What the Exponential Ecosystem is
The greater ecosystem extends beyond the community to cover all aspects of the Exponential world within the PHP stack: its users and creators.
Contents
Five parts
| Part | What belongs to it | Section |
|---|---|---|
| Products | Exponential 6, Exponential Basic, the Platform line, Velocity, Layouts, Intelligence, AdminUI, the help system | Products |
| Packages | Extensions, themes, site packages, the forks of upstream packages | Packages |
| The PHP stack | PHP, Composer, databases, web servers, operating systems, the libraries Exponential uses | The PHP stack |
| Organizations | 7x, the Exponential Foundation, partners, hosts, agencies, other projects | Organizations |
| People | Users and creators | People |
Beyond the community
Community members take part: they "use, contribute to, promote and develop software using Exponential worldwide" (Community: start here). The ecosystem also includes people and things that never take part in that sense:
- an organization whose site a partner built and which never visits a forum;
- the visitors and members of every Exponential site;
- the authors of the PHP libraries Exponential depends on;
- hosting providers whose servers run Exponential among many other applications;
- the code itself: packages, forks, tools and data.
Within the PHP stack
Exponential is PHP software installed with Composer. Its world sits inside the larger PHP world, and the borders are open in both directions:
- Exponential uses PHP projects: the Zeta Components for its kernel libraries (forked as expcomponents since 6.0.15), Symfony, Twig and Doctrine for the platform line, the upstream layouts packages for the page builder concept, the Qbix web server for the Velocity engine.
- It gives back: forks and patches kept current for new PHP versions, and pull requests upstream, for example "14 security PRs submitted upstream to zetacomponents" (The PHP stack it stands on and gives back to).
Users and creators
| Users | Creators |
|---|---|
| Site owners and organizations | Developers of sites, extensions, integrations and apps |
| Editors and administrators | Designers and theme authors |
| Members and visitors | Translators and documentation writers |
| Students learning with it | Hosts and agencies that package and run it |
Many people are both. See Users in the ecosystem and Creators in the ecosystem.
Why it matters
For someone choosing Exponential, a healthy ecosystem answers practical questions: will it be maintained, can we find help and people, can we extend it, are we locked in. The sales section has a page that answers those questions with proof: The community and ecosystem as a selling point.
Related pages
- Ecosystem: start here
- The ecosystem map
- Partners, community and ecosystem
- What the community is
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
Become an Exponential Partner
Partners share their information, provide funding, contribute back and develop the products with us, and that is how Exponential grows. A partner website and dashboard are planned for mid-2027: please become a partner today to speed up our growth rate and land new features faster.