Symphony.

Long time Symphony users, do you miss the good old days when Symphony podcasts were a thing? Well, they're still ostensibly a thing, it's just not a thing we do in any regularity or with any hope of seeing a triumphant return anytime soon.

Why, do you ask? Because producing a podcast is long and tedious. Well, it's only time consuming if we want to avoid molesting our dear listener's earholes. And frankly, as the person that is usually tasked with editing and production, the whole process is about as fun as milking my pet hamster (disclaimer: I don't have a hamster but I'd milk one if it asked me nicely).

Here's the thing, I still want to conduct real-time discussion with my fellow Symphony colleagues and have it shared among our community. If there is one thing we don't do enough of, it is communicating what the team is doing aside from milking hamsters and other creepy stuff.

So we're not going to do podcasts, instead we are going to do one better. I'm calling it Symphony Jam!. The bold and exclamation mark is there for dramatic effect, but please don't use in any regularity. Symphony Jam is a semi-regular Google hangout session broadcasted live and recorded to YouTube. If you've seen our Symphony Lounge session this year, you'll know what I'm talking about. Bear in mind though that we won't have the nice lounge set-up. Instead, you'll see a bunch of disembodied heads uttering nonsense, and occasionally spouting words that resemble wisdom.

Here's the format for each Jam session:

• Symphony Jam will be hosted by yours truly.
• We will ask up to 4 guests to participate in the hangout session.
• The session will be broadcast live
• Each Jam will be 40 minutes long and cover two topics. One set by the core team and a topic solicited from the community.
• At the end of each Jam, we will wrap up the session with an action plan which will be posted on the forum.

To start off, we have a lot of topics that we really need to cover, so Jams may be as regular as one or two a week until we cover all the critical stuff. It will eventually slow down to one every two weeks to even just once a month, depending on what needs to be covered.

So now that you guys know that this is happening, I'd love to start soliciting some topics that the community would like us to cover. Also, please let me know if you're up for being a guest on Jam too.

Note that all the past Symphony contributors, Symposium participants and working group members are automatically in the, "yes, I'm in" group. You guys aren't getting out of this that easily! Those who respectfully decline can respectfully answer to my hamster.

Below is a rough schedule of the initial set of topics we'd like to cover over the next few weeks.

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Jam Session 1 (complete)

Watch the show

• Date: Saturday, 17 Nov 2012, 11:00 am GMT
• Topic 1: Database abstraction (and ASDC)
• Topic 2: Testing & code quality assurance

Name	Guest	Confirmed
Alistair	pointybeard	Yes
Huib	creativedutchmen	Yes
Thomas	iwyg	Yes
Jens	jensscherbl	Yes

Action Plan

Abstraction will be implemented by way of a DB wrapper akin to what was partially implemented in Symphony 2.2.1 and prior (DB drivers). PDO will be implemented as a driver, possibly maintaining straight MySQLd driver as a fallback, given that PDO is not offered on all hosting environments.

Testing and QA will be conducted via unit testing implementations. Unit tests will be added to new and isolated parts of Symphony as code is progressively refactored. Unit tests will not be added to existing code given Symphony's current code construct and the herculean effort involved.

We will be doing another Jam to revisit this topic in 4-8 week's time.

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Jam Session 2 (complete)

Watch the show

• Date: Tuesday, 27 Nov 2012, 7:00 pm GMT
• Topic 1: Symphony Factory
• Topic 2: Default workspace

Name	Guest	Confirmed
Nils	nils	Yes
Mark	nils	Yes
Johanna	johanna	Yes
Marco	alpacaaa	Yes

Action Plan

Nils and Johanna is aiming to have Symphony Factory beta released Thursday, 6 December 2012. At which point, handlers of the various Symphony network sites will test it out and provide feedback to help polish Factory.

Marco from xpathr.com is looking for contributors to help with the frontend portion of the project.

Mark from symphonyninjas.com will liaise with Nils and Johanna on extending the site to offer job board functionality, possibly covering features that was originally planned for Symphony Bounty network site.

Nils and Johanna will check in with Stephen on the docs site after we've had a Jam session on the topic of docs.

We will be scheduling another Jam session for Factory a week or two after the beta is released.

