Symphony.

The Overture beta site you see now will eventually replace the main one. It's current still in development, but will eventually sport a variety of new features as explained below.

Account System Integration

The Symphony account system will be integrated to Overture. Members need not travel outside of Overture to manage their account.

Website Showcase

The website showcase's new design accommodates more websites displayed per page. We plan to offer filtering and sorting based on tags.

Downloads

Packages exported using Symphony 2's "Export Archive" feature will have a similar showcase so developers can share sites which they have built. We plan to offer a PayPal donation system for these packages so that Symphony developers can earn some cash for their hard work.

Forum

We've found members of the current forum have been neglecting the use of categories. The new forum will have a more rigid posting system which will ensure members post to the correct category. Each category will have a slightly different posting format.

For example, the Installation Issues category will request the member to attach their installation log, a link to their phpinfo() and briefly describe the steps they took to install.

Documentation Section

This section will replace the Overture wiki. We have found the wiki to be less than ideal. Mark Lewis, our Overture moderator is hard at work writing documentation for Symphony 2. His document will be available as a PDF download on this page.

We've found 2 pages in the wiki to be very useful: Compatible Hosts and Tutorial and Screencasts. We are planning to implement a collaborative system for these pages.

Submissions

Instead of having to go to the accounts page to submit a website, extension, application or an XSLT utility, the submission link is now context based. For example, the website submission page now has a link to submit a website.

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Here are the direct links to Overture beta pages:

• Symphonian websites: http://beta.overture21.com/
• Downloads: http://beta.overture21.com/downloads/
• Accounts: http://beta.overture21.com/accounts/
• Help: http://beta.overture21.com/help/

About the redesign

Our main goal for the new Overture website is to combine the different section of overture into a consistent layout. The sidebar is now persistent throughout all the pages on Overture. The structure is now fixed width to allow more flexibility for the designs of different sections. The design for the sidebar will be changing to accommodate for a slew of new things to come.

Overture beta's design, naming scheme and section structure are still very much work-in-progress.

Awesome. Great work guys.

Thank you :)

Pagination not working yet?

Nothing works except for the forum for now.

ok,

Allen, I've got a question out of interest:

You are using Vanilla for this forum and for the bug tracker. I assume you are using Symphony for the other parts of Overture. Shouldn't it be possible to handle the whole community (accounts, forum, extensions, ensemble, XSLT snippets, bug tracker) with Symphony 2 itself?

We've got front end editing, now. The section fields are even more flexible than before ... It would be a great proof of the capabilities of the system. Okay, it would be a lot of work, too, but that is why I'm just asking out of curiosity.

It's definitely our intention one day. You may have noticed that we have been trying very hard to simplify the forum in effort to lessen the amount of work required when we migrate to our own solution with Symphony 2 when we decide to take the plunge.

I anticipate that Symphony 2 will be able to deliver 80% of the core functionality but will need extensions and customised data sources for the other 20% (i.e. Who's Online, Next Unread, etc.).

Looking forward to that. I myself was thinking about this plunge. :D Keep us posted. ;)