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Although symphony 3 is a ways off according to the blog post about it, apparently there will be no easy upgrade path.

I just started looking at Symphony two days ago, so forgive my fawn-like stumbling around. I am thinking about the statements from the dev team about 3, and wondering, should I do some smaller sites first, not only to let me get used to it, but also to avoid major pain and suffering trying to upgrade later.

I have a bunch of company documents that I eventually want to organize in a CMS, which are now in a wiki and in various files outside the wiki, such as Word, PDF, or Pages files. My concept is, “have everything in the CMS” including internal and external documentation, and be able to serve that to multiple various devices in various formats, and to various groups of people (internal staff vs public viewers vs premium subscribers).

So, before embarking on that and considering that 3 is probably a ways away, what’s better: do I just barrel in and start doing it in the 2 series in hope that there will be some way to migrate content, or, do I start prepping my documents in some consistent way outside Symphony? If so, may I ask for your opinion on how I might best go about that?

For instance: do I take the top 10% of the docs, and start re-formatting them in docbook or some-such?

Appreciate any opinions I can get on this.

Sincerely, Rick

There should be nothing stopping you from using Symphony 2. Waiting for the next version is always a losing game (with anything, not just Symphony).

Thanks Lewis. Are people using Symphony 2 for longer documentation?

Regards, Rick

Are people using Symphony 2 for longer documentation?

Not sure what you mean… Do you mean for the official Symphony 2 documentation? I believe so but Craig is leading that project and would know better than anyone.

I’m currently creating new projects with Symphony 2.

Symphony 2 is still the preferred, stable version and will be for some time. Even after 3.0 is released, version 2 will be supported for a long, long time.

As mentioned by Craig when announcing Symphony 3 beta earlier last year, Symphony 2 is a stable platform and security related updates will still be available for a while, so there’s no need to migrate old projects to Symphony 3 immediatly.

Hi Lewis - appreciate your engagement on here. I mean, for authoring any content which is longer than your typical web page with only a couple paragraphs. The company I run has a significant volume of documents, which we have produced in various formats over 11 years for clients (reports, guides, checklists and the like), and besides the basics of building and managing our websites, one of my longer term goals is to “future proof” our knowledge base built up so far. For the main body of documentation, I am trying to find the right sweet spot of an environment to keep that maintained, and be able to release it in as many formats as possible - web-readable, pdf, epub and so on.

I am guessing that at least for most of the documents we make, which are not that huge, we can use Symphony for the authoring, and the transformation to various formats. I am looking forward to the Members extension release, in hope that that might allow me to have a “premium content” area in my envisioned site, where, our clients could log in and get their stuff. Drupal has a way of doing this with its organic groups and ACL features and “books”, but by the same token I always am driven away from Drupal by some difficulties and a feeling of backwards-ness.

I suppose, a “document management” solution is one way to approach that, but, from what I have seen, those seem to promote proprietary rather than try to stay away from it. And they are usually pretty expensive, nay, very expensive. :-)

Just curious if anyone in the Symphony community is wrestling with this problem, since I would hate to barrel in with 2.x, develop a significant amount of documentation, then have to have the pain of migrating it again. I want to find the most efficient way, is all.

I have to get going to bed but wanted to briefly comment before I do.

I would consider content stored in Symphony future proof because of its use of XML. I can’t provide the best case study for what you are talking about, but there have been compatibility gaps between previous versions of Symphony. But still I was able to create some fairly simple custom scripts to import the XML data into the latest Symphony version. The five sections I imported totaled around 15,000 entries. In the past, the biggest changes have had more effect on extensions, the interface, and other things related to the core.

XML is extremely versatile and you can easily port the content to other formats.

Get started!

Thanks Lewis, that’s good to know. :-)

You won’t need custom XML import scripts if the XML Importer extension is ported over early enough into Symphony 3.

All you would need to do is change your page output method to XML and then re-import it into your new Symphony 3 build.

All that aside, Symphony 2 is perfectly suitable for what you want to achieve, I have thrown massive XML data at it before and it’s all been stored and handled fine. I would do your project now and not worry too much about the future of Symphony, it’s such a long way off anyway that it’s not really worth thinking about yet, I mean, Symphony 3 isn’t even in alpha stage yet!

When it gets to it, think about it then. One of the giant brains in this community may come up with something to port old content across anyway in the event of there being no XML Importer, you never know.

Hi designermonkey - thanks, that eases my mind. Appreciate your and Lewis’s comments.

I agree with everything John said.

There simply is no logical reason not to start now.

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