Symphony.

The Symphony team is excited to announce the immediate availability of Symphony 3 beta. Released at Symposium 2010 in London, version 3 is a profound evolution of the Symphony platform. Featuring a heavily-refactored codebase and a host of improvements—from the system architecture to the workflow to the UI—it realizes many of the team’s long-standing goals for making Symphony faster, smarter, and more powerful.

Before you get too worked up though, be sure to read the section below on what to expect. This is, after all, a beta :)

Some Highlights

The Core

Changes to the core system are largely aimed at reducing overhead and improving system architecture. We’ve continued our push for standards by moving away from custom classes where possible and back to core PHP functionalities like DOMDocument and Iterators. We’ve furthered the logical separation of data and structure by splitting all project-specific structural elements, like Sections and Views (formerly Pages), into XML files in the Workspace. This means your DB is cleaner and lighter, and your project’s structure can be easily version-controlled.

Workflow and Data Flow Improvements

One goal for Symphony 3 was to address some of the most obvious workflow and data flow limitations in the system. With the introduction of a layout editor for sections, developers now have more control than ever in crafting their entry-publishing forms. The editor supports fieldset grouping and multiple layout templates, all in an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.

Version 3 also introduces a much more powerful Data Sources editor that features improved filter logic (negation!) and new execution conditions. Similarly, the Events editor has gained the ability to allow you to specify defaults and overrides for data being passed back into the system.

Extensibility

In Symphony 3, we’ve taken our simplicity principle even further. Now, every field, every data source type, and every event type is an extension. Symphony is more modular and more configurable than ever before, and the extensions API is increasingly robust.

User Interface

Although the admin user interface hasn’t gotten the very thorough overhaul it will eventually need, version 3 provides a solid refresh and introduces some much-needed standards for back-end page layout and UI elements like tabs, all of which are easily accessible by extension developers. What’s more, the entire back-end is being increasingly optimized—it’s image-free now, features a CSS/JS file-cruncher, and (to date) is scoring a 99/100 on YSlow.

What To Expect

Symphony 3 breaks compatibility with Symphony 2. Don’t expect Symphony 2 extensions to work on v3, and don’t expect an easy upgrade path.

Bear in mind that Symphony 3 final is still a long way off. There’s much work to be done stabilizing the core and doing bug-testing. So don’t expect this release to work flawlessly out-of-the-box, and please don’t use it in any production environments just yet.

Symphony 2 is still the preferred, stable version and will be for some time. Even after 3.0 is released, version 2 will be supported for a long, long time.

Extension developers, before you start trying to update your extensions, know that there’s no guarantee that bits of the core won’t change at this point. Unless you just want to experiment, I’d suggest not worrying about updating extensions until we get to Release Candidate status.

The website’s issue tracker will be updated soon. In the meantime, please email Symphony 3 bugs to me (craig@this-domain).

What You Can Do

1. Find bugs
2. Fix bugs ;)