Symphony.

Hi I'm researching cms' symphony looks good for what i need.

Please let me know if Sym' lends itself to do the following.

1- Be setup with multiple users who can swap and discuss data easily, or choose not to. Perhaps Sym' can be used beside another, social platform with complex out-of-the-box user controls?

2- Autofetch (XML from feeds I setup), or have XML uploaded by a user (I assume yes). Store it in a webserver.

3- Display the data (as a complex graph in particular).

4- Allow a user to edit their data (from a user-interface that would need to be built I assume), and create a new record.

5- spit the data out as an XML file, to begin the cycle again.

If the Answer is "No" maybe point me in a better direction.

If the Answer is "hell-yes" then I will continue my research.

Thanks in advance. N.

-1. Have a look at the members extension.

Regarding #2 and #5, XML is where Symphony excels, owing to how it has been designed. It's like Symphony's native language, so any time I've had to do anything with XML, Symphony has always been there for me. There is a type of data source called "Dynamic Data Source" that will fetch XML from a feed; you can even filter the incoming XML using an XPath expression. As for outputting XML files for other people to access, it's just a matter of creating the page like any other page in Symphony, setting the "page type" to XML, and then creating an appropriate template.

-4. Yes, you can certainly create interfaces that let other users interact with the data. You can build the interface like any other page on your Symphony site and use events to process user submission.

-3. This is a bit vague, so I'm not sure what to say here. You are entirely in control of how Symphony structures and outputs your data. So you can certainly have Symphony output the data in XML, HTML, etc., and then use a JavaScript/HTML package to create a graph, or maybe PHP's GD extension if you want an image. Hell, if you are really adventurous, I suppose you could even attempt to generate your graphs as SVGs on the fly—but that is far beyond my XML skills!

If you have the time, I recommend you download the latest version of Symphony and try working through a tutorial or two or just experiment on your own with trying to build a simple version of what you want to achieve.