Symphony.

Hi, I have been building sites using PHP and XSL for about two years and have just stumbled across this project. I had no idea that any CMSs were using XSL. I thought they were all using botched PHP files.

Anyway, out of interest, is there any other XSL CMSs about? I am just downloading this and checking it out.

hey david, i was in a similar situation as you were a few years ago. I was jumping from cms to cms thinking this would be “the one”. But once I came across symphony in their v1.7 days, i really did feel that this was what I was looking for. Granted, like any other system, you still need to learn its specifics, but as i was learning this one, it all just really made sense, especially the flow of how things linked up with each other. Also, I think you will like this cms a lot simply b/c you know xslt. I felt that learning xslt was the harder part than learning the structure of symphony.

now, that it is on version 2, the team did a great job of improving the it at least 10 fold. there are many more features that turns symphony into an extremely flexible, customizable cms. from the way you can extend it with extensions and following the standard xslt way of importing files, just to name a few. not to mention this entire site is built on it.

there is a good amount of documentation to get your feet wet and a good amount of people in the community that are willing to help out.

-d

Anyway, out of interest, is there any other XSL CMSs about?

In the past, most references to other XSLT CMSs have been made to in-house systems. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better CMS than Symphony. If you are comfortable with PHP and XSL, there is nothing you can’t do with Symphony.

Did you know this website, including the form, are powered entirely by Symphony?

I have to use Cascade Server at my day job and its templating system uses XSLT, but now it’s moving towards the Velocity Engine.

Since I already learned XSLT at work, I gave Symphony a try. I’ve tried a ton of CMSs and am loving Symphony. Wish I could use it at work. :-)

• Umbraco open source .NET
• Karova an e-commerce system (CMS-ish)
• CommonSpot I think

Umbraco looks pretty neat. I’ll pass it onto my colleagues. We’re looking for something to use at work that is opensource and uses SQL as a database. Anyone try it?

We’re looking for something to use at work that is opensource and uses SQL as a database

Symphony?

By SQL do you mean MS SQL Server? I’ve not used Umbruco but have heard good things. It seems to be very similar to Symphony.

Sorry, I mistyped. At work we’re limited to Oracle and have access to MS SQL server. If Symphony worked with Oracle, that’d be fab. :-)

• Synkron Via (.NET, closed source)

Some consultants we’ve worked with at my day job used to use Ektron (.NET, closed source).