Symphony.

Hello All,

In fact I am just saying hello to the community. I'm a web/multimedia developer at an advertising agency in the Netherlands. I have mainly worked with ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter to build small to large web projects and have always enjoyed the flexibility of the system. Nevertheless I have always be on the lookout for good alternatives and Symphony looks real good so far.

I have been following some tutorials now (just for a couple of hours really :D). But I think I will proceed and maybe actually start using the CMS when I'm ready.

There are some new concepts I need to learn like xslt, but I think it won't be to much of a problem. I hope Symphony proves to be just as flexible or maybe even more flexible than EE is.

Anyway, thanks for reading and you will probably see me asking stupid questions every now and then...

Are there more EE users around?

Yes and no. There are some people 'round here who have been working with EE formerly. But in my case: I don't remember very much of EE.

Hi Dion,

Great to see another Dutchie starting to look into Symphony!

I've had a little experience with EE but Symphony has been a breath of fresh air. This not in the least because of the awesome Symphony community. There are some similarities between EE and Symphony but what, to me, makes the biggest difference (apart from the community) are the 'principles', or the 'Tao': these really resonate with what I am looking for in a CMS.

Symphony seems to have hit a sweet spot between framework and CMS: allowing us the flexibility to build about anything you can think of but, at the same time, creating just the right user-friendly environment geared towards 'getting started quickly'.

Anyway, welcome and do not hesitate to ask if you run into issues. The learning curve can be a tiny bit steep at first and these Forum Posts (though helpful) are still a bit difficult to search (this will be addressed!).

Also: if you would like to discuss things in person (and/or in Dutch): hit me up on the Twitters or on e-mail. There's a couple other active Dutch Symphonians that I'm sure would like to help you on your way also.

Hi davidhund,

Thank you very much!

I am really curious to find out how it will perform in a production environment. I work in a advertising agency and I am the only Developer. This has some advantages... I guess. But most of the time I am looked at as the wizard that understands languages from out of space and therefore has the ability to create anything they can come up within timespans that are plain ridiculous. I think some developers in a similar situation know what I mean.

ExpressionEngine has helped me do things I would not see possible with some of the big, mainstream os content management systems. Lately however, I feel it's time to seriously look at alternatives. The overall bias in cms land leans to open source more and more. Next to that Ellislab is relying more and more on the third party developers community (that is really good). It's never possible to use EE to it's full extend without buying extra modules that are ranging form $10,- to over a $100,- dollars. The licensing costs usually aren't this expensive compared to the cost's of a project as a whole and it should not be a problem to pay for high quality products.

This however, is what I think EE is losing ground on lately. The rollout of EE2 has been extremely slow and the initial releases where instable and it took way to long before serious issues where fixed. Also the support is much slower that it used to be. These issues made me look for another "secret weapon" and I think Symphony is a very good candidate. I wish I had more time on my hands to practice more, but I will continue :).

Edit: oops, posted with the company account, its Sanity11 :)

It's never possible to use EE to it's full extend without buying extra modules that are ranging form $10,00 to over a $100,00 dollars

:-o

In which case Symphony is for you. Out of interest, what are the common modules you find yourself purchasing for EE? Hopefully we can match feature-for-feature with our extensions :-)

There have been a couple of posts comparing Symphony to EE.

Personally I recognize your feeling about EE2. I have tried EE2 after a break and came to the same conclusion: it felt buggy and there were quite a few interface/usability issues.

Symphony felt like a breath of fresh air: the simplicity of it, the modular approach etc.

This is not to say Symphony is perfect: it actually feels a bit 'young' (young, not immature :)). For example: the community is currently working through some questions regarding functionality that most other CMS'es have long tackled (e.g. multi-language and 'static' Page Structure)

This is also because of the Symphony philosophy to stay away from 'One Way Of Doing Things™' and offer various solutions in the form of modular extensions instead. I actually love that: it's exactly what I am looking for in a CMS. BUT: it does (at the moment) require some tinkering/searching to get the functionality that other CMS'es have baked in (deciding for you how the functionality should be done…).

