Symphony.

Hello,

I’m new here, brought here by a Symphony CMS evangelist from another forum. I love what I see - super elegant and customizable system! I’d like to preface that I’m more designer than developer, but I’m pretty fluent with WordPress and Drupal. Drupal outputs some very bad markup at times, but is really customizable. I’ve been using it for the more complex sites - social networking, complicated content types, etc.

I’m about to start another project which will be sort of a social network, with job board, group blog (all users can contribute to the blog, but moderator approves and sets the timeline to publish articles), news, etc.

I was going to use Drupal for this. Would Symphony be a good choice? I’d love to have a project to test it out on, but I don’t want to head down a twisty windy road of square pegs and round holes.

Any advice, opinions, comments, or pointing in the right direction would be appreciated.

regards,

Tevi

Welcome!

The trick with Symphony is figuring out what parts of your functionality will be easily accomplished through SYmphony’s inherent flexibility, and what will require extension development. Obviously this is easier to do the more familiar you are with the system.

From you description, it sounds like the only special feature you would require that is not available through using the symphony core would possibly be the membership management. There is a frontend members extension as well as an ensemble (full symphony install) that demonstrates it. I have only used it a bit, and I’m sure others could give you more detail, but check that out. If it looks like it’s in the ballpark, then Symphony would probably be a good fit.

Another tip I always give new users: Symphony’s flexibility is all about XSLT; the more comfortable you are with XSLT; the more you can shape Symphony to do whatever your heart desires. So don’t be afraid to hit the forum up for XSLT questions!

Thanks! I’ll give it a whirl.. I guess I’ll have to learn XSLT first, though! It seems pretty easy, though.

XSLT has a few gotchas but the vast majority of the time It’s amazing how flexible it is and how extremely powerful.

For example, one stupidly simple thing to do is called the XSLT Ninja Technique which allows you to do fun stuff like take all headers (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) and increase their level by one (so, h1 becomes h2). Really handy when users/clients are going to enter in the text and you just know they aren’t going to respect structural hierarchies.

Hi Tevi,

I was in the same situation a few weeks ago. I didn’t know what to do. Should I really give up Expression Engine (another CMS) in favour of Symphony?

In retrospect it was definitely worth it!

The way symphony is built just feels right. You need very little code to achieve a lot of functionality.

Learning XSLT may discourage some people, but it took me only about a week or two to master it. There are only a few dozen commands and once you’ve mastered them, you can write more powerful applications than you ever could in PHP.

I can’t think of any application or website that couldn’t be built with Symphony. If it can be built with Django, Expression Engine, Movable Type, Joomla or Typo3 it sure can be built with Symphony as well.

Hmm… I don’t know about mastery, but you can certainly become very fluent in it. It’s a very flexible and intuitive language that only has a few pieces of functionality but as you use them more you start to realize those are the ones that really matter.

That being said, I’ve been building with Symphony for about… Oh, 2–3 years now and I’m still hitting brick walls every once and a while. That’s what I mean about XSLT’s little gotchas. The thing is, once you learn them you start to work around them and you see just how much you can do.