Talking Heads
Don't take our word for it, take theirs.
Browse
Symphony Testimonial – SSRC from Symphony Team on Vimeo.
Transcript
Ravi: My name is Ravi Rajakumar and I am the lead web developer for the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The SSRC is an organisation that was founded in 1923 that was created around the idea of formalising the practice of social science research.
Craig: I am the communications co-ordinator. What that means is that I do a lot of everything! Quite frankly I don't know what we would have done — if we we not discovered Symphony I can't imagine how we'd be trying to build the website now.
Ravi: Because the system isn't fettered by a whole a whole set of prefabricated templates, you have a lot of flexibility. You can start with something very raw and just go from input to output and see what you're going to get, without a lot of decoration that you then have to dismantle.
Craig: It's actually not even of how Symphony does it better than other systems... it's just that we could not do it with any other system.
Ravi: Because Symphony is based on the real "bread and butter" open standards of the Internet — the future of where web development is going (XML, XSL, HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL) — you can always find expertise in any of those technologies.
Craig: The nice thing is you've got this community of developers who are committed to the product because, as developers, you almost feel like it was built for you. A lot of CMS are built for your average user such as someone who wants to get a blog up really quickly. As a developer when you have very specific things that you need to do and you're using any of those other systems, it's like you have to fight against it all the time. When you're using Symphony you don't have to fight against it, it works with you. You feel like it was build for you. For me that generated a sense of commitment to the product because I wanted to see it continue to grow and get better. I wanted to see people use it because it makes development that much easier.
Craig: The most important Symphony, for me, is its flexibility. It can be anything you need it to be; to fit almost any situation.