Symphony.

Hello, I am new to Symphony and for the last few days I have been playing around with the default Ensemble, but now I am trying another one, called Symphony no. 5.

http://firegoby.github.com/symphonyno5/

Is anyone here affiliated with it? I like the fact that the creator bases its design on modern HTML5 standards and uses LESS.

I would like to hear how others feel about it.

Sounds cool! Look forward to trying it out.

Hi there, I'm Chris, the creator of Symphony No.5 - Many thanks for your comments.

I made it to act as a common base for all my new Symphony projects, a clean slate with some boilerplate code already done so I could 'clone and go' (hence it keeps getting updated as I learn more about Symphony!). I guess you could say it's a bit like Opinionated Symphony in that it presupposes one will be using certain additional tools, at the moment: git, HTML5, LESS, Coffeescript and Bootstrap - and wanting to do things like minify/concatenate JS for production.

A petty example for the next update: I'm going to merge the css/ and less/ directories into a single styles/ folder and change js/ to scripts/ - not only will it eliminate a directory but it makes the naming more accurate, I (we) are no longer just writing plain CSS and javascript so why hold on to the legacy of format labelled dirs? (Like on the frontend we moved away from index.html to /)

I see it being quite different from the Default Ensemble (which I see more as a demonstration & learning aid rather than the base for new projects, could totally be wrong on this, more experienced Symphonists will know more)

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions or ideas for the project I would love to hear them and thanks again for checking it out

Very cool stuff firegoby.

I am new to Symphony and your ensamble is definitely a departure from the starters kit, so the learning curve is pretty high for me, especially since I am accustomed to Drupal and Wordpress.

I do have an observation, when I put my very plain site through the W3C Markup Validation Service I see this error:

*Validation Output: 1 Error

Line 1, Column 420: Bad value X-UA-Compatible for attribute http-equiv on element meta.

…Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">

Also, when I visit the site in Chrome, the browser seems to think the sites language is set to Italian, but in the header of the source code I can clearly see lang="en". Also

…Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">

That is explained here:

http://html5boilerplate.com/html5boilerplate-site/built/en_US/docs/html/#make-sure-the-latest-version-of-ie-is-used

Excellent, thanks

Ah yes, IE yet again making my life just a little more grey ;o)

@ctrlaltdel - Do you mean the 'Do you want to translate this page...' bar comes up in Chrome? With a default clone of the repo? (i.e. you haven't added any content yet) Very weird indeed, don't have a clue what could be causing that, anyone else got any ideas?

The heart of the project (other than Symphony of course) is really the master.xsl file, I learnt quite a bit about XSLT just figuring out how to turn the HTML5Boilerplate into that. Good learning exercise if you want to understand XSLT better.

Does anyone have any experience with CoffeeScript? The concepts seem pretty fun to me, but I don't know how it really works out if you actually use it.

I've used it on a few projects now (mainly using it to write JQuery code) and I find it very, very nice to work with. I think a lot of it depends on if you have experience with either Ruby or Python, in which case it makes Javascript feel a bit like their lovechild (it tries to take the best from all recent dynamic languages). However, if your primary programming background is PHP (or another C style language like Java) I would imagine the attraction of Coffeescript would be a lot less since Javascript is already in the C style. (I've heard Javascript best described as Scheme with C style formatting).

Interestingly though, on a recent project I had to write quite a lot of custom JQuery code, including a purpose built plugin and found myself writing it in plain old Javascript. I wish now looking back on it I'd started in Coffeescript as I think the code would have ended up cleaner and shorter but because I'm still a learner with Coffeescript I knew I could knock up a proof of concept quicker in regular JS, then as these things tend to do, the prototype got refactored into production code and so the whole thing is left in JS. The practicality of shipping working code on deadline versus not I suppose.

I'd recommend giving it a try on a personal project, or better yet for a quicker try-out take some short Javascript code you already know really well and translate it into Coffeescript, see if you think the language adds something or makes things easier for you.

Btw, re: Symphony No.5 - it's really simple NOT to use Coffeescript, simply delete the script.coffee file and just use script.js as usual. The Ant build script will only build Coffeescript files if they're there, so no changes or config needed.

@ctrlaltdel - Do you mean the 'Do you want to translate this page...' bar comes up in Chrome? With a default clone of the repo? (i.e. you haven't added any content yet) Very weird indeed, don't have a clue what could be causing that, anyone else got any ideas?

Yeah, it happens in Chrome for OSX and Windows. Though it may just be something wrong with my server/apache configuration because I saw it happening with the default symphony ensemble as well.

Symphony No.5 just got an update!

Headliners: -

• Symphony 2.3 - yeah!
• Cleaner Bootstrap integration - easy upgrading
• Better Ant build script - order dependent filelist
• Better documentation - detailed install/usage instructions
• Simpler LESS setup - less prescriptive
• Code cleanup and fixes

See the Changelog in the README for full details http://github.com/firegoby/symphonyno5

Finally got around to updating Symphony No.5 to all the latest versions of its parts...

• Upgraded to Symphony v2.3.3
• Upgraded to JQuery v1.10.2
• Upgraded to HTML5Boilerplate v4.2.0
• Upgraded to Modernizr v2.6.2
• Upgraded to Normalize.css v2.1.2
• Upgraded to FontAwesome v3.2.1

PS - There's also symphonyno5.sh command line tool that will download and setup a full Symphony No.5 project (extensions.csv, dual mainfest folders, fresh git init with develop branch) with just one command and a couple of y/n prompts - check it out if it sounds useful! Super quick starts to new symphony projects, with best practices!