Deviations from the standard Symfony Framework
Custom directory structure
Mautic uses directory paths that aren’t typical in Symfony to make it distributable.
Directory |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Symfony bundles distributed with Core |
|
Symfony configuration files |
|
See Middlewares |
|
Doctrine migrations that updates Core’s database schema |
|
Used to execute Symfony/Mautic commands |
|
Contains combined and minified production assets along with default images |
|
Mautic Plugins as Symfony bundles |
|
Mautic Themes |
|
|
|
Mautic translation files leveraged by Mautic’s custom Translator |
|
Contains temporary files such as logs and Symfony’s cache |
|
Contains Composer installed dependencies |
Mautic mostly uses Symfony’s 2.x/3.x bundle structure for Core bundles in app\bundles\ and custom Plugins in plugins\. Read more about these here.
PHP everything
Mautic was originally written in PHP. YAML and Twig wasn’t familiar at the time so mostly avoided. This is why Mautic used Symfony’s PHP template engine by default and PHP based configurations.
Note
Symfony has since deprecated its PHP template engine and removed it in Symfony 5. Twig is being slowly introduced to replace PHP templates.
The goal for a PHP based config was to create a single place within the bundle to define routes, services, menus, parameters, etc rather than hunting for annotations buried throughout the app’s code. Symfony’s PHP configuration for registering services, parameters, routes, etc is also verbose. Therefore, Mautic provides a custom configuration framework through \Mautic\CoreBundle\DependencyInjection\MauticCoreExtension and various listeners.
Custom configuration
Mautic built its own configuration system that services can access through Symfony parameters or \Mautic\CoreBundle\Helper\CoreParametersHelper. Mautic writes configuration key/value pairs to app/config/local.php by default.
Note
Use Mautic’s native means of managing configuration parameters, although you can define and use Symfony parameters if you want to.
Mautic 3 introduced support for Symfony’s environment variables. Note that not all bundles support environment variables for Symfony’s configuration so take this into account before using third party bundles. You can sometimes implement workarounds by using custom proxy or delegation services. For example, see \Mautic\EmailBundle\Swiftmailer\Spool\DelegatingSpool.
Included commands
Mautic includes its own commands in addition to commands defined by Symfony and Symfony bundles such as the makers bundle.
Running ./bin/console without any arguments outputs a list of available commands.
Note
Some commands are only available in the development or test environments.
Autowired services
Mautic doesn’t auto-wire native services other than Symfony commands and controllers.
Service scope
Services are public by default to have backwards compatibility with Mautic 3 and Symfony 3. You can change the scope of your service by setting public to false when defining the service in the Plugin’s Config/config.php.
Support for entity annotations
By default, Mautic uses Doctrine’s PHP driver instead of annotations which requires a public static function loadMetadata(ORM\ClassMetadata $metadata) method. However, Plugins can use annotations if desired but should use only annotations or only PHP loadMetadata. A Plugin can’t use a mix of both. See Entities and schema for more information.
Firewalls and User access management
app/config/security.php lists Mautic’s firewalls. For the most part, Mautic uses Symfony’s standard way of registering firewalls and authentication with a means for Plugins to hook into the authentication process through listeners to the UserEvents::USER_PRE_AUTHENTICATION and UserEvents::USER_FORM_AUTHENTICATION events.
Mautic has its own permission system based on bitwise permissions and thus doesn’t leverage Symfony voters.
Middlewares
Mautic leverages middlewares before booting Symfony, see app/middlewares. For example, \Mautic\Middleware\Dev\IpRestrictMiddleware restricts IP address access to index_dev.php.
Custom Translator
Mautic has a custom Translator that extends Symfony’s Translator component and enables Mautic’s distributable language package model. All Plugins and bundles should contain US English language strings by default. https://github.com/mautic/language-packer integrates with Transifex to create language packs stored in https://github.com/mautic/language-packs.