Symphony.

Hi folks

Evaluating Symphony for a couple of rather diverse projects I have in mind.

I like the design philosophy and flexibility, but am concerned that the Ensemble library seems so thin. Symphony looks great for blue-sky projects but I don’t want to be recreating basic functionality that is pluggable on other platforms…

In particular, both projects will require a forum and a multi-author blog with commenting. How mature are these ensembles, in terms of features like spam protection, simple editing/approval workflows and comment moderation? The Ensemble descriptions seem rather sparse…

I’d appreciate any feedback.

Symphony looks great for blue-sky projects but I don’t want to be recreating basic functionality that is pluggable on other platforms…

While at first this might look like extra-work, in most cases it isn’t. Most pluggable features have to be modified to work as you want them to work and in Symphony you’ll simply do it yourself with the tools provided.

In particular, both projects will require a forum and a multi-author blog with commenting. How mature are these ensembles, in terms of features like spam protection, simple editing/approval workflows and comment moderation?

Features like a forum have always, almost by tradition, required a lot of custom PHP code and manual customizations. Don’t expect it to be a “put this thing there and voilà, it’s working” kind of job. You really need to know what you’re doing.

Basically you need a members extension (there are three of them but only one seems to work properly) and a lot of custom events and datasources.

To learn how Symphony works I’d suggest you started with something more simple first. A simple Blog maybe. It will show you how datasources and events work. From there on you can start to dissect the forum ensemble and look at the code there.

Wrapping up I need to say that Symphony is not something that provides you with a working site/forum/blog but more like a framework that provides you with tools that make your job of creating exactly what you need incredibly easy.

First of all, I have not worked with Symphony’s forum ensemble, so I can’t speak specifically to that.

I don’t want to be recreating basic functionality that is pluggable on other platforms…

Honestly, this is a good reason not to use Symphony. There are far more mature and task-specific platforms (Wordpress, etc) that will get you a forum & multi-user blog in a fraction of the time it would take to replicate the same thing in Symphony. I don’t think anyone would debate that (That said, keep in mind this site is running on Symphony).

The advantage of Symphony is flexibility (and you seem to have a feel for that). The question is: once you have that blog & forum, what do you anticipate your customization needs to be? If you are reasonably confident thatthey are met exist within those pre-fabricated solutions, then that is what I would suggest.

However, if you or other stakeholders anticipate an ongoing maturation of the core functionality, then Symphony is a very worthy option to consider. In my experience with Symphony, what you will have invested in learning and development for the core functionality will be repaid with a much more seamless and intuitive process when it comes to extending and adding features to your app.

Thanks guys - very useful responses. Symphony is definitely on the list, but I’m also looking at a couple of platforms, including EzPublish, that seem to have good flexibility plus relatively mature and customizable community functionality…

Not really on topic but I wouldn’t call Wordpress “mature”. “Aged” would be the appropriate term here… :-)

In my experience there is no cleanly coded open source blogging platform. And I dare say that Wordpress’ security holes come from its messy codebase.

In that respect I would call Symphony more mature than a lot of other systems out there.

Not really on topic but I wouldn’t call Wordpress “mature”. “Aged” would be the appropriate term here… :-)

Kudos.

By ‘mature’ I just mean that, from a user’s perspective, it’s functionality is more clearly defined than if you were setting out on your own to create a blog as your first xslt/Symphony project.

Its funny I was just pondering today while reading about Wordpress 3’s custom post types and taxonomies: it is fortuitous that Symphony has had the opportunity to mature in a rational, philosophically sound manner. Now WP 3 seems like it will be the ultimate paradox: still fundamentally architected to be a blog, but now with the capacity for arbitrary data models. I hate to think what will be attempted in WP 3, and even more specifically, what I’ll end up having to attempt in WP 3.

I generally try to stay positive about other open source systems (in my official capacity, at least). At the end of the day, they are all the result of very hard work by very talented, well-meaning people. I try to think about them as Symphony’s colleagues rather than its competitors.

That said, I’ll be interested to see where WP goes from here because it kind of feels like they’re at the top of a very slippery slope right now. Hopefully, they find a way to balance there.

That said, I’ll be interested to see where WP goes from here because it kind of feels like they’re at the top of a very slippery slope right now. Hopefully, they find a way to balance there.

It’s a shame that the Wordpress devs and community think it’s a CMS when it really isn’t. If they focused on making it the best at what it really is - a blogging platform - they’d be doing everyone a favour.

Symphony isn’t an out-of-the-box solution for anything in particular, so perhaps a dedicated blogging platform would be a better option.

It’s a shame that the Wordpress devs and community think it’s a CMS when it really isn’t. If they focused on making it the best at what it really is - a blogging platform - they’d be doing everyone a favour.

100% agree from me. They’ve kinda got an upside down pyramid going on. Started small and building too much on top to try and make it what it isn’t, which means it will topple soon.

I generally try to stay positive about other open source systems

I agree here too, Wordpress is excellent if you want a blog and you’re not very tech savvy, it has served me well for years! Now I need to expand ;)