Symphony.

Now, I have people at work asking, “Why are we not using Symphony?”

:-)

Yeah. I could have kept going for a while, but I didn’t want to monopolize the time. The release of Symphony 3.0 that came after my presentation pretty much trumped whatever I was going to say.

But, I think I will feel less rushed to throw something together and produce a comprehensive tutorial on how to use Form Controls and Section Schemas to rebuild Symphony with Symphony. (And maybe even how to rebuild WordPress with Symphony, or Textpattern.)

The design business admin tool has been something I’ve been dreaming of for several years. I requested a feature that became the Sectionlink field to establish relationships between sections. Then the Events system was added based on my request for front end forms, which I commissioned Alistair to build for me. At that point, I knew Symphony was going to be able to accomplish what I had in mind.

The next piece I needed was access control, which I had with the pieces I had commissioned from Twentyone Degrees for Symphony 1.7. But these pieces were not forward compatible with 2.0, so access control was promised as an extension in Symphony 2.0. It’s taken a long time to get to a working Members extension, and it will need some attention from the dev team before it can be taken out of beta.

I had built a system in 1.7 that I was using for my freelance business, but data handling needed some major optimization to make it a workable solution. Then I joined Domain7 and they had me design a new project manager to be built into their proprietary Perl-based “RouteOne” web tools. I was only able to get so far before I had to drop the project in favour of working on client projects. We are using it for time tracking and reporting to this day, but it’s become a bit of a Frankenstein, with features hacked into it without my design input. I also created a demo of how to create proposals with Symphony, which used HTML and CSS print styles to print PDF files through webkit. This was rejected in favour of building it in RouteOne.

With version 3.0 fulfilling all my requirements for an application that would be able to build the DesignAdmin tool, I will be focusing as much of my efforts as possible on finishing it and releasing it to the community. For anyone who is interested, I was able to get the 1.7 version working in 2.0 in time for the Symposium, and this is what I used during my presentation. It’s available as the designadmin branch of the Forum Ensemble.

Thanks for this little write-up on your relationship with Symphony, Stephen. You mentioned most of it at the Symposium, too, but to me as a fairly new Symphony user, the scope of your wrestle with the Members extension was not quite clear up to this point :)

I take it everyone is back home safely by now? Can’t wait to meet y’all again! In case anyone of you is in Berlin sometime … give us a call, it’s just an hour 15 min from our place by train.

Thanks, Johanna. The same goes for anyone who wants to come to Vancouver, Canada. We live in Abbotsford, about an hour from downtown Vancouver. Less history, but lots of mountains and water, if you like the great outdoors.

Looks like Jonas already found it, but I’ve added the Symposium to Lanyrd — a new site to browse and publicise attendance at conferences and events.

http://lanyrd.com/2010/symposium/