Symphony.

This is the type of thing Symphony can do out-of-the-box. Who needs EE? :-P

Out of the box how? I wasn’t aware of this feature. A guide or tutorial would be very welcome!

Hey MrBlank,

First of all, thanks for the link.

Second, I haven’t used Symphony, but I’ve heard some rumblings about how delightful it is. I’ll have to check it out as even the “reset password” copy was hilarious.

Third, I’m pretty technology agnostic, but what else would you say Symphony does that EE can’t? Please note that this isn’t a flame-war question, but rather a comparison of features and facts.

Thanks, Kenny Meyers http://www.hmftime.com

Maybe this is just old-fashioned CMS xenophobia, but ‘Eeeeeeeww.’

That is all.

edit: referring to EE, not Kenny, of course ;).

Hi Kenny, welcome :-)

I think MyBlank is referring to the fact that XML is at the core of Symphony. You can give it any XML feed (whether it be from the Twitter API, Atom, RSS, a SOAP response…) and you can immediately render it with XSLT into your page. “Dynamic XML Data Sources” are native to Symphony, which parse and cache external XML for this very purpose.

I wrote a quick tutorial the other day on how easy it was to add my Last.fm plays to my blog using Symphony.

To be honest, I’ve never used EE (I used Wordpress, then ASP.NET, and haven’t looked back after seeing Symphony) but they are certainly similar. The biggest thing for me is that Symphony uses XSLT as its templating language rather than proprietary markup. It’s hugely powerful, and results in some really nicely abstracted markup (as opposed to procedural inline template tags). XSLT seems to be a stopping point for many, but we’re building up a natty pool of reusable templates.

Nick,

Thanks for your great answer. I will definitely check it out and I appreciate your time.

Cheers, Kenny

Well, as in “out-of-the-box” I meant you can pull a Twitter search query via its API and use that as a data source. You would base the search variable on the entry’s ID and use {$param} syntax to specify dynamic portions of the URL in your data source. So, you wouldn’t need an extension to duplicate that feature.

Like Nick said, I think the main reason Symphony is so good is that you can use any valid XML as a data source. No need for a special plugin to be able to use a service’s API. Grab the XML and use XSLT to turn it into anything you want.

My personal site pulls data from Tumblr, Twitter, several blogs, LastFM, Xbox Live and a few custom Delicious Library XHTML publish templates. If I had some more free time I’d make my Symphony install simply be my social Web aggregator and blend it all together into a lifestream. Or, I could take it a step further and use Nick’s info and use PHP and a cron job to pull external sources into Symphony’s database for back ups and do even more with the data.

When working with Expression Engine, I was always fighting the interface and templating language. With the interface, there was just way too many options and clients would get confused because we wouldn’t use 80% of them. Then the templating was difficult because it seemed like there was only one way to pull data and it had to be in the loop and you had to disable options to keep things snappy. Even things like passing an entry’s title to the title tag required a variable to be passed from one template to another. It seemed like I was working in a way EE wanted rather than how I wanted.

With Symphony, the core is pretty minimal. Clients can easily edit content and any special features needed can be added with an extension. That way you can create sites that are very specific to their content. Pulling data to display on the page can be done in a variety of ways that are specific and efficient. Once you have that XML data, you then use XSLT as your templating language for full control over the output.

Symphony is still pretty young and it needs some more documentation and tutorials, but that’s changing and the community is great. New developers should have no trouble getting started.

This seems very interesting!

I’m a Python-developer, and I mostly stick with Django for work-related projects (on the personal side, I tend to be extremely language/platform/technology-agnostic). Python and JSON is a perfect match, as Python’s built-in data structure, dictionaries (hash tables), have almost exactly the same structure as JSON.

So, I’m curious. How does Symphony fare with JSON, which is becoming more-and-more important as a data interchange format?

Symphony is pretty hardcore on the XML front, so doesn’t natively interface with JSON. Some developer extensions using JSON in their AJAX requests since PHP has json_encode/decode functions making this pretty easy to serialise/deserialise.

There are various efforts to create XSLT templates to convert XML into JSON xml2json-xslt although I’ve not tried them. Symphony’s pages can output any data format that XSLT can — XML, (X)HTML variants, PDF and of course plain text, which allows CSV, JSON etc. You don’t need a generic XML-to-JSON XSLT template — in the past we’ve written the XSLT by hand to transform the XML into JSON.

As for consuming JSON, there is presently no native support. Dynamic XML Data Sources are just purely for XML. But it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility to write an extension that provides a small PHP proxy for a Dynamix XML DS such that it requests a JSON URI and converts this to XML for use in Symphony.

and now there is http://symphony-cms.com/community/discussions/26421/