Symphony.

I have a big portal project in hands, and I’m evaluating the possibility of using Symphony to build it.

I need to have the following features:

1. Articles (published in categories and sub categories)
2. Events (published in categories and sub categories)
3. Forums (8 of them!!!)
4. Static pages with forms
5. Document library
6. Media library
7. Members Area
8. Polls

In your experience is this feasible in Synphony?

Cheers!

Yes :)

You mean like this here website powered by Symphony? Yup.

Yes, it can be done. But yes, you should definitely feel comfortable with writing PHP. Here are the crucial parts:

• The Forum extension is not funny at all at the moment. There are many hardcoded things to change for your website, and it’s rather hard to wrap one’s head around this. The extension doesn’t even work with the stable 2.0.6 release of Symphony.
• Members: The existing extension is at 90%. If you have time, you may wait for the next release, which will probably be the first “official” one. If you need this functionality right now, you might encounter some issues.
• Polls: There’s no out-of-the-box solution (like an extension). But it shouldn’t be too hard to implement this in Symphony.

Here are some live examples of the features you’re seeking:

On Forum

As published on the Symphony showcase, AuthorsPlace is a author portal for Random House Publishing, powered by Symphony. The website allows dynamic creation of new author instances. Each author instance can have any number of optional components attached such as a blog, events and forum (example).

On Members

Outside of the Symphony website, both Virgin Media Shorts and Road to V has a user registration/member system.

On Polls

Forward Newspaper has a polling system: http://forward.com/channels/sisterhood/ (fourth block down on the right sidebar).

@michael-e: The forum extension is indeed currently at a weird state. The version of Symphony we’re currently running on the website is a forward-ported version of 2.0.6 that has some of the 2.0.7 and 2.1 features patched in. These are features that will eventually permeate down to the master releases. We’re hoping to focus on getting 2.0.7 released before finally updating the forum extension (and consequently the Forum Ensemble that uses it) to be more polished and developer friendly.

@brunopinho78: Just as an aside, the Symphony team is available to help with technical consultation. We can help with with figuring out how to tackle a project and provide hands-on technical assistance with more complex extensions (such as the forum extension and members extension).

@michael-e: My PHP is a little bit rusty… The last project I’ve done in PHP was back in 2001, but I should get along quite well with it… ;) Is there an “expected date” for the “official” Members extension release? I’ve played around with the existing one, and I think It is quite good, but if there is something “official” comming out soon, I’ll might wait a bit…

@Allen: Thank you for the live examples. I’ll get in touch with the the Symphony Team if needed… For now, I think I’m okay… :)

Cheers!