Developing a secure, High quality and modern website builder: a resume on my journey

Description and use

The author built a modular Symfony project with GrapesJS visual editor, automated documentation, and static analysis, achieving high code quality and OWASP ASVS compliance.

Problem

The author needed a modern, secure, and high‑quality website builder that could be used by designers and developers without extensive JavaScript knowledge, while ensuring code quality, documentation, and security compliance.

Outcome

The project evolved into a modular, well‑documented, and security‑aware Symfony application with a user‑friendly visual builder, enabling designers to create pages without coding while maintaining high code quality and compliance with industry security standards.

Workflow

• 1. Learned Symfony and built a basic HTML/Twig site with admin dashboard.
• 2. Decided to integrate GrapesJS to enable designer‑friendly page building.
• 3. Refactored the monolith into separate bundles for security, web builder, multimedia, and framework.
• 4. Set up CI to generate PHPDoc and phpmetrics reports.
• 5. Added Psalm and PHPStan as pre‑commit hooks and in GitLab pipeline for code quality.
• 6. Researched OWASP ASVS and planned security hardening steps.
• 7. Published bundles on Packagist and monitored downloads and AI security reviews.

Evidence

I set a CI pipeline that generates a PHP API documentation of the entire code using phpdocumentor.

Source

Both of these are set into the highest level of code quality, and I can tell that it hurts my developing speed a lot.

Source

I started reading each one of them (from the most essential test (l1), to the most hard (l3)).

Source