I’m not really answering your question here, but the best PHP CMS IMHO is Processwire, bar none, and I’ve used pretty much everything under the sun over the last 10+ years. Nothing else gets out the way and let’s you get on with the job in such an elegant way. I like their model as well, they essentially support their development through useful and elegant commercial plugins for things like caching, form builder, pro drafts, etc. The caching module is really worth every penny and then some.
It’s got a beautifully simple API and templating system that really lets you tackle and manage projects how you want to tackle them.
We’ve had production sites with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of daily hits running off it for nearly a decade and had pretty much zero problems with it that I can remember. I’m confused why more people don’t use it. Sometimes I wonder if people like to make their lives difficult and use the latest shiny new thing just so they can use the latest shiny new thing.
We’ve even utilised it in non traditional ways as well, due to its flexibility - for instance we developed a few games (UE4 and Unity) for clients where we set up and managed various game properties for objects, enemy behaviour, etc. that games could then easily pull in dynamically as JSON allowing a quick and easy way for non developers to play with underlying game variables while play testing with no real programming experience. The simple tree hierarchy system, supplemented with things like repeaters, standard fields and in built selector functionality really makes it easy for anybody to get a handle on it in under ten minutes and feel at ease.
We’ve integrated it with horrendously bad client SSO systems with minimal effort as well, to speak of it’s somewhat fringe abilities.
The community is great as well, no politics and very active.
Disclosure: I’ve got no commercial interests in it, other than it’s made day to day life much easier and I’ll sing it’s praises at any opportunity.
TBH, I probably would have approached this differently. When we’ve had big datasets, we’ve spun them out into another database entirely and just used Processwire for routing/API/business logic/hooks/security/etc. and hand cranked some DB queries as needed for the underlying data layer. Amazing to see what they did though.
I had never heard of Processwire and it does look interesting.
I have worked primarily in Drupal or just directly in either Symfony or Laravel. Drupal 8 has a pretty sophisticated cache API and reading through the ProCache module description it sounds pretty similar (except that it appears to lack cache tags?).
Anyway, I certainly wouldn’t call Drupal or WordPress “the latest new thing” and in my experience at least Drupal does a solid job of getting out of your way as well.
I hadn't heard of it either and I did what I thought was a comprehensive review of PHP-based CMS platforms a few years ago for a project. This may answer your question of not understanding why more people don't use it.
It’s got a beautifully simple API and templating system that really lets you tackle and manage projects how you want to tackle them.
We’ve had production sites with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of daily hits running off it for nearly a decade and had pretty much zero problems with it that I can remember. I’m confused why more people don’t use it. Sometimes I wonder if people like to make their lives difficult and use the latest shiny new thing just so they can use the latest shiny new thing.
We’ve even utilised it in non traditional ways as well, due to its flexibility - for instance we developed a few games (UE4 and Unity) for clients where we set up and managed various game properties for objects, enemy behaviour, etc. that games could then easily pull in dynamically as JSON allowing a quick and easy way for non developers to play with underlying game variables while play testing with no real programming experience. The simple tree hierarchy system, supplemented with things like repeaters, standard fields and in built selector functionality really makes it easy for anybody to get a handle on it in under ten minutes and feel at ease.
We’ve integrated it with horrendously bad client SSO systems with minimal effort as well, to speak of it’s somewhat fringe abilities.
The community is great as well, no politics and very active.
Disclosure: I’ve got no commercial interests in it, other than it’s made day to day life much easier and I’ll sing it’s praises at any opportunity.