Symphony.

The simple philosophy that guides Symphony’s development.

Providers is a concept that was introduced with Symphony 2.3 which allows extensions to natively provide new Data Source types. This allowed for a more seamless experience for users and opened up a world of possibilities for extension developers. The upcoming Symphony 2.3.1 release brings Providers to Events as well, allowing developers to provide new event types selectable from the native Event editor.

In the end, it happened. Symphony 2.3 finally knocked on our doors dragging along a large sack full of shiny new toys to play with, including long awaited improvements to localisation. Thanks to contexts, translators are finally allowed to translate a string in a multitude of ways, depending on the backend page that same string will be shown in.

The XML Importer extension is widely used to help users import XML content into their Symphony sections. But if your field returns anything other than simple XML, the chances are you're having to write more complex XPath to grab the import values. In this article I describe how you can implement the prepareImportValue method on your custom fields to ensure the XML Importer gets the values it needs.

Symphony 2.3 beta3 has been released, so, dear esteemed extension developer, now is the time to test your creations against this latest and greatest of the Symphonies.

For the longest time, Git Submodules have been a source of confusion and frustration among developers in our community. As a very complicated and barely controllable method of integrating other peoples code into your projects, they appear to be more a burden than a gain to most of us.

In this article I will try to shed some light on what submodules are, how they work and especially how you will work with them.

Have you ever profiled a Symphony page and raised an eyebrow at the number of database queries needed for a particularly meaty data source? Perhaps you have been linked to from a Slashdot (remember that?) and your server is melting. You need caching.

Symphony 2.3 introduces a new way for extension developers to document metadata. Instead of burying information in PHP classes, you are now strongly encouraged to write this as an XML file. Get the full specification here.

Symphony extension development has always been seen with an aura of 'dark arts' surrounding it, and now that Symphony 2.2 is here, it's a great time to take some steps to demystify this art.