Symphony.

That's right, I used a z.

Anyway, after getting to the end of this Smashing Article: '10 Weblog Engines Reviewed' without seeing Symphony, I wonder: What can I/we do as serious Symphony users to extend the userbase, and get included in things like this.

Should we focus on being more accommodating to new interest/users that we do get, or do we need to focus on going out and getting more exposure for or Symphony projects/Symphony in general?

I tend to think that it's the former. In my mind, the learning curve of XSL is pretty tough, and Symphony's knowledgebase somewhat fractured. Thoughts?

I saw that article too, and thought the same thing. For the most part, I think it depends on each of our particular skills and resources. Here's a list of things I think folks can be doing:

1) Establishing a presence. I often comment on articles like the one above. I've recreated the Wikipedia entry (though it needs lots of work). I've tried to make sure Symphony is included in Wikipedia's various lists of CMSs, Web Devt frameworks, etc. And I always add Symphony when I come across any sites that catalog web apps... like this one.

2) Tutorials and walkthroughs. I know some of these exist, at least for v1. But people should continue to create visual walkthroughs that demonstrate how fun and easy it is to develop sites in Symphony. Showing is always better than telling. I plan on doing a lot of this when I finally launch my personal site... but that won't happen until my two major projects are finished ;)

3) As you suggest above, do our best to help build thorough and clear community documentation. I know Mark Lewis has been very hard at work on the official docs for s2, but I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to supplement that.

I'm sure there are more, but it's bedtime for me. Will revisit this thread tomorrow.

Hey yeah - this is interesting... I have been thinking along similar lines for some time.
My guess is that as soon as the 21deg guys start putting the finishing touches on S2 we will see them really start to promote Symphony themselves, probably via a relaunch of the community forums and wiki i guess!? However i would like to contribute something a bit more substantial back to Symphony myself if at all possible.

I currently promote symphony to friends in the industry as often as i can, and certainly sing its praises to any clients i happen to deal with. However i really feel that i could be doing more to promote Symphony and help get the message out about this brilliant little CMS. I had thought that i could do that by way of writing walk-throughs (like czheng) once i launch the new site with S2, but i wonder if Scott/Allen/Alistair have any other ideas about what i/we can do to help out...?

Once the RC of symphony 2 is out, hopefully marking the end of any major changes either to features or the ui/workflow, I plan on starting up my screencasts again. Maybe even re-doing some of the old ones to fit in with the new features/structure of 2. I've been itching to get started for a while now actually but I didn't want to start and have something change in the RC so I've been waiting.

Having a small but very active community has been a huge help to us while working out the direction for Symphony, which feels a bit unfair since it's obviously in the community's best interest to be big enough to support itself. If the community was larger, making the drastic changes we've sometimes found necessary would have been more prohibitive, and might never have happened. The awful truth is that it's easier to deprecate software used by a small number of people than a large number of people, but without doing this, and without the community's understanding and support, Symphony wouldn't be what it is today.

The positive result is that Symphony is finally nearing feature completeness - meaning that its core concepts have matured to the point where there's not much that needs to be added. Certainly the engine and UI/workflow can be improved, and extensions built to make the system more comprehensive, but even as we occasionally entertain fanciful ideas with RC1 we're finding that there's really nothing fundamental that needs changing. This is good since it means that soon we won't have anything stopping us from growing the community too.

(We plan to make all future versions after RC1 -- until 3.0 at least, but we're not planning on making a 3.0 anytime soon -- updatable without breaking compatibility.)

Here's our very high-level to-do list:

1. Finish RC1, squash bugs or other glaring problems, and release S2 final.
2. Write enough documentation and extensions so that new users have enough tools and resources to build the sites they want.
3. Improve the community websites to make it easier to share knowledge, extensions and ensembles.
4. Grow the userbase to a self-sustaining size so you don't all have to rely on one party (us) for progress with updates, extensions, tutorials and suchlike.

Getting to #4 is a long-term goal, however I think we should at least finish #1 before we start seeking greater levels of publicity. Everyone is also very welcome to help out with steps #2 and #3, but obviously they are also contingent on #1 being done. We're getting there.

(As a side note, I very much agree with this approach to growing publicity.)

Thanks for the team perspective Scott. I guess Symphony collectively is not quite to the stage where aggressive growth is imperative, and the four steps you outline do make alot of sense.

It seems for now that the target users will be people more like me (& perhaps most Symphonians) in that we're comfortable working with what we've got b/c we believe in the fundamental concept behind it, and are willing to be patient for specific features, etc.

So, rather than trying to grab a bunch of minimally technical WP users, maybe it'd be better to find folks that might be rolling their own apps in PHP, etc. that are more likely to see the potential and jump into the extension API once we've got it.

Looks like you guys got an honorable mention with that SM article. Wewts!