Using multiple php frameworks on one website

Question

Our main website uses symfony 1, and by the time I started working on the code it seems impossible to upgrade (too much custom code from previous developer). Now we are adding a large addition to what the company offers. Instead of using a really old framework I wanted to use CodeIgniter, also since I'm very familiar with it. My real question:

What is a proper way of setting up a website to use multiple frameworks. The new features will be separate from the original website, but it will still need a few tables of the database.

I was going to have apache handle where the root directory was depending on the url and just do everything normally. The main website is example.com and the new feature will be abc.example.com

I'm really looking for people who have done this and some tips and warning they had.

Answer 1

PHP will run the framework based on which directory is loaded on the server. For instance, on most apache servers the root directory for example.com would be /www. Which means all of the code for Symphony would be in /www/*.

When you setup the path of your subdomain, just put it outside of the /www folder. Then, when you go to abc.example.com apache won't try to load the original site along with the Symphony framework.

I think it will be fine for both frameworks to share the same database tables. I'm not entirely sure how you plan for these two applications to work, but as long as you don't change the column names and types you should be okay.

If you don't want the applications to share the data in the original table, then look into using mysqldump or something of the like to copy the data over to a new table.