Symphony The XSLT Content Management System

Technology Working in Harmony

Open source XSLT content management system

Symphony is an open source content management system designed to let developers program exclusively in the XSLT templating language.

The philosophy behind Symphony is that nothing should be sacrificed for flexibility – developers should have full control over their website’s markup, URLs and data structures.

XSLT Icon

XSLT

We’re dedicated advocates of XSLT. It’s a highly versatile templating language that promotes an organised coding style and ample reusability of components. The result is ultra-fast prototyping, and with the library of community-developed XSLT utilities at your fingertips, you won’t know what to do with all your free time! (We suggest grabbing some pizza.)

Workflow Icon

Workflow

Our goal is to provide a highly streamlined development workflow. Although you obviously need to define a data structure before you can manipulate it with XSLT, Symphony is designed to allow as much parallel development as possible – authors can begin adding content right away, while developers work on producing the pages and HTML to display it.

Data Design Icon

Data Design

Symphony lets you structure your data in whatever way makes most sense for your website. You can represent anything from blog entries to the migration patterns of wild geese using Symphony's building blocks (sections and fields, in Symphony parlance), and develop rich interconnected relations across content items.

Open Source Icon

Open Source

Symphony is fully open source software, adopting the super-permissive MIT/X11 licence. Even though we love free (as in “free speech”) software, not everyone can work that way. What you make with or for Symphony is completely yours to sell, hoard or donate, and we respect that.

Community Icon

Community

Symphony has a passionate community of clever and skillful developers who are using Symphony in interesting and novel ways. Take a look at the showcase of Symphony websites, join the forum (all questions are welcome), or visit the IRC channel (#symphony on irc.freenode.net) and say hello.

Extensions Icon

Extensions

Rather than include the kitchen sink, Symphony is designed to make liberal use of extensions. This lets you tailor the system to suit your precise needs and add missing functionality where needed. We believe that Symphony extensions should be first-class citizens, with free reign to do anything they want.

As a developer when you have very specific things you need to do, if you’re using any other system, you have to fight against it all the time.

When you’re using Symphony, you don’t have to fight against it – it works with you. You feel like it was built for you.

Craig Zheng

System Requirements

Getting it to run on your server

  • PHP 5.2 or above
  • PHP’s LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled (--with-xsl)
  • MySQL 4.1 or above
  • An Apache or Litespeed webserver
  • Apache’s mod_rewrite module or equivalent

Symphony Articles

From around the Interwebs