatically generated lists and forms. These tools will not work with Doctrine. However, the back-end routing, menu link registration and other basic functionality will work normally because they do not interact with Eloquent. So if you are willing to create back-end pages by hand (building the HTML yourself), which I assume you would with reports, then this approach is fine.

The front-end (the public facing area) can operate without a database at all, the "demo" theme that ships with October is a good example of this. So you can use Doctrine for building the front-end as much as you like, since there is no dependency on Eloquent or any ORM in particular.

There is also nothing stopping you from hooking up Eloquent to the identical tables used by Doctrine, this may present some duplication but could be necessary in areas where you want to use the back-end tools that interface with Eloquent.

Thanks so much for the info you provided. As I see it we will mostly develop what you refer to as front-end features. I can see this work with Doctrine in parallel to Eloquent.