Symphony.

Personally, I find Symphony inspirational and I think this is a selling point, speaking as a designer that is. I'd like to communicate that over Wordpress and its stock template blandness.

Because you get nothing with a clean Symphony install, you've got to build and it's going to be bespoke.

If you want a happy, inspired designer and something that can handle the design we use Symphony.

Did someone mention iOS? You can always try the Apple marketing strategy. "We invented web sites and we're in the process of suing all other CMS and their sites will soon be removed from the internet so if you don't have a Symphony site you won't be able to trade online".

@jensscherbl

Don't even get me started on Drupal…

Interesting topic. I think everyone on this forum knows the answers to those questions but yes, the tricky one is in terms of selling it to a client if they need selling.

In this sense I see clients falling into two categories:

• clients coming with a problem
• clients coming with a solution

If a client is coming with a problem then it's easy, you get the project details, spec it out and then build it with the go-ahead. They care not for the tools being used but just for the end result. The ideal.

If a client is asking "why Symphony?" or saying they want to use X then they've coming with a solution—often without even considering the problem. The idea has already been planted by an external influence or pressure of some kind which is most likely biased or without consideration to the bigger picture. It will always be an uphill battle from there.

In either case I agree that the selling starts with the developer. Convince the developers it's the best solution and usage will increase in line with awareness—eventually doing the selling for you. Maybe one day it will result in clients coming to us and asking for their site to be built in that popular CMS they keep hearing about—Symphony. :)

Personally however I quite like that it's a small but refined community and CMS/F. I've seen EE's forums go from small and friendly to the point of being fairly useless now. WordPress has reached saturation point and is doing more harm than good with every marketer and web designer wannabe selling their 'web development services'. Promotion and selling is good but it's a careful balance between too few and too many users. The higher the learning curve the higher the quality of it's user base (from a development side of things) and Symphony is a poweful and elegant crafting tool with an outstanding community and high quality developers involved. I wouldn't ever want to see that diluted and quantity overtaking quality.

I wouldn't ever want to see that diluted and quantity overtaking quality.

Me neither.