Symphony.

Hello everybody!

There is something i’d like to suggest.

Symphony is one awesome CMS but i dont think it’s the greatest forum engine out there. The Symphony community could benefit a lot from a great working forum (Vanilla) / QA system (OSQA).

Now i’ve been thinking about starting such a forum but i don’t think that is the way to go! Spawning symphony forums all over the internet doesn’t built a large cohesive community. So i was thinking whether it would be better to update the forum here on getsymphony.com….

What are your thoughts on this?

I don’t think that is the better way to solve this problem. What could be improved on this forum? This is the right question to ask yourself. If you have some good ideas I suggest you to post them here.

Symphony used to use Vanilla until it was replaced by this home-grown solution which, by and large, works very well. The biggest benefit is that it’s integrated with your Symphony login which covers you across the forum, blog comments, showcase entries, extensions, XSLT utilities and ensembles.

The Symphony community could benefit a lot from a great working forum

We’d certainly like to hear your thoughts on how to improve this forum. What useful features do other solutions offer that we don’t have here?

Well, finding stuff is hard imho, the search returns a lot of unrelated posts. Perhaps i am too used to the way forums work.

Well, finding stuff is hard imho, the search returns a lot of unrelated posts.

We are aware of that and several improvements are being discussed :-)

We are aware of that and several improvements are being discussed :-)

Actually, several improvements are already built and being tested, thanks to nickdunn.

Well, finding stuff is hard imho, the search returns a lot of unrelated posts. Perhaps i am too used to the way forums work.

Search is something I’m working hard on, watch this space. But a useful search alone isn’t a reason to migrate to new forum software. Is there anything else you’re finding difficult or unsuccessful?

Email notifications would be useful.

Maybe a quote post? I know a quote can be done with markdown, but just having a button to do it would be nice. Also a delete post button, I’ve accidently posted twice before, and didn’t see a way to delete the second one. Other than that, I think it works quite well, and demonstrates the flexibility of Symphony!

I’m looking forward to new search stuff, maybe an excerpt with the search term in context? Sometimes just the title doesn’t reveal the term and it’s confusing. Delete is good too. I do like the forum though, simple interface which is good.

Email notifications would be useful.

Yes, this is quite a big one that we really need to address. It’s holding back adoption of the Issues tracker from Github too. This has been asked for a few times on the issue tracker so is on the list :-)

quote can be done with markdown, but just having a button to do it would be nice

This was considered but not implemented, so as to discourage people quoting entire posts, which just adds noise. Forcing you to it by hand makes you think about what you’re quoting.

Also a delete post button

Agreed!

search stuff, maybe an excerpt with the search term in context

Well I’m glad you suggested that, because that’s on it’s way (it’s part of the Search Index extension this sit will eventually use).

I second that notification feature! The delete post as well.

Perhaps an overview of threads you participate in?

What I always like on other sites, is that someone askes a question and the first response is a post which is voted as the answer. Something like answers.yahoo.com and stackoverflow does. Example.

Not too sure if this is something for in the forum, but 9 out of 10 times it’s really helpfull when trying to find the answer to a question. Perhaps something with users rating forum-posts or something? Or a simple link with ‘this is the answer’ which the author can click on or something? It sure would add some extra parameters to get a more effective search with. Or you could categerize it for a troubleshooting or tips & tricks page or something.

Maybe you guys would like to propose a Symphony StackExchange site, such as the SilverStripe one if you think there will be a fair bit of use.

I like the suggestion kanduvisla made. Some threads get a bit off topic or just provides a lot of good debate around something. When a thread fills several pages, it would be really handy with some way of highlighting either “the answer” or maybe a more generic “the key posts” which summarizes the most direct answers to the problem.

Something like answers.yahoo.com and stackoverflow

We’ve actually been discussing something like this for a few months. Still trying to figure out the best solution, so keep the ideas coming :)

I don't know the status on this but StackOverflow actually enables us to use their platform for Symphony ... on area51

It would take all active Symphony users to get it up voted!

And there are other, open source, implementations such as the one i mentioned in the opening post.

Sorry to revive a slightly outdated topic, but I'm very eager to know if I can download this forum as an extension or ensemble. I can't seem to find it in on this site.

I find that there's severe lack of tightly integration CMS+Forum solutions, and what you've got running on this site seems very slick. I'm not a developer, but I'd love an opportunity to play around with the complete setup and see how it compares to my experience with other CMS+Forum solutions I've encountered thus far.

The forum was specifically built with tight integration with other parts of this site. As its current state, it wouldn't be very useful outside of this site's specific use. However, I do plan to clean up and repackage the forum you see here in a dedicated ensemble build at some point. I can't commit to a date on this though.

In the mean time, you can download and poke around an older version of a forum ensemble that this site's forum was derived from.

Or if you want something that has been updated to work with the latest version of Symphony (well, almost: version 2.2.5RC1), and has been modified to work as a responsive design, you might want to look at the rough beta build of the Builders Collective ensemble. We are using a customized version of this ensemble to run our agency site and have a version of the Forum ensemble integrated as part of our intranet. Admittedly the UI is in need of some polish, but it's a pretty comprehensive starting point for a CMS + Forum solution in terms of functionality.

Now that Bootstrap 2 has been released, I think it would be interesting to revisit this project by integrating the framework into this ensemble to polish it for a final release.