Symphony.

My opinion at the moment is that it is not ready for commercial products.

If it was never intended to be than that’s my fault, but I feel there are elements to the product that are lacking in core off the shelf functionality and we are relying on other people to come up with extensions to compliment it.

Also I have many sites on 1.7 that I simply can’t upgrade to 2.0 because it’s lacking in features.

I just wonder about the dedication towards Symphony, and maybe if there was a license fee for it, then that dedication would be more improved.

I have followed Symphony since the start and I loved it, I kind of still do - and I have always tried to spread the word and get it out there in the wild, at the moment I feel a little disenchanted with it.

I’m falling out of love with Symphony, and for that I am gutted.

It definitely is ready for commercial use ;-) Unfortunately it’s not on the site yet, but there are household brands using Symphony for big sites — they’ll go into the showcase at some point.

One good example is http://forward.com/. A very large commercial site running Symphony.

The upgrade issue is a fair point. But if your 1.7 site works, then there’s no reason to upgrade to 2.0 is there?

Symphony 2.0 provides a really powerful platform for developing extensions, evident by the sheer variation of the 66 existing extensions, and others in development. If it’s not in the core, it can be done with an extension.

If you’ve got a list of functionality you need, I’d be willing to vouch that half of it can be achieved with 2.0 or its extensions, and the other half would be solvable with new extensions. What features are you lacking?

1. Symphony is already being used commercially, for websites much larger and more complex than anything you or I will likely build.

2. No CMS or content management framework can do everything “off the shelf” and Symphony certainly would never claim to. It’s important to understand any system’s limitations, and our own limitations as developers, if we’re going to undertake a project for which we’re being paid. If you have a project and you can’t implement it with Symphony, then don’t use it.

3. I’m sure I’m not the only one around here who will take offense to your questioning peoples’ dedication toward Symphony. Especially since so many of those dedicated individuals have worked very hard to answer your questions over the years. For them, I’d think an apology is in order.

I haven’t directed any offense at anyone in particular. It’s nothing personal, but I have clients who have requested an upgrade because they wanted a particular feature. Something I couldn’t do, but the person did has done if for 2.0 as to be expected. So I have had to reconstitute the whole site in 2.0 - but there are elements such as the Search Section which is no longer in the mix. That is a big pain, and something my client is very annoyed about.

I am also not questioning dedication over the years, I am questioning it now. It is my right to question it, and I don’t feel I need to apologise because I am not directing it at any one person.

I personally wish I was php skilled but I am not and I never will be. Maybe we could have a thread for Extension requests like we used to. I know the Symphony developers don’t have the time to be able to do that now, and that is a shame. But I promote Symphony when I can with clients, other developers, artists, designers. I have been constantly trying to get people to move over to Symphony so it can be developed further by those who are able to.

So I feel my dedication to the promotion justifies me to question whether or not Symphony is as vibrant as it once was, I personally don’t think it is, and I know I’m not alone in that thought.

I have to disagree with Symphony 2 not being ready. Not being able to directly upgrade from 1.7 is not a negative, to me. If the 1.7 site works, why fix it? I’d rather have progress and Symphony 2.0 is a huge jump in quality and the core is supposed to be lean and abstract, so you can add extensions for your specific purposes.

I’m not php skilled (or javascript skilled for that matter) either, but I was able to put together an extension in a few days. That says volumes about how well Symphony’s extension API is built. I can’t fucking believe I built an extension! I’m so pumped.

Imagine what I could do with proper documentation. That there is no extension documentation is a serious flaw and I hope it can be addressed next. If the core relies on extensions so much, documentation is essential.

Anyway, I know it’s hard to say no to clients, but they can’t expect you, as a front-end developer to do everything. Special features might have to require some time and money to build. I’m sure someone here would be happy to do a freelance project and upgrade the old search extension for 2.0. Not everything can be free.

Don’t get too frustrated. Clients can get hyper-focused on small things. One CMS won’t solve every problem. You have to prioritize.

I have no doubt that Symphony 3 will be ready, but for me 2 not ready.

The site worked in 1.7 but she wanted another site developed which was pretty much a clone of what she had, but she wanted a feature which I have had to get another developer to produce and I have factored in that cost.

It’s partly my fault for not researching, but I had no reason to believe that something as useful as a Section Search would be discarded.

I’ll just throw in my input. Considering the past ~18 months of Symphony development / Community activity, I would say that there has been more activity and community development (what I would call commitment) in the past 3 months than any time previous that I recall. For me, the extensions that seem to be popping up weekly have made S2 a commercially viable replacement for 1.7.

