Symphony.

Hello fellow Symphonists,

Thought you’d all like to know that I’ve relaunched the Symphony book website: http://book.getsymphony.com/.

Should be much easier to use this time around, and don’t forget that five lucky commenters will win a copy of the book and a spiffy Symphony tee!

Looks great Craig!!!

Thanks Craig for making it so easy for everyone to contribute!

And yes, I accidentally misspelled your name in my first comment that I left on the book website but I blame Michael for subconsciously planting the idea into my head (from the Symphony beta thread).

Great Craig! Congrats for this iniciative!

I blame Michael for subconsciously planting the idea into my head

Ha! Me? How can you say this, Lewid?

:-)

(One day I will learn typing.)

Commenting here or there? :)

If it’s about the book, there. If it’s about mistyping one another’s names, then here ;)

Almost spilled my coffee while reading your new bio. Please keep doing that and never stop writing… :-)

After the Symphony book is finished and Symphony 3 is stable, would you mind writing a futuristic thriller with a private detective in film noir style? Thanks in advance :-)

How do you plan your Symphony projects?

If your answers are good enough, I’ll put some of them in the book :)

And thanks for the kind words, Jens. I’m just glad I wasn’t funny enough to actually waste any coffee. That would be tragic.

Looking for tips and tricks on using Symphony in team settings

One or two responses will be featured in the book. As long as they're riddled with foul language and sexual innuendo.¹

¹ I'm kidding of course. Or am I?

The Symphony book project was cancelled.

Project Cancelled

After nine months and ten chapters, Wrox decided to cancel this book project in June 2011. Symphony Start to Finish was to be the first comprehensive guide to building websites and web applications with Symphony. It was meant to cover the next major version of the platform, but after Symphony lost its only full-time developer, progress on that version was delayed significantly, and in the end Wrox was unable to accommodate the extended timeline.

What Now?

The considerable work put into the manuscript will be incorporated into Symphony's free online documentation.

Thank you for donating your book to the community, Craig.

Now, the Symphony book is free to read on GitHub. Keep in mind that the manuscript is not finished and was a work-in-progress that refers to Symphony 3.0 (which never was released beyond the beta, which was really an alpha) and Crane (there were plans, which were scrapped, to rename Symphony to avoid confusion with the Symfony PHP framework). There is still a lot of valuable information to be gleaned from Craig's work, and now it's up to the community to rework it to align this content with the latest Symphony release. Feel free to fork, update and send pull requests.

The XSLT Chapter is a particularly good read for anyone who is just getting started with XSLT. This is a Markdown formatted adaptation of the Chapter 8 text. I thought this would be a great place to start to help contribute to the XSLT resources on the Web Platform project.

If you'd like to see higher rates of XSLT adoption in the Web Standards community, get involved in the discussion and help to build a library of resources.

The book chapters have now been formatted with Markdown.

Chapters

• Contents
• Chapter 1. Why You Need Symphony
• Chapter 2. Symphony in Action
• Chapter 3. Getting Started
• Chapter 4. Symphony Anatomy
• Chapter 5. Content
• Chapter 6. Front-end
• Chapter 7. Data Flow
• Chapter 8. Templating
• Chapter 9. System Management
• Chapter 10. Planning Symphony Projects
• Chapter 11. Adaptive Techniques

This is awesome!

i would have loved to see Chapter 19. The API

craig, any chance you have a draft of that chapter flying around that you could share? :)

or maybe nick could let us in on the secrets to his symphony extensions API http://bit.ly/IupEDi

All of the chapters Craig wrote are available, so sadly there are no more.

The API docs are available on this site here though

This is great stuff.

The API docs are available on this site here though

as far as i understood the API Chapter was about creating an API inside symphony so other sites could interface with yours not about the Symphony API. Nick did the same with the Symphony Extensions API and i was wondering about the best way to do it. i am not sure if this can be done with core symphony or if one would need to write custom extensions for it.

This is great stuff. It's a shame the publisher pulled the plug on the book. Has anyone considered carrying it on and self-publishing via Lulu or alternative?

It would be great to see a chapter on extension development too.

@azzagazz Symphony seems to provide the basis for a RESTful API out of the box with it's advanced route handling and XML responses. If I follow you correctly you would just need to design the dynamic routes and then build their responses in the same way you would with a regular Symphony site. The only difference is that you'd be outputting XML instead of HTML for each request.