Date:
01 Feb 2013
Category:
Announcements
Discuss:
2 comments

Thank you to the community for your support of the Symphony Factory project, and to Nils and Johanna Hörrmann for their work on the beautiful responsive web design. It has been wonderful to be able to follow the evolution of the design and to start working with the framework to test and refine the layout. Now that this work is mostly completed, the work to rebuild the Symphony community site with the Symphony Factory framework can begin. In fact, it is already in progress, although we're only in the early stages.

Moving away from the complexity of the existing Symphony site, we will integrate community activity into a single stream of content, which will include discussions, questions, blog posts, showcase entries and events, as indicated by the the mockup in the introduction to the Symphony Factory project by Nils and Johanna.

Contributors

Allen Chang is overseeing the project and will provide feedback and final decision making on the feature set that will be delivered for the initial launch of the new design.

I will be actively involved in the work of building the new community site, working with Brendan Abbott, Thomas Appel and Allen Chang to build the sections, data sources, events, page templates and utilities, and to create extensions as necessary to provide a prototype of the community site, serving as a sort of international airport, a central hub for the satellite and regional sites. The community site ensemble will become the model for other sites in the Symphony Network.

Authentication System

A separate instance of the Symphony site will serve as a centralized Members API and authentication system, using the Members extension. This membership database will serve as a sort of air traffic control tower for accessing each of the sites in the network. If you have access to one site, you will have access to all sites in the network with a single login.

Community Site

With the current plan, the community site will focus on the community interactions, flowing all content into a single stream. Specific pages will filter the different types of content.

The basic architecture of the site should follow this structure:

  • Home / Stream
    • Discussions
    • Questions
    • Blog
    • Showcase
    • Events
    • About

The Symphony Network navigation bar will contain the links to the subdomains of the supporting satellite sites and the user profile information for the authenticated member.

The drop down serves as an area for accessing the project download and GitHub repository, the network navigation and the user profile form.

Satellite Sites

The Community site will serve as the main hub of activity, and the satellite sites will include:

  • Documentation
  • Extensions
  • Ninjas
  • xpathr

Regional Sites

Language-specific regional sites will be featured in the Network navigation drop down.

  • Germany
  • Italy
  • Romania

If other language groups are interested in building and maintaining other regional sites, please let us know so that we can factor these additional links into the design and navigation.

Services

Links to the Symphony Network services and social channels will also be featured in the Network navigation drop down:

  • GitHub
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • Flickr

Community Contributions

We welcome your suggestions, comments and contributions to the project. This is your chance to add your voice to the discussion about how we can best support and grow our community. Keep in mind that we likely will not be able to incorporate any or all requests, but they may serve as a road map for integration of features into future phases or iterations of the community site. But, ultimately, this is your site, so we would like to be as accommodating as we possibly can without compromising our ability to deliver the project as soon as we can.

I am honoured to be involved in building the new Symphony site, and I hope I can make up for lost time over the past several months by contributing to the work of supporting this fantastic community. I am excited to be working with all of you again.

Comments

An update on the progress of the project.

Great work

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