Symphony.

I've been looking at Symphony for quite some time now, though I by no means have any practical experience in implementing it on a production site. I have a question about whether Symphony is right for a new site I'm working on.

My wife runs a celebrity birthday website at www.leannesbirthdays.com with 57,142 records in the database. It's really old. The site content has continuously been expanded and maintained all these years but the backend and the design (yuck) have stayed the same this whole time. She gets a fair bit of traffic and is on the first page of Google when doing a search for "celebrity birthdays."

The point of my saying all this is, it's a site that has more potential than what it's now experiencing. I started developing a replacement with a new design and using the Lithium framework with MongoDB as the database. I have to say, this combination rocks as far as speed is concerned and it came together very quickly. It falls way short in Lithium's documentation and I have hit some road blocks while work on her admin tool.

I would really love to use Symphony for her new site. My question is this: is Symphony a good choice for this kind of website? My wife will need to be able to search on a variety of criteria to find records and update them on a daily basis. From what I've seen of the admin tool and extensions, I'm not seeing anything that would really help her parse and filter almost 60,000 records efficiently. I'm also finding scant details on extending Symphony so that I could build my own extension.

Maybe I'm not digging deeply enough, but I'm wondering if Symphony can be used effectively in this context. Any opinions and advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Gary, and welcome back (I remember you posting about admin filtering a while back).

If I understand correctly the site is quite simple — a single table ("Section" in Symphony speak) of people, fields being:

• first name
• last name
• date of birth
• date of death
• description

This is perfect for Symphony, you can use the core fields (text input, date and textarea respectively). Frontend search can be achieved using a data source pulling from this section, and filters on the various fields.

Backend search however is limited to the Publish Filtering extension. You had problems installing this last time but we didn't get to the bottom of why. I maintain the extension, so will gladly work through any errors you might be having. It's an extension that the majority of users install, so it needs to be as stable as possible.

Publish Filtering lets you filter on any filterable field in the section (the vast majority of field types allow filtering) but only allows one filter at a time. Symphony's backend doesn't really support multiple filters, so the workflow is to choose your field (first name, last name, date etc.), enter a value to filter by, and you're done.

The Date field is very expressive, since it uses PHP's strtotime function. This means that using Publish Filtering you should be able to search for dates like:

• today
• 2011
• 2011-01-23
• next week
• last year

and so on.

I notice the site presently has an "Edit" button to allow people to submit updates. Are these put into some sort of queue? You could achieve this in Symphony in several ways:

• have the form emailed to your wife, no data stored anywhere other than the email text
• have the data stored into a "Person Edits" section (which is a cardon copy of the Person section you already have), and the email to your wife includes a link into Symphony to that entry directly
• use the Entry Revisions extension so that the frontend form creates a new version of the person entry, so your wife can review and roll back if necessary

I'm also finding scant details on extending Symphony so that I could build my own extension.

This is something the guys are aware of. Only recently have we documented Symphony's core, and so tutorials on writing extensions should come next. But we've got 259 extensions to date, which means that if you need to write one, the chances are someone has already created something very similar that you can use as a guide. Your best bet would be to ask in the forum, and someone will be able to point you in the right direction.

Symphony might not be as pretty and light as Lithium under the hood, but if you're comfortable writing PHP already then you won't have any problem picking it up :)

Thanks for such a thorough response. I had completely forgot we discussed Publish Filtering previously. I've installed the latest version of Symphony and your Publish Filtering extension. I'm happy to say it's working and I'm going to dig in.

I have to say, I'm really excited about doing this in Symphony. I really like the CMS and the community. I think this will end up being a perfect fit for what I'm doing. I'm not merely looking to translate my wife's website into a new platform, I have plans for adding functionality that's been requested over the years and Symphony seems perfect for what I need.

Sounds great! Keep us posted on your progress and shout if you have questions :-)