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Dear all member, I started just fews days ago looking into Symphony and seems the answer I was looking for.

I read some article on Quora to understand how Symphony is perceived on the market but I didn't find anything that could help me out. What do you think about it? Do you think is a niche market or is a product that can have a big boost?

Thank you for any comment

Symphony is pretty powerful; unfortunately marketing wise maybe not much have been done and the CMS is not as popular as others; which might mean people are unfamiliar to it's benefits and structure and would 'prefer' a household name.

I'm not sure if you are calling it a niche market for any particular reason but I think there's potential for it to be more popular it all depends on who happens to come across it.

Thank you gunglien for your prompt answer.

I'm referring as niche the fact that is using XSL and XML, before Symphony I never heard about CMS based on this two technologies, but to be honest I'm getting close to CMS just in the last few month and most of the one that I had look at (Joomla, WordPress, ExpressionEngine) are based on PHP and MySQL ... even though as well Symphony use MySQL

Yes technology wise you can say it's a 'niche' in that most CMS's do not use XML and XSLT for templating.

most of the one that I had look at (Joomla, WordPress, ExpressionEngine) are based on PHP and MySQL

Regarding its core technologies, Symphony is pretty much the same as the systems you mentioned (Joomla, WordPress, ExpressionEngine). It's running on the LAMP stack, so it's built around PHP and MySQL.

The key difference is how it works.

It has no pre-defined content structures like "pages" or a "blog". Instead, it's completely based on custom content types, so you can build whatever your project requires. That could be a blog, an e-commerce system or just an API for a native application. Think of it as a form builder for your backend.

In that regard, it's better compared to newer systems like Craft CMS, ProcessWire, Kirby or even services like Contentful.

The XML and XSLT part is just the templating layer. Under the hood, Symphony automatically generates XML documents for all pages, then uses XSLT stylesheets (your templates) to transform an XML document into its final output format (like XML, HTML, JSON, PDF, etc.).

I'm referring as niche the fact that is using XSL and XML, before Symphony I never heard about CMS based on this two technologies

It's indeed not very common in the PHP world, although not entirely unique to Symphony, and generally found more often in Java and .net based systems.

@jensschrbl

Thank you for your clarification, when I was reading what you wrote I thought ... that's exactely what I was looking for. I always liked XML and XSLT since 2000 but I never had the chance to really use them apart a brief experience with Apache Cocoon.

I definitely want to learn it and I will take advantage of a real project I've to do. If you guys can suggest me some tutorial apart the one that I already found in youtube, please let me know...

A little note about the name... when I google the first time I got a lot of "symfony" that is a PHP framework as far as I understood, but belive me at the beginning I was a little confused, spending some time reading about it and checking in youtube, maybe I'm the only one...

A little note about the name... when I google the first time I got a lot of "symfony" that is a PHP framework as far as I understood, but belive me at the beginning I was a little confused, spending some time reading about it and checking in youtube, maybe I'm the only one...

Yeah, we're aware of that and you're definitely not the only one who's confused by this.

Thing is, when Symphony (the CMS) was originally created over 10 years ago, Symfony (the framework) just started out as well, and wasn't as well known and ubiquitous as it is today.

We already discussed renaming Symphony a few times, but didn't come up with a better name that everyone would agree on and liked as much as "Symphony"...

Thanks Jens ;) Well explained.

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Symphony • Open Source XSLT CMS

Server Requirements

  • PHP 5.3-5.6 or 7.0-7.3
  • PHP's LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled (--with-xsl)
  • MySQL 5.5 or above
  • An Apache or Litespeed webserver
  • Apache's mod_rewrite module or equivalent

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