Symphony.

The Symphony team are all very busy working on what seems to be an unending mountain of things to do and sometimes, it’s hard to keep the community informed about them.

There are a lot of things we want to share with you all, like a feature and API compatibility roadmap, removing the over-reliance on GitHub, etc. Even though sometimes we don’t respond to these threads, they are known to us and we are doing something about it.

Below is a quick and dirty list of things that’s on our plate currently:

• New website functionality
  • Better in-house management of extensions
  • Better search system
  • Extension categorisation
  • New ensemble pages
  • In-house bug tracker for Symphony and all downloads
  • Articles from around the web aggregator
  • Plus heaps more that I can’t talk about yet…
• Symphony Documentation
  • Comprehensive content
  • New screencasts and tutorials
• Extension management
  • Symphony extension browser extension
  • Functionalities that revolve around the above…
• Symphony update roadmap
  • Addressing extension compatibility
  • Admin Access Control Layer
  • Lots more…

We’re hoping to address them as soon as we can but they do take time. Any help from the community would be more than welcome.

Allen, would it be possible to have some kind of Symphony roadmap? Nothing about release dates but a list of priorities or a list of next steps. Something like this post but constantly updated.

Would you rather see that here in the forum or in the blog?

Personally I see it sitting as an entirely different section of the site. It’s headline stuff and should be treated as such.

Good call, Joseph. Noted.

Personally I see it sitting as an entirely different section of the site.

That would be nice.

I think in the best interest of the Symphony team, it would be best to keep the road map as a sticky in the forum for two reasons:

• It is time-sensitive. The roadmap will change as features are implemented.
• If you make it easy for average users to see these plans, the team will be continually contacted by these people wondering when one feature will be implemented or what the time-frame is looking like.

Since the forum is populated mostly by people who know generally how OSS projects work and how fluid time-lines must be, I see no better place to put it than on the forum.

Doing this will somewhat help to filter out the average Joe’s inquiry “when will feature x be finished?”

sirlancelot’s has a point and it’s something we’ve always been a bit apprehensive about. The road from 1.7 to 2.0 and was a particularly painful one as we announced its existence way before it was ready. Expression Engine feel the same way about roadmaps.

However, I think it’s still important to have an extension API roadmap (what delegates will be added and when one will be deprecated, etc.) These should be fairly static and deprecated/modified delegates requires plenty of warning beforehand for the benefit of developers.

We do have some ideas that will provide some sort of development plan but without the problems associated with people hung up on promises.

We’ll look into a more community oriented approach and let members see what other members are planning to do and if people are tackling the same problem, members can team up to work on them.

At least you guys have released something, Allen. The EE guys haven’t shown anything of substance since the screenshots last year - at this stage I call vapourware (but wait with some interest to see what they do eventually release).

I’ve been very impressed with the new “open” approach to Symphony - the community contributions in the extensions area are really great!

Are there any updates on the current state of things?
Something like an improved documentation and extension management – are these things we can expect this year or are they scheduled for 2010?

They are scheduled for this year. Sooner than later.

Thanks, Allen.