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Symphony!! This is a bit self-interested, but nonetheless this is how I feel and so I feel compelled to share it. I love Symphony and it has been the best way for me to develop my websites and so make them editable by clients. The alternative CMSs simply do not compare, as they lack the precision that Symphony offers. Anyway, I can tell that there are fewer comments/signs of interest in the platform these days (maybe I'm wrong?? I don't know). But I just wanted to encourage everyone who has developed this that they have created an awesome platform and the precision of this is simply beyond compare. Please let me know if this will still be in development.. if it is never looked after again, or I can't look to someone if there is a potential problem.. I may need to look elsewhere for my cms needs.. thank you so much for everything! I may just impulsively use the platform now lol

I want to keep Symphony going as well. I have taken it upon myself to write the next version. It will take several months before I have something ready.

Thank you, Peter. Which repo should we keep an eye on, to offer testing, PRs?

I will make an announcement when I create the repo, which will not be very soon.

Symphony is a world in its own. Glad to see someone still cares.

Beside maintenance my feeling has always been that tutoring is lacking. The Cms had for me a steep learning curve, because the Cms, and mainly because Xslt is not the newcomer's language of choice. Xslt, beside having a clean and very elegant syntax, has some things which are still quite puzzling to me. apply-templates makes me always unconfortable, for example.

I am still building every single website in Symphony since 2009! Don't understand how it's not more popular. Luckily it has reached close to perfection and can live on without to much maintainance. I am willing to contribute as far as my skills let me!

For everyone who still wants or needs to run symphony websites in the near future, here’s a drop-in replacement symphony-folder for 2.7.10-installations (!) that works with PHP8:

github.com/animaux/symphony-php8

Simply replace the folder in your 2.7.10-installation with the folder in the repo. Likely not all PHP8-problems are fixed in there, but I’m using this on several production sites.


Here’s a list of extensions with patches for PHP8 and/or PHP8.1:

github.com/animaux?tab=repositories&q=symphony-cms-extension+php8

And here’s @pixelninja’s set of extensions made compatible with PHP8, in case you need one not included in the former list:

github.com/pixelninja/symphonycms-php8/tree/master/extensions


All of these of course come with no warranties, use at your own risk! ;)

A year has passed since I announced that I was going to write the next version of Symphony CMS. I am still working on it. I am sure that it will be released before the end of the year 2023.

For all people still using 2.7.x: in addition to my drop-in symphony-folder for PHP8 I have uploaded a new repo to github with an installer included.

—> https://github.com/animaux/symphony-php8-installer

It should work as a clean install on a server running PHP8, mySQL5, mySQL8 or mariaDB. The regular update procedure and other versions of PHP not tested. Handle with care.

Symphony was great because it did a lot of the SQL stuff under the hood and exposed a standard data format to work with on the front end.

If these concepts can be brought forward, then there is a chance it could live on.

I haven't worked in PHP for well over a decade, so I would be biased towards headless TypeScript API based solution.

The key is keeping some of the developer experience and moving towards a stack that the wider industry has adopted moving forwards.

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Symphony • Open Source XSLT CMS

Server Requirements

  • PHP 5.3-5.6 or 7.0-7.3
  • PHP's LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled (--with-xsl)
  • MySQL 5.5 or above
  • An Apache or Litespeed webserver
  • Apache's mod_rewrite module or equivalent

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