Symfony Content & Community Platform
A leading Romanian retail bank
Overview
A full-stack Symfony web platform built for a leading Romanian retail bank to power a content-rich community/campaign web property. It combines a Doctrine-backed content model, a Twig-rendered frontend with a modern asset pipeline, and document/export tooling.
The Challenge
The bank needed a maintainable, content-managed web platform with editorial capabilities, secure user access, and the ability to produce documents and reports, delivered with a repeatable deployment process across staging and production environments.
What We Built
A Symfony application structured around an AppBundle-style src, with app, bin, web, assets, and upload directories. Key building blocks observed in the Composer manifest include Doctrine ORM and DoctrineBundle for persistence, FOSUserBundle for user management, the Scheb two-factor-authentication bundle for stronger login security, and FOSCKEditorBundle for rich content editing. Document and reporting output is handled with dompdf and KnpSnappyBundle (HTML-to-PDF) and PhpSpreadsheet for spreadsheet exports, with SwiftMailer for email. The frontend uses Twig templates compiled through Webpack Encore with Tailwind CSS, PostCSS, and SCSS. The repo includes separate base, dev, staging-deploy, and master-deploy configurations, a db_structure.sql, and Docker Compose files (docker-compose.yml, docker-compose.staging.yml) plus a GitLab CI pipeline.
Technologies & Approach
Symfony with Doctrine was chosen for a robust, well-structured PHP backend with strong CMS-style capabilities through its bundle ecosystem. Webpack Encore plus Tailwind modernized the asset pipeline, and Docker Compose with environment-specific deploy directories supported clean promotion from staging to production.
Outcome / Impact
Delivered a long-lived, multi-environment content platform (active across roughly three years of commits) with editorial, authentication, and document-generation capabilities supporting the bank’s community/campaign initiatives.
Capabilities Demonstrated
- Full-stack Symfony/PHP development with Doctrine ORM
- CMS-style content management with rich-text editing
- Secure access with two-factor authentication and user management
- Server-side PDF and spreadsheet generation
- Modern asset pipeline (Webpack Encore, Tailwind, SCSS)
- Multi-environment containerized deployment with CI/CD