Symphony.

I am the founder of CMS Critic and would be willing to publish a review of Symphony if someone from the community would be willing to write one up. I’m not well enough versed on the CMS yet to be comfortable extolling it’s virtues but would be willing to publish an article from anyone who was willing to do so in an effort to assist providing publicity to this fine product.

If anyone is interested, please let me know.

If Mike is still willing to publish it, I’d like to revive this call. Anyone interested in writing up a Symphony review? It’ll probably lead to instant fame and fortune… and maybe a man hug from Allen.

I might be able to give it a go. In January I was not familiar enough with Wordpress, but now i think I could give a fairly good side-by-side. WP’s new ‘custom post types’ would give a good context for the comparison.

Would that be appropriate, or just a straight-up review?

Heh. Somehow I suspected you’d be the one to volunteer ;)

I think it’s entirely up to you how you write it, but the next step is probably to get in touch with Mike and see what he thinks. I’ll email you both. EDIT: I don’t have Mike’s email so I’ve tweeted you both instead. How savvy of me.

To everyone else, if you’re also interested in writing about Symphony, get in touch. There are lots of publications out there :)

Hey There.

Thanks for the tweet. My email (for future reference is my first name @ cmscritic.com) <- spam block for the win

My only requirements are that no other systems are bashed in the writing of the review, not that I would expect that to happen but you’d be surprised what gets submitted nowadays. Just fire it to me with screenies and I’ll publish right away (after a quick read through.) See previous reviews for an idea on formatting: CMS Reviews

Just a quick little side-question: When you say no bashing does that mean no side-by-side comparison where Symphony comes out the winner (in the opinion of the reviewer) or just no outright “this is so much better than that crappy WordPress piece of junk… God thing is crappy” sort of stuff?

For the record I’d be happy to see the Symphony community stay away from openly bashing other systems at all. Developing a CMS is no small feat—it takes intelligence, hard work, and in the case of open source systems, a bit of selflessness. We may disagree with a particular system’s implementations and approaches—sometimes vehemently—but we can’t discount the work that’s gone into them. And to be honest, there are plenty of people for whom Symphony won’t always (or won’t ever) be the best choice.

And when comparisons are drawn, I think they should always be fair and contextual. What specific things does Symphony do better? What specific situations make it a better choice? I’d hate for a developer or user of another system to feel like it was being attacked outright in order to make Symphony look good. I think Symphony looks just fine on its own.

dougoftheabaci: I’m referring to no flat out bashing (ie: wordpress is crap). Comparisons are awesome. It is a site for critics so there’s nothing wrong with saying that wordpress is bloat or joomla is over-rated just as long as it’s not slanderous.

I agree with czheng’s ideals on the matter.. except being that the nature of the site is to be critical, criticism is ok, as long as it’s not harsh.

I can see what you mean. It’s more constructive criticism. For example, WordPress is great for blogs and is a very user-friendly system. Symphony, on the other hand, is much more flexible and gives you a much higher degree of control, especially on the front-end.

The one reason I’d say whoever plans on writing this should use comparisons to platforms like WordPress, Drupal and ExpressionEngine is because to many designers and developers they are known entities. If we say, “Symphony allows for more control than WordPress but is more user-friendly than Drupal while being free and open source (unlike EE),” that would give people a baseline for comparison.

Anyway, just wanted to throw in my two cents.

Just wanted to throw in that I’d be willing to volunteer to write something if you guys need it (heh, obviously. :)

Ok we need it. Go for it Jonasd!

Andrew has been with the Symphony community for a long time and knows his stuff, especially when it comes to XSLT.

Jonas’ articles on Symphony are a joy to read. It’s well written and insightful.

Can’t think of a better two to write reviews for Symphony. Thanks to both Andrew and Jonas for stepping up to this!

Jonas,

What would you think of doing a general review and/or intro, then I could write something specifically comparing the workflow of custom fields in WP3 vs Symphony. Then Mike could publish mine after yours at his editorial discretion?

Would that make sense Mike?

Hi Andrew, that sounds great…I will try to throw in a short bit about how Symphony compares to other popular systems, but I won’t go into too much detail. (A real comparison is an article in itself!) I’ll circulate a draft around for comments before submitting it to Mike.

We’ve just published Jonas’ write up on symphony here: Symphony CMS review we’d love to hear your thoughts/additions in the comments.

Thanks again Jonas. You did a great job.