Symphony – Blog

Our migration to Rackspace Cloud

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:48:00 +1000

By Allen

Recently, we've seen the Symphony site go offline in four separate occasions. For the past several years, the site has been hosted on Amazon's AWS. For the most part, the server environment had been very stable with only a handful of server hiccups all these years. The most recent downtime however, had been the most severe with a downtime of over 24 hours. We've since moved our home to a new environment and here's the low-down.

Rebuilding the Symphony Site with Factory

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 06:03:00 +1000

By bauhouse

Thank you to the community for your support of the Symphony Factory project, and to Nils and Johanna Hörrmann for their work on the beautiful responsive web design. It has been wonderful to be able to follow the evolution of the design and to start working with the framework to test and refine the layout. Now that this work is mostly completed, the work to rebuild the Symphony community site with the Symphony Factory framework can begin. In fact, it is already in progress, although we're only in the early stages.

Articles, Articles, Articles

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 22:41:00 +1000

By Allen

What does these four gentiles, Nick Dunn, Brendan Abbott, Simone Economo and George R. R. Martin have in common? That's right, they're all accomplished males.

Incidentally, 75% of the mentioned distinguished gentlemen have also authored epic stories about the adventure of Symphony development.

Symphony 2.3.1 Released

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:22:00 +1000

By Allen

Hot off the heels of the version 2.3 release, the team got right back into adding a big list of updates and fixes. As a cryptic man would say, a minor version update, by name it may be so. But in spirit of the nomenclature, this is certainly not! Whatever the case, ignore this cryptic man, and just download the update already.

For the love of statistics

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +1000

By Allen

Just over a week ago we sent out a newsletter to Symphony website members. It's not often that we take the effort to do mail-outs, but when we do, we make sure we've got important things to say. We thought that we should share our newsletter and survey results with the community.

Symphony Factory

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:59:00 +1000

By Allen

In a previous blog post, I outlined Symphony's plans for the Symphony website and how spin-off projects from the community can congregate to become a family of networked sites. That plan starts with Symphony Factory

Introducing Soario Inc.

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 01:05:00 +1000

By Allen

Today is the day I get to proudly announce Soario, a company co-founded by yours truly, sewn from the seeds of Symphony CMS.

New Symphony website Plans

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:44:00 +1000

By Allen

The current design of the Symphony website is a couple years old now. We’ve had plans to overhaul it over a year ago that never really came into fruition. That is not to say that we haven’t been working on it, though. The challenge as it turned out was defining exactly it is that we wanted to achieve with our new website.

The rest of the article examines the key requirements the new site and how we intent to go about implementing it. While I would've liked to have posted this article alongside a surprise launch of the new site, truth be told, we still have a little ways to go yet. Instead of keeping quiet about all the exciting plans for several more months, I thought it's better to lay it all out.

Announcing Symphony 2.3

Tue, 29 May 2012 09:21:00 +1000

By Allen

Last year, a baker once asked me, "Do you want icing on your cake?" Now, if there is just one thing you need to know about me, it would be that my answer is always, "Yes, ALL the icing." This year, I've gone back to my baker to get a new cake. And before I continue with my fictitious story, yes, I have an appointed baker, like I do with tailors, hairdressors and manicurists. I'm an important man, dammit.

A short note about PHP5.2 support

Tue, 29 May 2012 10:00:00 +1000

By brendo

The Symphony 2.3 release opens up a whole new range of possibilities for developers to create awesome sites and applications. We've cleaned up a lot of the codebase and we are always looking at ways to make it leaner and more efficient. Because of this reason, we've decided that the Symphony 2.3 line will be the final releases that we test against PHP5.2.

We feel that with the recent release of PHP 5.4, now is a good time to end our relationship and look forward to the new possibilities that developing with a PHP 5.3+ codebase brings.

Hackathon 2.3 Podcast

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:51:00 +1000

By Allen

Allen raises his left fist. "You see this fist?", Allen remarks with conviction. "He has a brother." Allen then raises his right arm, but soon realised he didn't have a free hand to point to both his fists. Without the ability to point to his intimidating punching instruments of death, he feared the impact of his message would be somewhat diminished. "I really need someone to point to my fists", Allen quietly utters to himself.

Brendan, standing next to him heard Allen's mumble and like a true showman, pointed to Allen's pumping fists with gusto. Jazz hands were even involved at one point during the pointing affair.

A new way to discover extensions

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:48:00 +1000

By nickdunn

It's clear that there hasn't been enough extension-loving recently, so here we introduce both an XML schema to document your extension metadata, and a handy aggregator website that watches Symphony extensions on GitHub to let you know what's what.

Meet xpathr!

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:35:00 +1000

By brendo

An idea was hatched earlier in the year from the Advocacy Working Group to have an online XML/XSLT service that allows users to transform their XML and XSLT and easily share these snippets. Meet xpathr!

Making Extensions easier to find

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 23:15:00 +1000

By brendo

Back in July, @nilshoerrmann logged an issue that kickstarted a discussion on how we can improve the extension categories to stop the growing number of 'Other' extensions. After some discussion, we'd like you to please welcome the Membership, Multilingual and Third Party Integration categories.

Announcing Symphony 2.2.5

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:44:00 +1000

By brendo

Hot on the heels of the Symphony 2.2.4 release, 2.2.5 fixes a couple of critical issues with the Select Box Link and Date fields.

Symphony 2.3 Dev Notes #3

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 20:55:00 +1000

By brendo

This installment of the 2.3 Dev Notes includes information about the changes to localisation with the introduction of namespaces.

Announcing Symphony 2.2.4

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:24:00 +1000

By brendo

The Symphony working groups are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Symphony 2.2.4, a bugfix and security release.

Symphony 2.3 Dev Notes #2

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:13:00 +1000

By brendo

This installment of the 2.3 Dev Notes includes information about multiple output parameters for Section Datasources and Publish Labels for fields.

Symphony 2.3 Dev Notes #1

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:50:00 +1000

By brendo

As Symphony 2.3 progresses, we are going to post intermittent development notes for extension developers to stay up to date and ensure the transition from Symphony 2.2 is to Symphony 2.3 is as seamless as possible.

On the horizon, Symphony 2.3

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:30:00 +1000

By brendo

The release of Symphony 2.2.3 marks the end of development on the 2.2 branch, and the Working Groups are already hard at work on the next release, Symphony 2.3. I thought I'd take some time to outline a couple of the changes that we're working towards in this next release.