Have you ever heard of Contao? If the answer might be "No", we are about to change that now :)

Contao Camp 2022

Before we jump to the mighty details of Contao - a very powerful open source CMS that allows you to create professional websites and scalable web applications we want to give you a quick background on how this article came to life.

We are Christian and Roman - We never met before. Currently we are sitting together at the Contao Camp 2022 in Potsdam (Germany) https://2022.camp.contao.org/.

The Contao Hackathon has started just now and we joined forces to publish the very first article about Contao here on dev.to. Because one of the great things about Contao is definitely its vivid community and it is worth joining!

But enough with introduction words, let's get started:

Contao - Open Source by heart

Contao is open source software licensed under the LGPL-3.0. The license permits the free use of the software ­even for commercial projects. In its core Contao has already everything included to build professional websites and scalable web applications.

It features:

• Core components: News module, form generator & lots of content elements (e.g. text, images, video, slider and many more)
• Multi Website Support in one Contao installation
• Multi Language Support
• Detailed user permission administration
• Compatible with Var­nish and oth­er HTTP caches, HTTP2 support, de­ferred im­age re­siz­ing and ESI
• 2nd factor user authentication (frontend & backend)
• GDPR compliance

Con­tao based on Symfony

Con­tao is a Web Content Management System for the administration of websites based on the Sym­fony Full Stack Frame­work. If you have worked with Sym­fony be­fore you will find your way around quick­ly and you are able use the over 11,000 avail­able Sym­fony bun­dles to cus­tomize Con­tao.

Thanks to hooks and events, you can ma­nip­u­late the pro­gram flow in var­i­ous places. In­sert tags al­low you to em­bed dy­nam­ic con­tent any­where. And even if you up­date Con­tao, your cus­tomized tem­plates will be pre­served.

To install and maintain your Contao project and also your Contao symfony bundles you can work directly on the commandline with the composer PHP dependency manager. A more convenient way to maintain Contao is the Contao Manager. It's an easy to use graphical user interface.

The Contao Community

Con­tao has started as a ger­man-speak­ing pro­ject in 2006. Since then the project evolved a lot and has grown a big com­mu­ni­ty with reg­u­lar events like the Contao Camp we are at now over the course of this weekend. Many re­sources like developer documentation and user manuals are available in english and german of course too.

Christian's view on Contao

I am using Contao as a webdeveloper since 2014. It's flexibility to implement website layouts is one of Contao's super powers! Contao has a very clean source code it makes browsers happy and also search engines. There are many Contao extensions (symfony Contao bundles) which help's me to build websites very fast.

In my expierence content editors are able to use Contao very fast which makes my job even easier cause I don't have to spent much time on explanations.

Would you try Contao for your next web project? Let us know in the comments below!

Contao Links:

• https://github.com/contao
• https://github.com/contao/contao: core development
• https://github.com/contao/docs: dev & user manuel
• https://github.com/contao/easy-coding-standard: Coding