Ensemble is a content management framework based on the php Zend Framework 2. The goal is to benefit from the reusable Zend Framework 2 modules combined with a powerful kernel to hook modules onto a specific page in the sitemap of the website.

Ensemble is a cmf, making it easy to create cms based applications. The cmf is a selection of various modules to handle page building, route parsing, navigation building and it provides an admin interface to manage the various content modules. Ensemble is called a cmf and not cms (content management system) as it does not provide the usual content management system tools, but rather helps with a low level handling of pages inside the application.

The fundament of ensemble is a page model, where every page is filled with content from one module. Pages are hierarchical stored in a database and processed into a route stack by the kernel. Meta data from pages is processed into a navigation tree for menus, breadcrumbs and so on. Ensemble has a repository on Gihub with documentation. At this moment, the best place to start is the wiki.

Ensemble works with Composer as dependency manager. To install this ensemble example application, clone this repository to a local machine and install dependencies with composer. Load the SQL statements into your database and modify the configuration files in config/autoload to your needs. This should be enough to get the system up and running.

This comes down to the following steps:

1. Grab the sample application and install the dependencies

cd path/to/projects
git clone git://github.com/ensemble/SampleApplication.git
cd SampleApplication
curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php
php composer.phar install

2. Configure the sample application Look into the config/autoload directory and modify the files in this directory to your needs. Do not forget to copy doctrine_orm.local.php.dist to doctrine_orm.local.php and change its contents to fit your needs.

3. Import the database schemas Grab the contents of data/database/schema.sql and data/database/fixtures.sql and execute those statements for the database you want to use

mysql -u your_username -p your_database < schema.sql
mysql -u your_username -p your_database < fixtures.sql

4. Making it accessible Don't forget to create a (virtual) host for this application ;-)

The cmf is built modular and to start the application, there is a minumum list of modules required to run the application:

1. EnsembleKernel: supplies the page model and parsers for routes [work in progress, usable]
2. EnsembleUtils: basic utility classes from CMF usage [work in progress, usable]
3. EnsembleAdmin: bare admin control panel [work in progress, little usable]
4. EnsembleAcl: access control list based on ZfcAcl [not started yet]

Additionally you might be interested in:

1. EnsembleI18n: provides i18n for ensemble including locale detection and translation helpers [not started yet]

The system is in heavy development and no guarantee is given the applications are stable. Please test it and report to me if you have any findings: [email protected]. You can find me often on Freenode IRC in the channel of the Zend Framework 2 development: #zftalk.2