Symphony.

getting halfway there with the development guys?

getting halfway there with the development guys?

I'd say so. We're looking like we might even beat my 2-month estimate. I'll post a more detailed progress update on Monday to let you know what we've accomplished so far.

I've been wondering what to say about our progress, and I can't think of anything useful besides that there's been lots of it. It looks like my hazy, off-the-cuff guesstimate that two months of work remained (since just over a month ago) might turn out to be vaguely accurate after all. Though I make no promises and you can't prove I said anything.

Before, we were a bit too ambitious. We were adding features we weren't even sure about. The new had not fully replaced the old, so there were awkward duplicate ways to do some things. There were three pages full of preferences!

Now, we've ruthlessly stripped the core down to its essence. Every single field type, data source type, and event type is now an extension. We have also proliferated XPath everywhere and gotten rid of those clunky injected $params which means Symphony can do a whole heap more things with a whole heap less interface. There are zero preference pages.

We cut user roles. They were complicated and ugly, and conditional redirect events (which are simple and pretty) can do everything on the front-end that user roles could. We ditched maintenance mode. Similar story. You don't have to name a page's URL parameters anymore either. We even threw out the /workspace folder.

(Alistair is believed to have remarked that once we're done removing all these features, Symphony will just be a single file - a symbolic link to notepad.exe.)

So despite the shrinking feature list (which is pleasing to us anyway since it means less work), I still feel like Symphony is improving. It's becoming more focused, more concise. It requires less space in your brain to learn and to remember and to reason about. I heard that Allen intends to print a Chaotic Pattern article on this subject in the near future, so stay tuned.

GO TEAM GO!

I think.

That's exciting news! I'm very much looking forward to playing around with RC1. I'm intrigued by how things will work without the workspace folder.

Woo go HTML5 :)

Will RC1 be capable of supporting a parent-page/sub-page multilevel setup? (ie. a self-referential data source?)

I managed to get this somewhat working under r5 from git, but it seems a little "off" to me - and the items you list as being addressed would seem to provide this behaviour (?)

@tonyarnold: Not quite sure what you mean here. Let me know if I'm off track, but I'm pretty sure it will be possible to create parent-child relationships for pages and arbitrary section content in RC1.

• Pages can be nested, just like in rev5.
• Data sources can reference output from other data sources, similar to "Param Output" in rev5.
• Data sources can be contextually evaluated, depending on the presence or absence of a URL parameter. (This screenshot might explain that better.)
• RC1 makes it a little bit easier to associate entries in a section with pages.

You can combine all of the above to get some pretty rich structures, but I can't say for sure if a particular use-case is possible until we have a fully working system.

@Scott - man, those screens look good.

I guess I'm basically talking about being able to create a traditional site structure:

• Page 1
  • Page 1.1
  • Page 1.2
    • Page 1.2.1
  • Page 1.3
  • Page 2
  • ...

and so on without major limitation, from a single data source/section. It sounds like it may be possible, but potentially not in a very deep structure. I'll wait and see when you guys drop RC1 into our hands :)

Will there remain an equivalent to Create Ensemble to .zip the whole thang?

Yes there will be, in the form of an extension.

Perfect.

how is the status?

/status

> health           50
  strength         11
  armour          178

  bugs swatted     14    
  team casualties   0

I hope that answers your question, newnomad.

In terms of timeline, we're running a bit over schedule. Allen and Alistair were sucked away to work on a different project for the past 2 weeks, but they reckon we'll still have a sort of working version ready by early December.

A pownce/twitter would be a good way of sharing these things, or is there a development log to watch? http://bugs.21degrees.com.au/ is not for RC1 is it? I sure hope you will manage to timely market the advantage/diversity with similar apps that are appearing on django which is starting to get all of the spotlights in your target-community as of lately.

is there a development log to watch?

Nope, but getting Symphony a Twitter feed might be a good idea. The reason we've avoided this so far is because we don't want to have more distractions making us even later with our software releases.

bugs.21degrees.com.au/ is not for RC1 is it?

Not yet, but it will be after we release RC1. Right now rev5 is only being patched with critical bug fixes, so that's why there's not so much activity on the bug tracker.

I sure hope you will manage to timely market the advantage/diversity with similar apps

We're not trying to compete with other apps, gain marketshare, or things like that right now, but we might have some announcements of this nature when the final S2 release lands, hopefully!

A new article from Allen on S2... http://chaoticpattern.com/article/earl-grey-xslt-or-coffee/

Any all-night parties lately? I hope the pizza is flowing...

Are there any news on the progress of the development?

I'll have something significant to announce next week. Stay tuned!

P.S. No pizza has been consumed by me for a long time. :(