Symphony.

@jonasd

Casual users / hobbyists — these folks are likely looking for a boxed solution to a specific problem (“I want a blog.”) They need common features that are easy to integrate, or already integrated.

I think those would be better off with solutions like Virb (virb.com), Squarespace (squarespace.com) or even Wordpress.

What exactly would be the benefits of throwing pre-ensembled symphony setups at the average do-it-yourself blogger?

Let’s bring symphony to more professionals and into more agencies instead. These are the people who can (and hopefully will) develop new and better extensions, utilities and ensembles and contribute their stuff back to the community.

Symphony is not Drupal, there’s no reason that both audience can’t be served.

My reason for linking to the articles is less to draw a comparison between Symphony and Drupal themselves, more to demonstrate the level of thinking that Drupal folks have gone to. This paragraph sums it up nicely:

And so we have this tension. Drupal as a ‘Consumer Product’ and Drupal as a ‘Developer Framework’. Currently, the official direction is that the project is going to attempt to be both. I think this is a serious problem.

The conclusion from a lot of research and proposals to the Drupal community was that, although they’d like to, you can’t cater for everyone, and that the better product would be borne out of satisfying the needs of a specific audience (developers) than catering for the masses. Whether we consider hobbyists the “masses” I’m not sure.

Obviously Drupal is several steps further down this path in that it already provides modules (“Blog”, “Commenting”, “Forum” etc.) that are installed and enabled by default, but this appears to be one of its criticisms both from those defectors to other CMS/CMF, and those trying to improve Drupal who are finding it difficult to do so.

Anyway, I don’t to get bogged down in the Drupal stuff. But the Symphony community has a (mostly) wonderful habit of solving problems in very unique ways, but it often pays to look around and see where competitors (they’re not really competitors are they?) stand.

Indeed Nick, it never hurts to keep our eyes open. Most here know (and some use) django, but I found it interesting that the web2py framework (even less cms, more simple & framework) has an enourmous list of ‘ensembles’, just like opensource google app engine applications, although those 2 clearly don’t focus on consumers at all.