Symphony.

Here's an interesting article comparing Expression Engine an Textpattern. Personally I've never used them, but I've seen both of them compared to Symphony, and it seems like they are they nearest neighbors in the CMS universe. Are there any Symphonians out there that have used these that could shed light on where Symphony falls into this mix?

I just read that and I have to agree with everything in it. I've tried both platforms and found EE to be bloated and a pain to use in the admin area while TP seemed to be a blog app that didn't use blog terminology. They both have their strong points, but to be honest, Symphony 2 is just miles ahead of both in terms of simplicity in the admin and robustness in the templating (XSLT). I think the only drawback to S2 is learning XSLT and the concepts behind the system.

I am in the middle of building a site in EE for a no profit group and the client finds the admin confusing and I find myself having to do a ton of work in the EE templates to get simple things like dynamic page titles to work. (Not to mention the retarded index.php in every URL!) If the project drags on any longer, I may just convert it to S2. Now that I have a handle on it, I bet I could do it in a weekend.

EE is powerful, but it really is primitive when calling data. About all you can do is pull entries with a loop. even if you just want one thing. I don't know, I think Symphony 2 has spoiled me.

We should all comment on that blog post and tell people to give Symphony a try! :-)

I just read that and I have to agree with everything in it. I've tried both platforms and found EE to be bloated and a pain to use in the admin area while TP seemed to be a blog app that didn't use blog terminology. They both have their strong points, but to be honest, Symphony 2 is just miles ahead of both in terms of simplicity in the admin and robustness in the templating (XSLT). I think the only drawback to S2 is learning XSLT and the concepts behind the system.

This is a really great summary of what I am thinking, too.

I had been using Textpattern for a lot of projects and it's great for blogs or small magazines that should not look like standard blogs. The idea behind the system was great at the time it was first developed but the process of enhancing and extending the core took way too long. Nowadays there are many other content management systems that are able to handle more complex things than Textpattern does. Textpattern has a lot of drawbacks where the system feels like a beta version or a unfinished product. But you get used to those things and do not notice them anymore as there are many plugins that work around missing functionality. One of the really great things in Textpattern is the simplistic and easy-to-use interface that is far better than many interfaces of popular content management systems I know.

I tried Expression Engine after I ran into problems with some more complex web projects. The templating languages of both systems "feel" quite similar and many of the features I missed in Textpattern where available for Expression Engine. But the interface is so bloated I never got an overview what was and what was not possible with this system.

After that I discoverd Symphony (I think it was in a comment of Jon Hicks whose new article you mentioned above): The layout of the admin interface is as clean as the layout of the Textpattern backend while looking more contemporary. I had never heard of XSLT before but liked the idea of using a web standard and the syntax of XSL templates is quite similar to the Textpattern (and the Expression Engine) templating language (<txp:article /> vs. <xsl:apply-templates />). I was impressed by the custom field madness and the flexiblity of URL schemes.

Symphony can handle simple or complicated blogs - but it's not a blogging software. Symphony can handle small or large amounts of data, files or images - but it's not as complex as other content management systems. Symphony can be customized with it's sections and fields in a way I've always been looking for.

The system is smart but silent: content is king, not the system. With Symphony, a website can be taylored the way you want it and you needn't build it the way (insert any other CMS name here) forces you to. Think of a website you like to create and you will see that most of the features you need are possible out of the box in Symphony. I never got to that point while using Textpattern or Expression Engine.

I commented on Jon's thread, then found this. I've been a Textpattern user long term, but recently sniffing around for an alternative, as you get the impression Txp development is slowing and becoming fragmented (xPattern).

As an outsider taking a quick look around, I found EE to be an overly complicated (but powerful) system, Symphony seems to offer a similar power within a far better environment.

However, for the moment I obviously know my way around Txp far better than I do in Symphony, but that will hopefully change. I'm only a personal user of a cms, but Txp still holds me for now - I want far better image/file/attachment handling in Symphony than it appears to me to have.

I love the way Symphony feels so transparent to the user, as Nils said "The system is smart but silent: content is king, not the system" - I just hope I can see through the XSLT trees soon.

The interface and ease of use of Textpattern's backend is superior to Symphony's. I'd think twice before giving a Symphony login to a non-technical client.

@nickdunn: no. If your Symphoy backend is too complicated for your clients, you have simply organised things in a bad way.

I have used TXP (but never finished a website with it), EE (3 websites) and Symphony (more than ten websites). Like John Hicks said, EE may be a good choice if you need all those features. But: Nobody loves EE, my clients simply use it (from time to time). Most of my Symphony clients love the system and really work with it!

regarding complexity of the backend, I can see what nick is saying. If you organize a Symphony site with proper data structure, then it can actually be more confusing to some users than if you didn't, e.g. If you create a Section for each content section of your site, it is easier for non-tech users to navigate and understand, but it is actually bad form if those sections share the same data model (you end up making redundant fields for each section when they should really all be in the same section).

Again, I don't know how that compares to TXP.

My clients are extremely non-technical, so I usually avoid requiring them to get into the backend (some of that hesitation is due to the formatter, though).

I experienced that especially "non-technical users" are glad to learn about semantics. (All my Symphony clients use Markdown!) And in Symphony it is up to you to make certain things understandable.