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Jam Session 3

• Date: TBA
• Topic 1: Moving from XMLElements to DOMDocument
• Topic 2: TBA

Name	Guest	Confirmed
Rowan	buzzomatic	Yes
Huib	creativedutchmen	Yes
Thomas	iwyg	Yes
Nils	phoque	No

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Jam Session 4

• Date: TBA
• Topic 1: Documentation and learning resources
• Topic 2: Web Platform XML/XSLT Documentation

Name	Guest	Confirmed
Stephen	bauhouse	Yes
Fazal	fazal	Yes
Jonathan	gunglien	Yes
Brian	bzerangue	Yes

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Jam Session 5

• Date: TBA
• Topic 1: Defining Symphony
• Topic 2: Symphony's vision and philosophy

Name	Guest	Confirmed
Nils	nils	Yes
Unknown	N/A	No
Unknown	N/A	No
Unknown	N/A	No

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Jam Session 6

• Date: TBA
• Topic 1: Session handling
• Topic 2: TBA

Name	Guest	Confirmed
Huib	creativedutchmen	Yes
Jens	jensscherbl	Yes
Thomas	iwyg	Yes
Brendan	brendo	No

Seems like we have no choice we're into the Symphony Jam.

I like the idea / concept it could also help Symphony move faster especially if discussions are regular. Thumbs up for the initiative :)

Not sure about this... We all know how Chatroulette ended up...

Just kidding, awesome idea! ;)

A large part of me wants to know where you came up with milking hamsters. But there is a small part that warns me and tells me I don't want to know.

I'm glad to see this acted upon. I'm always available as a guest, where appropriate.

Possible topics:

• XSLT admin pages
• section relationships
• using specific extensions
• extension development best practices
• promoting Symphony
• Symphony testing
• best practices
• hamster abuse

Awesome idea!

Section Relationships is a biggie that could do with more discussion on Johns proposed outline on github.

I see that I've already been enlisted. So, "Yes, I'm in."

It's funny that @Lewis had this at the top of his list as well:

• XSLT admin pages

Other areas of interest:

• Default Workspace
• Symphony Documentation
• Web Platform XML/XSLT Documentation

Hmm, it seems I'm in too :) Great idea!

I'd be interested in Symphony testing and XSLT admin pages.

Section Relationships is a biggie that could do with more discussion on Johns proposed outline on github.

I agree.

P.S. Great Idea

I'd like to watch but I don't think I'd be much use as a guest.

Can someone provide info for a unsociable person like myself on how to get this stuff? Join Google+ right? and then what?

BTW is that like artisan hamster milk, I'm not interested in that mass produced rubbish, there's no flavour.

Can someone provide info for a unsociable person like myself on how to get this stuff? Join Google+ right? and then what?

It will be on YouTube. I'm sure Allen will make the link available when time.

Great idea!!!

I've updated the thread with session schedules. There are a few unconfirmed guests that I'd like to check in with and make sure they're able to do the sessions.

There are a bunch more sessions that I'll add as I get a better picture of dates and guests, etc.

Any other Symphony member who would like to be a guest on a show, please let me know. There are many repeating guests on the sessions so far, and it would be good to have new faces on the show!

@gunglien: Which topic would you want to take part of being a guest? There are more shows I'm planning, so it doesn't have to be the ones already scheduled it can even be topics that hasn't been suggested.

@moonoo2: Would you like to be a guest on the section relationship session?

Allen wouldn't mind being in the fourth one (schedule permitting) I think I've got a pretty decent knowledge of XSLT to be able to contribute in that area.

What about having sessions about alternative UI approaches (relationships, Data Sources) and relationship management?

I'm in!

@Allen, if I can be of any contribution from an ideas perspective yes, would love to.

Relationship UI, Relationship management as Nils suggests is also key topics for discussion. If it's to be considered for core bundled, what implications this has etc.. not 100% sure under the hood, but use cases may be a good idea to chat about in the Jam.

Relationship stuff halfway down this github repo is an interesting look at how it's done in LocomotiveCMS from a UI perspective.

Great idea. I think it would be a great way to keep the community up to date and maybe even amused. :)

Regarding topics:

• Section relationships
• Symphony 3 (a 101)
• Event & Extension development
• Saxon & XSLT 2 (working prototype mentioned in another forum post)
• Soario & the Symphony core team. 2013 & beyond.
• Responsive design & how the heck I can handle RESS in Symphony

Looking forward to it!

This should be great. Looking forward to listening and learning. :-)

Responsive design & how the heck I can handle RESS in Symphony

In case you haven't already seeen it, Device Categorizr.

In case you haven't already seeen it, Device Categorizr.

That's fantastic. I hadn't seen that yet. It's certainly a step in the right direction but ideally I'd need finer control of media breakpoints by width declaration rather than just categorisations as each responsive design is unique and corresponding breakpoints will vary whilst designup 'up'.

So as not to hijack this thread going off-topic is there an existing thread regarding Device Categorizr or can I pick your brains directly? Device Categorizr seems like a great place to start from.