Symphony.

Hello All, My name is Micah. I discovered Symphony CMS with some intense googling and it looks very useful. I have used Wordpress for CMS and it is bulky and a 'swiss army knife.' I have read the beginners manual and I understand the basics of Symphony. However, I would like to know more.

With Wordpress, they have 'themes.' What is the equivalent for Symphony? Are the layouts from hand-coded html, xml and css? Or is it from a Photoshop (psd) file spliced and paired with code? Is there a tutorial or a document telling me how I could accomplish this and pair it with symphony?

I understand HTML, XML, and CSS on a basic level. I am willing to learn and work. I believe that is about it. I will probably be around here a lot more.

Thank You, Micah

Hi Micah, welcome to the community.

Unfortunately there is no equivalent to Wordpress' 'themes' in Symphony. The closest to the concept would be Symphony ensembles. Ensembles are a packaged build of a Symphony instance. An Ensemble is typically a fully functioning website or application, and does more than to "dress up your site". Take a look at the Symphony ensemble list to get a better idea of what it is.

In Wordpress, you build your layout using a mix of custom tags and PHP code. In Symphony, you build your pages using XSLT. In Symphony data is presented to you in XML and you use XSLT to transform your XML data into HTML.

If you haven't done so already, check out the tutorial, "Say Hello to the World". The tutorial walks through all aspects of the system and will give you a clear overview across all functionalities of Symphony.

@Micerbeats I cut my teeth on @bauhouse's DesignProjectX where you'll find all kinds of tutorials for Symphony as well.

@Allen Thank You man, I completely missed that section of the website, that will come to good use!

@wjnielsen I will check that out. At first glance it looks great!

I also found this http://www.rocketfoo.com. Whoever owns the website has a full tutorial on setting up Symphony. It looks pretty promising.