A little, personal, example: I suggested a little addition to the Symphony Core. In my mind this is a very small 'fix' (a tiny if/else allowing an extra Text content-type Page Type). Check out the Github discussion: I &heart; the way even these little things are addressed (even though people might decide against my suggestion :P ). There seems to be a constant tension between adding features and 'keeping the Symphony Way'. To me this is A Very Good Thing™

It does mean, however, that there is less standard functionality in the Core and some (trivial?) things are not yet standardized.

Also: there is a bit of a learning curve, especially re: XSLT. Then there is the issue of Documentation (which is quickly and greatly improving, but the Forum [read: search & extension gardening] could use some work.

Lastly, because Symphony seems quite young there is not a huge userbase, yet. E.g. there's only a handful of active Dutch developers.

All of the above, IMO, is just an honest view on where I think Symphony 'is at' at the moment.

That is not to say Symphony is not ready for production use: quite the contrary! Symphony is very ready but it's good, as a developer, to keep the above things in the back of your mind.

I really like were Symphony is going: I belief it is developing quite quickly, there's a strong, comitted, userbase and challenges are addressed in a very solid way.

At the end of the day you would have to try and take these things in account when deciding on a CMS: Symphony is not everything for everybody. But: my first impression is that it might very well be an excellent choice for you.

I second Nick's suggestion: why not post some of your most-used EE modules and we'll see if there's good Symphony alternatives. Hey: if there are not someone might just build it for us! :P

Disclaimer: the above, obviously, is my personal feeling. I am very new in this community myself. Ask around and read a lot of posts. Hop on #symphonycms IRC and Twitter. I am sure there are other, more experienced, Symphonians that can offer their more helpful views.

I usually purchache all modules from Brandon Kelly (http://pixelandtonic.com/). - Asset - Matrix - Wygwam - Playa

Sometimes I need "Structure" from http://buildwithstructure.com/ And a standard purchase aswell is: http://www.causingeffect.com/software/ee/ce_img

Te more expensive addons are usually related to building webshops.

The "default" licensing costs for us are over $500,- every time but again, that isn't an issue most of the time. I am curious how Symphony would handle the things some of these modules do. Playa and Matrix in particular :).

@davidhund I really appreciate your honest opinion about Symphony.

I may not use it for every site but decide what I should use after the specifications for a website are clear. Hmm, I would like to say more, I will come back later :).

For Matrix, you should check out Nils' Subsection Manager, from what I have seen it is pretty similar. I have not worked with Playa before, so I do not know what it is really capable of, but I usually manage my relations with either the subsection manager or a standard selectbox link field which is bundled by the core.

There's quite a number of WYSIWYG extensions (CKEditor, TinyMCE or WMD Editor that should be able to fulfill the role of Wygwam (I imagine at least one of them will!)

Symphony comes with the JIT Image Manipulation extension out the box that will do some of the simple filters that CE_img provides (resize, crop)

I had a little bit of time in EE and CI, and Symphony is far better in every way. I recently had to rewrite a website for a client, because I wasn't willing to give them a website with such a confusing CMS (EE). It's now in Symphony, it runs faster, is less code, is more semantic, and much easier for my client.

@davidhund I don't expect Symphony to be perfect, probably there isn't any system would be able to do anything perfectly. But like you I also like the philosophy behind it. That's what got my attention in the first place.

In the real world (mine at least), it really comes down to a couple of essential requirements. Most importantly... and I get this question a lot: "How long does it take you to develop.... something". Sadly the philosophy and elegance behind a system aren't always what's important to the people that aren't in the position of a developer. I really need to take into consideration how much time it takes to build relatively complicated systems in comparison with EE. That is without counting in the time I need to get accustomed with Symphony of course :).

@creativedutchmen & @brendo Thanks! I will check it out.

@into I am trying to approach this objectively. Honestly I don't think "a little bit of time in EE" is enough to write it of as confusing. In fact user friendliness has never been a problem with EE for us. It also depends on how a website is made. To illustrate: I think it's quite possible to make a user unfriendly website with Symphony.