Symphony.

We’ve been listening. All the little website feature requests—the you-should-haves and the we-wish-you-would-haves—we’ve heard them. Over the past year, we’ve noted every suggestion and every new idea that we’ve come across and diligently filed them away in a cigar box in Allen’s underwear drawer (they came out smelling a little like leather and sesame oil… but I guess that’s another story).

A few months ago, when it became clear that Symphony and its community were fast outgrowing their quaint little home on the interwebs, the team put down their crocheting needles and, after a quick visit to the emergency room (gotta be careful with those needles), we sprang into action.

Mommy, Where do New Websites Come From?

It began around mid-June of this year, when a series of design experiments were undertaken to explore possible future directions for Symphony’s identity. In August, shortly after I joined the team, Allen asked me to prepare a set of comps, which kick-started the redesign in earnest. The team enlisted Icelab’s Max Wheeler (makenosound) to participate in the process, and ideas and mockups were then bounced across three continents, between the Symphony team, Airlock, and Icelab, until a final direction was adopted in late August.

In early September, implementation commenced. The team fleshed out a complete design system and started building out the new Symphony website—one section, data source, and page at a time. Content creation and copy-writing began immediately and proceeded alongside the other work. With a completely new information architecture, loads of new features, and a new documentation system built from scratch, this was a tremendous task.

All these phases—design, system implementation, and content creation—continued right up to the 27th of November (a total of 12 weeks). Over the next two days, the development copy of the site was transferred to the live server, its contents purged, and the content from the existing Symphony website was tediously, painstakingly integrated before all the new content was re-entered.

And today, 30 November 2009, the fruit of all that labor is finally yours.

Benefits and Side Effects

As you’ve no doubt noticed, this is a completely new identity for Symphony. In addition to the fresh design, all of the site’s copy has been written from scratch. The homepage blurbs, the features list, the page-specific descriptions—all new.

Existing sections of the site have been beefed up. Showcase sites, ensembles, extensions, and utilities now have dedicated pages, where they can be described in depth, tagged or categorized, and discussed. Ensembles and extensions can have files and screenshots directly attached, so Github is no longer a requirement. Extensions can provide compatibility info, and every download has its own built-in issue tracker. We’ve added categorization and bookmarking to the forum, and the search function for all of these sections has been overhauled. Our fledgling compatible hosts listing has been redesigned around community submission and reviews. Finally, the members section has been outfitted with search, country filtering, revamped member pages, and an up-to-the-minute activity stream.

There are also some never-before-seen features. We’ve introduced Symphony support services, and built an issue tracker right into the site (existing issues have been migrated from the Github issue tracker). We’ve also built a dedicated releases section with a comprehensive release history and full changelogs for each version. There’s a new page to keep track of Symphony-related chatter on Twitter, the beginnings of a Symphony presskit, video testimonials, and whole slate of new feeds.

And then there’s the documentation. Completely redesigned and rebuilt, the new documentation system features edited user guides, articles, step-by-step tutorials, a comprehensive concepts reference, and FAQs. Elegant audience filtering allows beginners, intermediate users, and developers to browse only the most relevant resources. A robust architecture for code samples, screenshots, notes, examples, and other resources undergirds the entire system. Though the content, in some places, is still a work in progress, the new framework is a major leap forward and will enable the documentation to grow and mature alongside Symphony itself. A follow-up post will discuss the documentation and our plans for it in more detail.

And all of this, every single part of the site, from the forum to the issue tracker to the documentation system, is built in Symphony.

Note: Use of the new Symphony website may be habit-forming. Side effects may include dizziness, drymouth, loss of appetite, and desensitization to awesomeness. If viewing this website causes you to experience an erection for longer than four hours, please consult your physician (and then your psychiatrist).

The Tale of the Tape

The new Symphony site’s back-end architecture consists of 32 sections, 148 data sources, 130 Symphony pages, 17 utilities, 19 events, and 31 extensions. It may or may not also contain 36 chambers of death. Only Alistair knows for sure…

Shout Outs

Much to our chagrin, you’re probably all clever enough to realize that the team couldn’t have done all this on our own, so we’ll go ahead and (begrudgingly) acknowledge the very brilliant work of:

• Airlock, for identity and website design direction
• Max Wheeler, for helping us with site and icon design
• Icelab, for producing our testimonial videos
• Nick “Consider it” Dunn, for bug testing and feedback, and for personally categorizing more than 1700 forum discussions
• Rowan Lewis, for helping us with content integration

BYOA: Bring Your Own Awesome

Though the team worked around the clock this weekend to clean up and polish the site, it’s inevitable—due to the sheer size of the site and the amount of content—that we’ve missed some pieces or made mistakes. Lucky for us we’ve got an amazing and talented commnunity that’s always eager to help (wink, wink, nudge). Here’s what you can do:

• Bugs and such: report any and all breakage on the new website issue tracker.
• Showcase sites: tag your items and update your screenshots if it hasn’t already been done by the team.
• Download items: please create a short tagline for your items, add screenshots or upload a zip archive if appropriate.
• Download items: if there are any known bugs for an item, please put them on the item’s issue tracker.
• Discussions: if you have found a forum item that is incorrectly categorized, please leave a comment on the discussion for our moderation team.
• Discussions: if you have found a forum item that is not useful or no longer relevant, please leave a comment on the discussion for our moderation team.
• Compatible Hosts: please help the team by proposing compatible hosts and posting reviews.
• Account profile: your profile now has a couple more fields, so please make sure your profile is up to date.
• Support system: from now through December 8th, help us test the support ticket system by redeeming free support tickets

The Neverending Story

Even as you all settle in to the new site, we’re already cooking up new flavors of awesome. Here are a few of the things we’ve still got in store:

• A feedback/contribution system for the documentation.
• The launch of a Symphony developer network.
• Symphony project pitch support.
• Symphony hosting (instant instance creation and ensemble deployment on the cloud with XSLT2 support).

We’ll be following-up with more in-depth posts on some of the above topics, but for now we’ve got to get back to work. Enjoy!