Symphony.

I’m always on the lookout for new and better cms’. I tried Joomla:Awful. I tried Drupal:Very well programmed by you need to be a strong php programmer to really use this cms. I’m currently using expressionengine and although I really like the concept, its backend is not too good.

Anyway, I downloaded and installed Symphony on my local server(MAMP) and it was very easy to install and make a simple post. I like the backend - nice and simple without clutter. Good stuff. Not so sure about the tutorial though didn’t work for me. Probably a bug in Safari that wont work with xml and xstl. I’ll have another go with Firefox.

Cheers

Simon

I have done some work on Joomla and Wordpress and have recently been looking for a CMS that I could really customize for some specific projects. I was look at Textpattern for awhile and then ran into Symphony. And how glad am I that I found Symphony.

Plus the community here seems great. I look forward to playing around more and interacting on these forums.

I’ve been on the forum for a while now, and never posted to this thread!

I work for the UKs biggest travel tour operator on two of thier many websites as a front-end web developer. I love new technologies and have fallen in love with xslt and xml, although my knowledge is still small.

With quite a few non-deadlined personal client projects not related to work, I’m so glad that I found Symphony, (although I can’t remember when or how), as I have struggled to find a CMS that does things how I want, or at least gives me strong control over my data.

I believe Symphony is already very flexible and has a lot of potential, especially due to the amazing community attitude to each other and the framework! Brilliant!

I don’t remember where or what year I found Symphony, but there was a Michael involved and only an idea.

I guess it takes some Australians to make cool things happen :-)

I was on search for a new CMS. Last time I have done a lot websites with Typo3, but in some cases it is not very flexible and it is not really lightweight… so I tried some different CMS also Wordpress. But alltogether doesent have the power Typo3 have. So I tried Symphony CMS. Heard from it over some blogs about Best CMS I guess.

After playing around for only 3 day I really like Symphony CMS because of its flexibility and full control over the generated code. With the last I was really angry, because mostly every CMS promised that and maybe hold it until you try out some extension, wich mostly mix php and html.

Like quite a few people on here I came from textpattern - but was still on the look-out for something new as I didn’t feel textpattern quite suited my workflow. I read an article by Jon Hicks mentioning Symphony, so it was on my radar then but I didn’t really check it out properly until someone released this Fluid 960 grid template (http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/) and again mentioned Symphony.

until someone released this Fluid 960 grid template

That would be Stephen (bauhouse). Which was also my influence for using Symphony!

Cool! It’s great to hear that I’ve had this kind of influence. It makes me wonder what would happen if I ever finished any of these ideas that I throw out there. ;)

I’ve been on the search for a web designer that would be able to set up an easy editable website to hold images and blog, as im a photographer at university.

Whilst here we had a project to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create a simple site.

I liked it, sort of, but when changing pages i found it very awkward.

A friend of mine, also a photography at University suggested i used this, as it would not only give me control, but teach me a little in web design(ish) and its nice and simple to get started and work on a project.

Hopefully i will get the hang of it, hah :)

Hi guys. I’m a web enthousiast. I participate in some open source projects as french translator or as new ideas, new features founder. I come (principaly) from The Textpattern community. I discovered Symphony CMS a long time ago… without really reaching to do something with it! So, in search of a very flexible and speedy tool for my personal project, I decide to register here. Hope I can open my mind with XML and XSLT concepts and found some help to play with Symphony CMS ;)

Cheers, Patrick.

@ollieaaron and @Lowel -

We are glad you’re here. Here’s some references to XSLT, XPath, and XML that will hopefully help you get started.

@brian

Thanks mate :)

I’m more of a programmer than a designer, but having a one man shop I have to wear all hats. I had done some work with Joomla, Wordpress, Grails, Cocoon and some others, but was looking for something that was PHP based because most of my clients are small rural businesses who can’t afford and don’t need java hosting, and looking for something that used XSLT and other XML technologies because I’m an old programmer and I refuse to learn one more “Look at me! I’ve reinvented the wheel! Badly!” templating language when a perfectly good, standard language exists. Harumph! Symphony seems to fit the bill.

I found Symphony through Speckyboy Magazine in this article http://speckyboy.com/2010/07/19/14-light-and-east-to-use-open-source-content-management-systems/ I’ve been looking for a flexible, powerful cms to learn and use, and having played around with your system for the last few days, I think I can safely say that I’ve found it, keep up the good work!

I first read about Symphony in a blog article (which exactly I don’t remember) and then, a few weeks later, stumbled across this website. The neat design and the clear documentation immediately caught my attention.

I was also amazed at how easy the download and installation process went and how little time it took to get the default installation up and running.

Back at university I had always toyed with the idea of creating a CMS entirely based on XSLT, but didn’t have the guts to go through with it. You guys did and that’s what I should thank you for.

Using XSLT feels very natural to me and I am still amazed at how little code I need to achieve a lot in Symphony, especially in comparison with other CMS such as Expression Engine or Word Press.

The neat design and the clear documentation immediately caught my attention.

Nice!

stumble upon lol

The first time I discovered Symphony was one or two years ago. I gave it a short try and found it smart but pretty confusing (due to the kind of special nomenclature, I guess). And I really did not want to mess around with XSLT.

A few weeks ago I had to code a pretty small website, mainly consisting of a gallery which the client should be able to maintain. Every CMS I knew seemed to be too much bloated for this task. So I descided to give Symphony another try. This time there was quite a lot of documentation available so the beginning was not that hard as I thought. And even XSLT turned out to be a great thing after all. :-)

Today I am working on my third Symphony-driven website and like the system more and more. To be honest, for many projects I still use Silverstripe, but this may change in the future :-)

Erm, to get back to the topic: I can not remember where I read first about Symphony. Recently it appears in almost any of these CMS comparison blog posts, so it is quite present on the web.

Last year i was building a website completely based on a blogspot feed, Searching xslt on the web i soon came across symphony. Started practising the tutorials and realised all the potentials. It’s a great tool and without being an expert programmer you can achieve almost everything, love it!

Stumbled across Symphony here after looking for a CMS, as I was somewhat disillusioned with the likes of Wordpress, and felt limited in what I could do with Textpattern. There were lots of other options I tried, although none seamed to let me define how I wanted my content to be shaped. The ones that came close were: EE, which I did try out in some depth — found it helpful but did not like the way they did some things; and also Drupal, which did my head in (what with having to undo everything that was assumed upon me already).

But Symphony, seems to have hit the nail on its head perfectly. Sure, there are things that Sym cannot do, but that is the idea. Instead they have made it easy for you to shape the system as you desire. Only the bare (important) minimum is done for you, the rest is up to you. I am sure this putts some people off. However it is a good thing. You are given a clean slate to build on top of, with building blocks to aid you in your master plan. There is no time spend disassembling what is already there, to just try and rebuild everything how you like it. If that is even an option, if not, you are forced to add item after item to an already heaving system, and then run the risk of the whole lot collapsing on top of you.

I am glad I stumbled across Symphony.