Symphony.

Hi everybody. Some days ago I began thinking about a CMS change. I used Textpattern before and thank I jumped on Drupal boat (bloat?). It’s a powerful tool but has a complicated UI and is a bit oversized for y needs so I used it only on clients, more complicated, websites. For the last site I am using Textpattern and I updated the core only two times since its initial setup.

Then, after some research, I found Symphony. Only few words for explain my feel: I’m impressed.

I’d really like to change my personal website’s engine and the only way I’d like to go is Symphony. But I’m afraid that this could be a too big change. The most important thing I’m evaluating is the high speed changes of Symphony.

Due to my life-style, I can not spend too much time updating (maybe trubleshooting) things that driven my pubblications so I am here to find some advices. Do you think that Symphony would require this kind of maintenance? Are updates complicated? Is for the devs a priority the compatibility between versions? You know, Texpattern has a so slow lifecycle that those questione could be useless in its case. Maybe I could not feel not so confortable if the difference in this aspect are big.

I really like this community. I find this place so nice with a lot of kind people. I hope my questions are not too generic or “dummy”.

Thank you in advance!

If you build something and it’s stable, you don’t really need to update. The exception would be for a security fix (which are rare for Symphony) or to add a feature. Like I’ve said before, I’ve got sites still running on the beta version of S2 and they still work like they did on day one.

If it makes you feel better, though, updates after Symphony 2.0 have been pretty painless for me. :-)

There are some people here – like me – who always want to be “on the cutting edge” of Symphony. To be honest, yes, you will get your hands dirty digging in code more than once if you are like us.

There are different people – like me – who built websites for clients even on Symphony 1.7 without ever needing to change them. Believe it or not, I have around ten client websites still running on Symphony 1.7.

There have been hard times with Symphony 2.0, e.g. updating from beta versions to final releases. But early adopters will ever have hard times.

In my eyes Symhony 2.0.6 is running very well, and update mechanisms have been improved sincerly. So 2.0.6 (or the coming minor releases) will be painless in production. If you think about 2.1, well, this might hurt a bit, because it will probably break some extensions. (No problem if you do not rely on third party extensions too much.)

In short: Going with Symphony won’t be as painless as Textpattern. But it will be a really rewarding experience.

from my experience with symphony and upgrading from v2 betas to the latest build has not been extremely painful, but not painless. ya, there were points when i was about to shit myself b/c of what i had updated broke a client site, but with some searching and thoughtful posting here, i’ve been able to solve every problem i’ve encountered thus far.

if you’re going to want to stay up on the latest versions of everything, then ya, it may be a pain in the ass to maintain things, but if you think you’ve hit a good spot in terms of functionality, then there probably shouldn’t be a need to change unless if it becomes a business requirement.

a lot of us have been in the same boat as you with different CMSes and from what i can tell, this community is only growing so expect good things if you learn how symphony functions.

Tank you for your help! I decidet to dive in Symphony tryout and… first of all, I’m trying to convert my Wordpress contents.

I’m still running my site off of Symphony 1.7 - my experience has been that the team release very stable software and upgrading is optional if it’s not for security or functional reasons.

Come on board, Symphony is great!

You’ll never go back @puleddu!