Here's an example: Let's assume your client wants to upload pictures to a news section of his website. Some of those pictures will look best with an additional surrounding border, some others will look best without it. In this case I simply provide a checkbox which says "put a border around the image". Everybody understands this chekckbox, and the functionality behind it may be created easily with Symphony/XSLT/XHTML/CSS. This example will be more complicated in EE, and in TXP I would probably need to tell the client how to add a class to the image via Textile (which is not easy to understand in my eyes)

I thought about ashooner's section example. I do not think this is necessarily true. I often used sections like the following (without confusing my clients):

• news
• products
• standards (being more or less "static" content, providing a select box for "content location")

Anyway, I really enjoyed Hicks' article (which is much more objective than we, those crazy Symphonians, manage to be here in this forum).

How would Symphony fit in this comparison? I try to make things short:

• Symphony's backend definitely is much simpler than EE's admin area
• Symphony is much more flexible than TXP
• there are many features in EE which are not included in Symphony, especially member management; (we all hope that once Symphony 2 is released, we will find many useful extensions for the system, like member management, a newsletter extension, a customizable admin interface or a simple forum solution...)

I won't say too much since it's still a little early but I think it's a good time to mention that the following items have been designed and in mid-development, planned to be included in Symphony 2 final:

• Better section-linking interface for authors.
• Membership system built into the core.

With S2b, we were focused on working out the kinks for developers - adding power and flexibility to the system. We have learned a lot from all the developers giving us feedback on what worked and what didn't. and we think we've got the ideal workflow and interface design (yet to be revealed). Now with S2RC1, we've shifted our focus towards the authoring environment. The aforementioned features are just two of the several items to reflect this focal change.

a little off topic, but i've been using jive's clearspace...basically it's wordpress that costs money for customer service...everyone that has used it whether it be content, developing, etc, has hated it and swears it off. but we're locked in b/c they already started working with it and have a handful of sites built with it.

I played a bit with Symphony back in the early, pre-beta days and liked it very much, but it also scared me a lot because of the learning curve (I know my XHTML and CSS and that's about it) so in the end I took to Textpattern to build my own and client sites, and have been using it till now. I really like Textpattern: it's light, flexible, and what it does, it does very well.

Now, however, I feel that I need more power, specially in the member management area: who gets to see and do what in the site. I mean the frontend, web users, not authors or admin users. So I've taken a new look around and what I see is EE, MODx (has anyone here worked with MODx?), and, again, Symphony. Knowing that version 2 will bring member management capabilities it's just what I needed to give it another spin. As it's been said, if I have to learn a new templating language, why not XSLT?

One drawback I foresee is backend l10n, as my clients would require a localised admin area. How convoluted would it be to translate the GUI, as it is now? Textpattern team have set up a very good solution for this problem: translators log in to a translator interface and installs get updated from a central server. In this way, I could and did write my own translation of the beast. How would one go about translating Symphony?

How would one go about translating Symphony?

I'm fairly certain this is a priority for Symphony 2. Steps have already been taken to accommodate localisation, however, I don't believe it has been fully implemented as of rev5.

The most important part of Symphony for authors is the publish area and most of it can be localised by the developer. You can localise your section and fields (and consequently table headings) already. The Only things that can't be translated are the form buttons like create, save and delete.

I see, thank you. As soon as I finish a project I'm working on, I'll try to get my head around Symphony. What would you recommend for learning purposes, version 1.7 or the new beta? I mean, if v. 2 is around the corner, I might as well start getting familiar with it, no? Or would it be an added complication?

@jordi, i think it's probably better to start working with v2 as that is the direction 21degrees is heading in. Even though I fell in love with v1.7 the first time I installed it, I have enjoyed working with v2 beta even more so.

The flexibility, structure, and workflow have done nothing but improved imo.

Don't get me wrong, if you don't know xslt (not sure what your skillset is) and are learning Symphony, it will be a large learning curve as xslt in itself takes a little while to grasp. But I think the overall structure Scott, Allen, and Alistair have taken in terms of templates makes more sense than in v1.7.

Thanks, wtdtan. I have read a bit on xslt but never actually used it, that's what scared me away from Symphony the first time around. Not that I don't enjoy learning per se, but I need to know that I'll be able to apply what I learn in my daily work. I cannot spend weeks or months learning an app just to discover that it doesn't fit the bill.

Anyway, the feeling I get from just scratching the surface of Symphony is very good, as opposed to, say, the feeling I got from Drupal, so I'll just follow your advice and download v2. We'll see what happens.

I tried out drupal before...and wp...and txtpattern...and whatever else has been out there. now, i'm sure it could have been a combination of my limited knowledge at the time, but obviously, i couldn't get a good feeling for them. Drupal i thought was going to be the one for me, but as i delved deeper into the system, it was just confusing and i couldn't do somethings that I thought would be pretty simple to do.

I think i found symphony from the big noob and ever since i've used it from 1.7 to now. But of course, like any other system, there's some learning curve, but I think symphony was the easiest system out of all of them to get a hang of. there is a lot of helpful information in here that can help you on the way. and as the community grows, i'm sure you and everyone else will benefit from it.