Symphony 1.5 Beta Review
September 02, 2006
It’s been a while since Symphony hit version 1.0, around 9 months in fact. I reviewed version 1.0 back in January and quite simply at the time it was excellent, good enough to pry me away from Wordpress at any rate. It had a lot of good features but it also lacked quite a few as well and this (I feel) kept a few potential users away from it.
A few months after the initial release Symphony hit 1.1 and then we entered a period of quiet until a screencast of version 1.2 was put up on Chaoticpattern.com (Allen’s blog). It looked good but most importantly it appeared far more feature rich than before and promised to deliver an absurd amount of flexibility when making your site!
Then we (the Symphony community) held our breath in anticipation of the soon to be released beta. Frustratingly it was set back and we had to wait until August 31st to get our hands on it.
It was worth the wait believe me…
So a blend of 150 bug fixes and new features later we’ve reached version 1.5, yes 1.5 it’s that much of a jump from previous versions.
New Looks
We have a new interface, which is something I didn’t expect. Gone is the green in favour of a polished, professional looking silver/black and blue colour scheme. But it’s not just colour, the widgets have been redone and slide smoothly into view from the top, as do the advanced configurations for pages. So no more back and forth between pages just to do configuration!
More extensible
The Symphony equivalent of a plugin is a Campfire service and there have never been that many of those. However there are a whole bunch of new campfire services you can install now ranging from Akismet spam protection, to adding XMLRPC functionality. Personally, I like the Page Render Stats service as it provides a quick way to see page performance instead of having to ?debug every page!
The broader range of Campfire services coupled with the pending release of the Campfire API means this number will grow much more in future months.
Very much more flexible!
Symphony 1.5 introduces the concept of “Sections” and allows custom fields to be mapped to them.
For example by default you have an entries section. If you create a new entry you’ll see the following fields:
- Title
- Body
- More
- Date
- Photo upload
- Categories
These are each custom fields, so if you don’t upload Photo’s when you write an entry then you can delete the custom field and it will no longer be present in the entries section.
Or, here’s another example. My Goodies page is, essentially just a bunch of preview images that link to the downloads. I never need to write a body or anything like that, all I need is the URL to the preview, a URL to the download and a title.
So in my installation I’ve made a section called “Releases”, and when I create a new entry in this section all it has are the fields that I need.
It’s a tad tricky to explain in words but hopefully you’re getting the idea.
Custom Field Validation
On the subject of custom fields how about field validation? You can now choose to validate a field in an infinite number of ways. You might require that a field be a URL or you might even need to customise the validation which is possible using Regular Expressions. This is handy as it prevents the wrong data being put in the wrong field. It’s also now possible to have certain fields be required, such as having to have a category for an entry, or an image for example.
Utilities and a New Datasource Editor
Another new feature which is an absolute godsend for me (I use a lot of datasources) is the ability to map a utility to multiple datasources and even to events. It doesn’t sound like a big thing but when your site gets to a moderate size it makes one helluva’ difference.
There’s also a new datasource editor which brings more power and flexibility to your finger tips than ever before. Want to include certain custom fields? Sure. Maybe group the data by date instead of a list? You can do that too. There’s also a simple check box to html-encode the data returned if it’s being used in a RSS feed for example.
Performance
Performance has been greatly improved with the more powerful datasources available but Symphony now also features a “full page” caching system. This allows the entire output of the page to be cached to avoid doing repeated transformations each time a page is loaded. This is especially handy for reducing load on your site in particular when the transformations you’re making are complex.
I really truly have only scratched the surface here when it comes to the new feature set but I hope it gives a good idea of some of the things to expect.
Migration
Now, we come to the point of migration. Unfortunately this is the only bad part about 1.5. The changes made to the database in order to support the new features meant that backwards compatibility was sacrificed. So all those entries on your 1.1 site? You’ll have to do them manually. It’s the same for comments as well, although it does seem like there may be a way to import them more easily.
There also aren’t any migration scripts for any other CMS/publishing systems so it really is a case of starting from scratch.
It must be said however, that it’s worth it. It really is. I spent almost 2 days importing just over 200 entries, yes it was a pain but now I’m using a much better system.
Isn’t this supposed to be free?
Well yes, you’re quite right, however, this is just the beta and as such it’s only available to license owners of Symphony. The final version, due for release at the end of this month currently, will be free for everyone with the option of paid support.
Conclusion
The best publishing system I’ve used, bar NONE. I don’t think I need to say anything more! If you’re looking for any pictures of the system then please visit my symphony flickr set.
Feedback?
If you’ve found errors or have some feedback please . Comments aren’t currently enabled due to spam but I’m sure they’ll return in the future.