Symphony.

Are there any former Textpattern users out there? If so, would there be any interest on a tutorial or screencast on how to move your site from Textpattern to Symphony?

Definitely.

I’m not a Textpattern user, but I know many of our active users are former Textpatterners, and from what I understand there’s something of an affinity between the two systems. Having a well-written tutorial or a nice screencast would be great.

I used to build everything with Textpattern. Then I found Symphony to be far more flexible. I’ve never looked back. A tutorial or screencast would be a welcome addition to the growing list of Symphony development resources.

@bzerangue, are you offering to write/record a tutorial? Or just inquiring generally?

We’ve been thinking about doing a “migrations from other systems” series of articles, and we’d welcome any contributions!

I’ll see what I can pull together. I don’t have any remaining Textpattern sites, but I can put together a test one to then migrate to Symphony.

Looking forward to the result! I a currently building a new site which would need exactly this transfer.

Like quite a few others here, I’ve transitioned from a great affinity for Textpattern to a complete love affair with Symphony. There’s a lot in common between the two systems, and Symphony feels like what Textpattern could have become if it had evolved in a more flexible and generalized direction.

I haven’t migrated any specific sites from TXP to Symphony, but I have helped migrate a TXP site to Umbraco, another XSLT-based CMS, by creating an XML export template in Textpattern. I imagine that technique coupled with Rowan’s XML Importer extension is probably the easiest transition path?

Edit: For anyone interested, this is the template I created to export my Textpattern site as XML: https://gist.github.com/762865.

@bewildergeist - That’s exactly what I was going to do. Thanks for sharing that template.

To anyone interested in working on this, we actually need two articles:

1. Symphony Fundamentals for Textpattern Converts
2. Migrating a Textpattern site to Symphony

my opinion is that the former would be much more valuable, because the specifics of the latter depend heavily on the particular site you’re migrating (though a generic example could certainly be useful.)

@bzerangue - Awesome, I’m looking forward to seeing your take on it. My template was put together pretty quickly, so there is certainly room for improvement :)

Looking at it now, I realized another thing that makes the transition from Textpattern to Symphony seem so natural, aside from the XML-like syntax of Textpattern Tags. Textpattern’s concept of Forms as template “snippets” has a lot in common with named and matched templates in XSLT, in many ways. While the latter are more powerful, there is an underlying similarity that would be worth exploring in a “Symphony Fundamentals for Textpattern Converts”-article like @jonasd suggested.

@jonasd and @bewildergeist - This week, I ended up not having as much time as I hoped. I’m hoping to carve some time next week and attempting to tackle one of these tutorials. Sorry, for the delay on my end.