Peter Robins, his website

The documentation on Symfony's website is generally very good (much better than many other open-source projects :-) ), so I assume you have read this and are familiar with the concepts. The basic directory structure of Symfony is based on the Mojavi MVC framework; I am tempted to say that if you don't know this you could read my beginner's tutorial. However, this is no longer up-to-date, so might well confuse rather than help.

These pages only give a broad outline, using a Linux setup, and use different names from the production system in case anyone's tempted to make a nuisance of themselves by trying to hack into the system. As I'm converting an existing site and doing so gradually, the system will change as I go along; the IT industry has various jargon terms for this, such as agile or rapid application development, but as an old-fashioned codger I call it 'the SIAS method': suck it and see. If it works, fine; if it needs changing, change it. I'll change this page to reflect the changes.

First, set up the test environment/directory, which I'll call 'symf'

1. mkdir symf
2. cd symf
3. symfony init-project symf

Then create application, which I'll call 'main'

• symfony init-app main

This is not a hugely interactive site, with most pages having static content with few changes. There are, though, three broad types of page:

1. static HTML, which changes occasionally
2. blog/diary type content, which is time-related, and doesn't change
3. pages which include variable content stored in and created from a database

When the changes are made, the project then has to be installed/deployed on the live server. I deploy first for the static and blog pages, and later add the db-driven pages.