Symphony.

I'm going to be doing an intro to Symphony at my local Web tech meetup next month, and I was wondering if anyone has suggestions about simple site setups I could do live to whet my colleagues' appetites. The caveat being the assumption of no XSL knowledge, so it will be an intro to that as well. Currently I'm thinking the defacto standard 'blog in 20 minutes' approach. Any thoughts?

I would not go for the blog angle since there are so many standard out of the box blog solutions. I would show it's CMS capabilities by making several pages with "custom" content drawn from a content section (e.g. header 1, header 2, body, image, meta keywords and descriptions). If you show them the XML generated from the datasource, and the little XSL required to put the content into place, I'm sure they will be impressed (if they are used to setting up simple sites like this). Perhaps you can show them a more complex example using some pre-written XSL and section setup.

check this or maybe the team migth have some screencasts from work in progress on version 3...?

I think I'd go with a blog. It's what people are very familiar with, and if they're Wordpress (etc) user's they'll understand the ideas straight away. You can elaborate and say that a section doesn't need to be an "Article", it could be a Property (think real estate), a Page, a Promo, a User Account... anything!

I think the following would work in 20 minutes:

• a blog article section
• a list of blog articles
• viewing a single blog article
• pulling an external RSS feed (Flickr photos?) to display on a sidebar

Definitely have it all pre-built — nobody wants to see you writing code.

Why not walk through several ensembles? These aren't blog solutions and do very different things. It shows flexibility.

Actually, I'd recommend presenting something akin to MrBlank's awesome use of pulling dynamic XML from various sites to augment his website (XBox Live achievements, delicious monster, twitter, etc). Or perhaps a simple reference to his site could suffice.

@Allen; Isn't dynamic XML a bit too advanced? It's the basic ideas of Symphony which make all this possible (and which should be demonstrated).

I'd show them Symphony's true separation of content and presentation. The debug mode is great to show the inner workings. So I would start with a rather empty workspace (having only one page saying "hello world", but already one master stylesheet and a navigation utility). Then:

• create a section, let's say "movies", with some text fields and checkboxes for "DVD" and "Blueray";
• create some movies in this section; tell your audience: the website authors may already do their work now, there is no need for them to think about the website's frontend
• back to "web designer's work": create some pages (which will be rather empty at the moment) called "DVD" and "Blueray"
• demonstrate that the navigation is working based on XML ans XSLT (using debug mode)
• mention clean URLs
• create two datasources for "movies on DVD" and "movies on Blueray" using filters
• append them to different pages
• show the XML of those pages (while the frontend HTML pages are still empty)
• create the XSL to show movie data
• sum it up: Your example demonstrated that content sections may collect data (Symphony doing all the "database stuff" for you). The presentation may be completely different -- in your demo you created two different frontend pages for DVD and Blueray releases! Next steps for this (demo) website could be to pull some "latest movies" on the homepage, or to add custom fields (e.g. a rating field) to the movie section for later use on the frontend. And all this may be done with the smallest CMS backend you might think of. This is the Symphony idea.

Bingo. I guess this demo takes 20 minutes to half an hour, but people should love it. They will have a first impression of Symphony's flexibility.

Thanks, Allen!

@ashooner: Now that MAMP will create ensembles for me, I can share what I've done with Xbox Live as an ensemble. Just let me know if you want it and when you need to have it for your presentation. I'll post what I create on the forum here.

FYI: My dynamic XML sources on my site are ...

• Tumblr (API)
  • Delicious bookmarks (Pulls into Tumblr)
• Several blogs I write for (Syndicated XML)
• Xbox Live source (API)
• LastFM monthly top albums (API)
• Delicious Library shelves (local XHML file published by DL)

Twitter is just the JavaScript they provide as a badge and is the slowest thing on the page. I'm working on replacing it, but I like the formatting of the post date in "## minutes ago" rather than a timestamp. That's tough to do in XSLT. Even with all that stuff, my homepage renders in half a second or less. :-)