Symphony.

Hi group, I'm coming from a Drupal development background, and I'm investigating a new platform for my clients. Looking at Concrete5, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS and ProcessWire and Symphony.

I have a particular client with a complex set of functional requirements. The crux of the site is really a Community Discussion Forum area, where authenticated Members needs to be given different roles and permissions on a per group basis. ie. a Member may be an Admin in one group, but only a Member without Admin in another group.

Member Forum/Collaboration area - Guests groups, Private Groups, Moderated groups - different authenticated users will be Administrators of their Groups ie. Group 1 - Administrator is David Group 2 - Administrator is John, but David is a member of this group

Membership management (Users and Admin can edit Profiles)

Membership payment processing renewal based on an expiry date through Moneris gateway

Bilingual (En / Fr) front end (localization)

Events Calendar (and member input, and email notifications to subscribed Events)

Newsletter(s) - my client currently uses an existing third party Newsletter campaign. - members need to be able to register for a newsletter

Reporting and Statistics - like google anyltics ?

Front-end Search - search faceted like Solr ?

Modular approach to customizations and plugins - my client is very frustrated to have been stuck with an old clunky CMS for many many years, without the ability to upgrade core, or modules, etc, etc, etc.

Responsive Design on the front end

Payment processing - my client used Moneris payment gateway

Initially, I was going to go out and look for best in breed and build their solution with single sign on integration points. So for example : CraftCMS as the core, then integrate Vanilla Forums, then integrate a Calendar, then integrate a payment gateway etc etc, etc, etc. But this gets convuluted.

Thanks so much!

Symphony can do the job, but it won't be a simple bundle install and ready to go.

Membership management for one is provided by a separate extension (yes the core is quite lean) you can set up fields to determine the level of account access then based on that decide what pages should be available.

Front end search at this stage is provided through Elastic Search, so you'd have to run it as a separate service as well as configure the extension, to search exactly what you need to.

If you're planning on starting this with Symphony I'd recommend that you either make yourself familiar with XSLT or else make sure there's someone who's well versed ready to support you because I can pretty much guarantee you'd get stuck on something which was previously trivial.

Thanks a lot for the reply.

Is it a concern that the members/ extension has not had any new releases since December 2012 ? http://symphonyextensions.com/extensions/members/ Search has been since March 2012 : http://symphonyextensions.com/extensions/elasticsearch/

Agree with you on the configuration. Drupal very similar, so I'm prepared for that part.

Does Symphony make it easy to upgrade the core, and updates to extension ?

As for the Members as far as I'm aware it's pretty stable. I'm not sure if there are a couple of tags which have not been joined with master yet (as these wouldn't show up in the extension site).

In regards to elastic search - I've been working myself on an update to bring it in line with the latest version of Symphony and just needs some proper testing prior to sending a PR.

As for updates I find the process straight forward - not an update like you would do for wordpress, but nothing too difficult. Most of the time there's a period where you'd have to check for extension updates following a release, though most major breaking releases are now coming with a collective effort to update the most important extensions by the community, even if the author didn't update them further.

Is it a concern that the members/ extension has not had any new releases since December 2012 ?

We're a bit slow with updating extensions around here, since most extensions are non-commercial and only worked on when needed in a new project.

However, Members has a new release coming soon...