Symphony.

It's dark, you can't see anything around you. In front of you is a sliver of light. You don't know where you are or what time it is. The glimmer of light brightens, a creak resonates from where the light originates. Compelled by curiosity you move towards the light. The sound of the creak continues, the light is now bursting through, blinding you momentarily. You step through the light, crossing to the other side.

Welcome to the Symphony retrospective zone.

2010 has been a great year for Symphony. It wasn't until fellow working group member, Nick Dunn had put together a list of achievements did it dawn on me just how much we have managed to achieve in a year. Without further ado, let's take a look at some of those accomplishments:

1. The new Symphony website was launched (end of 2009).
2. Symphony has its first official meet-up, Symposium 2010 at London.
3. A Symphony working group made up of twenty members across five groups was formed (based on the proposal made during Symposium 2010).
4. Two symphony version updates were developed and released by the working group, transitioning Symphony into a full-fledged open source platform in both its software and its development process.
5. Symphony won the 2010 McFarlane Prize for Excellence and was nominated for 2010 .Net awards in open source application of the year.
6. The number of extensions now sits at 219, with the 200th extension submitted by Giel Berkers. We surprised Giel by sending him some pretty awesome Symphony swag (details to come)!
7. We secured a publishing deal with Wrox to publish the first Symphony CMS book.

You can check out photos for both the McFarlane Prize award ceremony held at this year's Web Directions South and the 2010 Symposium at Symphony's official Flickr account.

While the Symphony team have been busy, extension developers raised the bar further by contributing some of Symphony's most useful extensions to date. Here are some of the highlights:

• Search Index allows provides the ability for full-text site search.
• HTML Panel opens up field development to frontend developers.
• Publish Tabs allow better field organisation for the backend publish area.
• Subsection Manager extends Symphony's publish interface to allow creation of nested entries.
• XML Importer offers a definitive and easy way to import data into Symphony.
• 7 language translations made available.

The journey we have shared as members of the Symphony community has been nothing short of fantastic. Symphony's platform and community have been building up steam year-on-year, and everyone involved have set an even more ambitious sight for 2011: The next release, Symphony 2.2 will be the working group's most involved release yet, sporting code that is a cumulation of the community's brightest minds (collective IQ surpassing the cumulative population of the entire north continent). There will be more on Symphony 3, a version that includes all the feature wish-list that the Symphony team dreamt up of since its inception. We also have a laundry list of updates to the Symphony website including a better search system, Symphony API documentation, update email notifications and extending the site to other languages, many of which are all well in progress. We also have plans to expand Symposium 2011, offering meet-ups in two territories. And these are just a small set of the goals we have for the coming year.

Let's raise our digital glasses for the great year we've had and cheer for what 2011 will bring for Symphony! Let's all make a date now and gather back here at the Symphony retrospective zone once more. I'll see you all again, this time next year.