The Symphony Audience
September 04, 2006
Although the people to ask really are naturally the developers of the system I’ve had a few e-mails asking about Symphony over the past month, most of them featuring the now familiar question – “Is Symphony for me?”. I’m still baffled by this as whether or not something is suitable for you is normally judged by trying it out.
However I’ll look to offer my take on things here, remember this is just my opinion though. When the free version becomes available I really do encourage you to try it!
Usability
Symphony is undeniably easy to use, the interface is nicely thought out and it’s easy to get around and do what you need to. It has a few nice qualities too such as making text fields bigger (handy if you’re writing long entries) by pressing the escape key or saving posts with ctrl+s (alt+s if you’re on windows).
Creating
If you really want to “create” something with Symphony then you’re going to need to get to grips with XSLT. There’s a plus to that though as it’s a web standard learning it means you can apply it elsewhere, not just to Symphony. This makes it more beneficial than say, learning the syntax for the template engine used in Textpattern.
I’ll not sugar coat it, when you first poke around at the insides of the default theme, see the data-sources, masters, pages and utilities that make it up, you’ll probably be somewhat bemused. I know for sure that I was! However as you familiarise yourself with the makeup of the design you’ll come to appreciate the almost modular aspect of it.
Plugging In
If you’re used to Wordpress and the concept of “I need a feature, lets go install a mass of plugins” then Symphony will come as a shock. There just aren’t that many, and certainly not the same amount of variety. Although that won’t be the case as time wears on, what with the Campfire API being released and the community being able to share utilities, events and “themes” with ease.
Themes
This is something I very much like about Symphony. Themes comprise of just your workspace folder and you can transplant these between copies of Symphony and a quick refresh of the page updates everything. Themes can contain just graphics and that sort of thing, but they can contain, essentially, complete sites! Datasources, events, utilities, pages… everything!
I plan on attempting to make several themes available in the future for Symphony users to download.
Support
You want documentation? Well you’re out of luck because there’s very little documentation on Symphony at the moment. However the devs have opened up a Wiki which will, over time, become a much more rich source of information than officially written documentation could ever be.
It is, however, very easy to get a hold of the dev’s either through the forum, via support tickets (if your purchased symphony) or through the Campfire Chatroom they have setup. They’re very friendly and care very much about helping people with their Symphony questions.
Migration
Forget it! At least for the time being there’s absolutely zero migration scripts. So you’ll have to either start again, re-save manually or wait until there’s a script made available.
So? Is it for me?
Well hopefully what I’ve written above has covered the points that ultimately make you decide what CMS is “right for you”.
Personally, if you like things to just work and don’t like coding things yourself then you’re probably looking in the wrong place. While you’ll be able to get by, the real power of symphony comes when you learn XSLT and start creating a site structure that makes publishing your content easier.
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.