A new EasyAdmin Demo application

Symfony introduced its Demo application in 2015 as a learning resource to showcase the main features of the Symfony project. We’ve been maintaining it since then and today it’s still a great resource to learn Symfony, to prepare some quick proof of concept and to benchmark new features.

Some time later, and inspired by Symfony Demo, we introduced the EasyAdmin Demo application to showcase the main EasyAdmin features. Sadly, I couldn’t find the time and energy to maintain the project. This damages the reputation of the entire EasyAdmin project and causes frustration to some users.

That’s why we’ve decided to drop the entire EasyAdmin Demo application and archive its repository. However, we still need to showcase EasyAdmin somehow because we want users to see it in action. If only there was a sample Symfony application that we could use for this…

Forking Symfony Demo

Symfony Demo is the perfect application to solve this problem. It’s a simple but realistic Symfony application that follows the latest and greatest best practices defined by Symfony. That’s how we created the new EasyAdmin Demo: forking Symfony Demo and creating an EasyAdmin backend on top of it.

This is how it looks:

Homepage of the EasyAdmin Demo application

Symfony Demo includes its own custom-made backend, so you can compare how to create backends with EasyAdmin and with pure Symfony code.

Besides providing an entire backend to manage the Symfony Demo application, we’ve included other resources, such as a “form field reference”. This renders in a single page all the available form fields in EasyAdmin backends, so you can check how they look and feel:

Full reference of form fields available in EasyAdmin

The new EasyAdmin Demo project is available at github.com/EasyCorp/easyadmin-demo.

Doing Less to Do More

Using Symfony Demo as the base of the EasyAdmin Demo will allow us to offload most of the maintenance burden to the Symfony community. This will liberate us to work on adding and improving EasyAdmin features.

Finally, in case you are wondering if we’re going to submit these changes to the Symfony Demo repository: we’ll never do that. Symfony Demo must stay agnostic and not favor any of the available admin generators for Symfony applications (mostly, SonataAdmin and EasyAdmin).