The Daily Blog

Symphony roundup

9th January 2006  Post a comment

You may have noticed in the footer at the base of every page on this site there is an image saying "Powered by Symphony". Symphony is a web publishing system developed by Twentyone Degrees - an Australian based web development studio. After a few days of learning and experimenting I believe I have got my head around most of Symphony's inner workings.

As with everything there are things I love and things I wish could be changed or altered slightly, but overall it is an extremely powerful CMS which allows you to do pretty much anything you would want a CMS to do for you. Let’s start with the good:

1. Installing In my opinion this sets Symphony above from my beloved Textpattern and Wordpress (which also has many, many fans but is not my cup of tea). Installation only requires you to upload one file, run it, fill in the details - all of which takes less that a minute before you are ready to go.

2. Support As with installation it is simple and works brilliantly. Support tickets can be submitted which are answered quickly by the Symphony team - again all through the Symphony interface. Symphony notifies you of any updates that you may require (as of 1.0.05) and all can be installed by clicking the "install" button!

3. Flexibility It feels as if you can do anything you could possible imagine with your content, providing you have a hold on XSLT.

4. Management Whether it is categories, images, css, plugins (called 'capmfire') or entries - it is all easy to find and keep it all in check. There is even a article search engine built into the interface system.

There are some drawbacks, however:

1. XSL/XSLT Invented by our friends at the W3C, XSL is an extremely powerful template language. It is a bitch to get your head round though. The people at the W3C are very intelligent, but aren't too good on the old usability and simplicity front with the languages they create. Be warned - it can get tricky in places if you aren't really a programmer and just a web designer.

2. Popularity It is a new piece of software which means there is a bit of a gap in community support at the moment. Hopefully Overture, which will be run by the Symphony team will build up the community and documentation.

3. No search...yet Although there is live search available in the Symphony interface, there is nothing for you guys to find things (although the archive system is very good).

All together it is a great package and well worth the AUD $50 (around £25), for me I was more than happy to make the jump and purchase my copy before full documentation is available because I can see the potential it has. If you are still not sure you can try the online demo which will give you a feel for it.

31/01/2006 Update: As a few people are interested, in order to install Symphony of Dreamhost you will have to enable PHP as CGI - by going to your web control panel.

- David Longworth

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