Symphony.

Is it possible to add the Wiki back to the Overture forum? Now that there is movement on Symphony 2 and so many new users with unique talents adding to the forum, it would be great to have a place where we could have a central and organized place to collect articles, code, documentation, etc.

Continued from this thread

@Lewis: Slideshow Pro has a wiki like what you are suggesting and it works really well. It's clean and organized and only admins can edit it so it stays that way.

I would also suggest making a user editable page or forum thread somewhere that allows us to actively add links to tutorials and info that lives on people's blogs. If one of those tutorials fit the documentation, then we could request to add it to the official wiki.

Maybe we can have a like Mr. Blank suggested with admins, but have it contain the capability to do user contributed notes (or comments) like PHP.net

That way... you have the main documentation, and then examples and solutions that people post below the wiki entry.

Okay, I'm going to change my plan. I'm going to create the documentation in Symphony which will allow me to give access to some and allow others to comment. I'm going to start converting the PDF I have been working on as of now.

Please post here if you would like to become part of the Walkabout Crew. I'll be selecting people later this week.

I concur. For Symphony to go to the next level it needs broad buy-in from the php development community. I suggest that the wiki start with the /symphony/lib/toolkit/ directory and break out pages per class with discussions of methods and parameters. When devs aren't spending weeks trying to figure out what they could normally do in hours, I think you'll find Symphony open-source developer community will mushroom. Having a format that will allow for multiple users to share examples (e.g., PHP.net) is ideal.

I'd be glad to help with the wiki. I'm pretty familiar with Symphony and think I have a good handle on it. Give me a shout on my contact form if you think you can use me.

What's the scope of the wiki? Is it just Symphony information or will it also include some basic XSLT instruction? I'd like to keep the Extension and XSLT Utilities on the forum so anyone can contribute to those.

I'd personally like to see a Wiki. A home-grown Symphony-based solution might be nice, but it's extra work to build and maintain. I'm thinking something along the lines of MediaWiki that can be skinned to match Overture.

It's worked very well indeed for microformats.

I'd be hesitant about allowing commenting like php.net — I find a lot of the code samples inaccurate or poor quality. To my eyes, keeping a tight ship of a forum, bug tracker and documentation/wiki is essential to make things easy to maintain and more importantly easier to discover and browse.

I think it would be great to be all-inclusive (XSLT utilities, API, etc)... a full-blown Symphony resource center.

I'd be happy to help with XSLT stuff. I'm not a PHP wizard, but I know there are many on our community that are that could help on that front.

I suggest that the wiki start with the /symphony/lib/toolkit/ directory and break out pages per class with discussions of methods and parameters

This is a critical aspect of Symphony, but unfortunately it's not the focus of initial documentation. Alistair is the best person to take on this task.

I'm thinking something along the lines of MediaWiki

hmm... I didn't realize how is PHP based. I'll look into this one further. I agree, Symphony based solution is definitely more work.

You rock Lewis! count me in. I've attached an excel schematic of Page->HTMLPage->AdministrationPage

I'm sticking with Symphony. I want this to be controlled and focused.

I've attached an excel schematic of Page->HTMLPage->AdministrationPage

Thanks Will. We'll get something going with this.

Mark, if you think I'd be helpful, count me in...

I'd be glad to help too!

Me too. One of the bods at Airlock has been playing with the idea of producing a full class reference for Symphony, using reflection to grab the class names, functions/methods and parameters. It would be similar to wjnielsen's PDF above, but potentially something interactive like visualjquery.com.

Ideally it will be a single script that can be run each time a release is made. A way to auto-document the full code structure. Adding full comments to the code to be used with something like phpDocumentor would be a mammoth task, but we might be able to produce something simpler.

What I like about the microformats wiki is how it was grown over time. It began as a few pages, but has since grown into a truly useful and interesting resource. One page per topic used to suffice, but as the breadth of knowledge grew topics were split and specific pages made for specific ideas. I'm worried that Symphony-based solution wouldn't allow for this flexibility. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.

Besides documentation some general preaching of the advantages of xml/xslt would be usefull to grow the community interest symphony deserves, and will allow to thrive better.

• How does it compare to other MVC frameworks
• What other interesting things is it used for
• How it is the de facto standard for hooking into all kinds of external data
• ....

as mentioned here

Mark, I'm in if you could use my help.

As good as the current documentation is, I find a strong need for a single repository linking to several symphony resources throughout the web (such as tutorials). A wiki such as employed for symphony v1.x could be great for this, and would allow developers to add tutorials. Since Symphony 2 is out and released as open source many people have been working together to improve Symphony, and I feel many would be willing to contribute to a Wiki too.

It would be great if the Symphony development team could reinstate the old wiki again or put a new version up. It could work as intermediary by linking to the existing symphony documentation and adding new knowledge that can be added to the documentation if deemed necessary. However, putting the documentation in the wiki will enable Mark Lewis to administer suggestions and additions more easily.

I got very busy but this week I hope to get the community aspect of the documentation moving along. Allen and I agree that in-line commenting would be best and there will be several people to implement the changes.

I think everyone will like it. I'm going to e-mail Allen right now, or rather, reply to his e-mail because I've been so busy...

Once this thing gets going there'll be no one person holding it up, sorry.