More to the point I think, is that ‘commercially viable’ is very subjective, and depends on

1. The needs of the project for which it is being considered
2. The abilities of the development team using it.

To apply those criteria to my case, I chose Symphony because

1. I produce primary identity / brochure style sites (so design flexibility was more important than pre-extisting applications and libraries)
2. I ‘m very comfortable working in XSL, so i can leverage my dev. skills with Symphony’s overall approach to CMS.

I will say that the lack of explicit documentation (particularly regarding the extension API) has slowed my own investigation of creating my own extension solutions. I think that that is a type of commitment (both of the dev team and community) that has been lacking in the past but is currently being actively addressed.

Ok, maybe I am being hasty. It’s just an opinion I have about the current state.

But it’s like this.

Before 2.0

Client: Can you develop a CMS? Me: Yes

Client: Does it have a search facility? Me: Yes

Client: When can you start?

After 2.0

Client: Can you develop a CMS? Me: Yes

Client: Does it have a search facility? Me: No

Client: …

I think a back-end search function would be great for sites with lots of entries, but Google custom search for the front end is free and will give better results than any extension could ever do. I bet the Yahoo! search works well too.

Yes but you have the Google brand don’t you?

I have seen it on Dan Cederholm’s site (he uses Movable Type), but he has recently gone from a native search to Google and it just lacks the seamless effect.

I think if you’re using a Custom search, the branding can be pretty non-invasive like just a watermark in the text field. I know clients preferences can be fickle, but i kind of prefer knowing I’m using Google’s engine when I search so I’m familiar with the syntax.

As far as the seamlessness otherwise, if you use teh GCSE extension, you have as much control over appearance as any other search would give you.

EDIT: Looks like they also require the logo in the results.

Yes I know.

You see the Symphony version worked and it was great and it was to some of my clients a selling point.

Am I still able to develop a site on 1.7? Well I am learning 2.0 so I would prefer not to. Especially when something like this can be done so easily (he says :) )

I’ll have a look at this so called API because apparently it’s easy to develop extensions with, even if your not a php coder.

Where is this API?

For a one-on-one client-to-developer setup, I’d say probably.

Full commercial deployment I’d say not at all simply because Symphony lacks proper ACL management.

I work in education and would love to use Symphony for our website but I hand it off to more than one person for managing, and each of those people are tinkerers who could easily elevate their own privileges because of a bug in the user manager and do some major damage.

I like Symphony and use it at home but the question is about commercial readiness, and Symphony just isn’t there… yet ;)

But it has been deployed commercially. That’s the point I was trying to make above. It’s really about project-specific requirements. Sometimes it won’t work. That’s true of any CMS. And of course there limitations and places where work is clearly needed. But the core (which is what the Symphony team has focused so intently on) is certainly, in my opinion, something that can be (and has been) deployed for commercial purposes. Many of the users on this forum represent large firms who’ve deployed Symphony for major corporate clients.

Also, if search is the major sticking point, I think the question has to be re-framed. Sure, something like Drupal includes search capability. But it stinks. You might try convincing your client to pony up for a paid Google custom search engine (or some analogous solution). Sure, it’s an additional cost, but the search will be better than any CMS-based search. And there are added benefits. Plus, you get the results as XML, so you can pull it in as a DS and have complete control over how they get displayed.

Yes but when the same client had it once in one site, they want it in the other - and they can’t have it.

Right I can’t find the API, and then I read that it’s not available. So that is another reason why I don’t believe it is ready for commercial produce.

At the risk of using the same methodology that some hardcore Linux distributions apply, you have three choices:

1. Build it yourself
2. Ask someone to build it
3. Or, keep alienating yourself.

I would have built backend searching already, but that I keep running out of time to do it. I have already built a solution for frontend searching using the Reflection field, so perhaps that can do what you want?

As others have said Symphony is ready for commercial use. The company where I work does so daily.

Symphony has had a license fee at one point, and those who bought symphony at that time (me included) have also been spending/investing a lot of time in this community, to help it achieve matureness, as it turned out they only bought a very early alpha. When the fee was scrapped shortly after it was said the payed amount could be used for special support.

In the beginning some webdevelopers felt that symphony delivered too little, too late, and left. With the coming versions it seems symphony will reach a point where it is truly mature to start competing with other opensource CMSes and even EE.
However…the opensource community is very dynamic and any time needed to build extensions for symphony for it to cover your needs could also(better?) be spend into learning other frameworks that have all the needed features readily available to mix and match, and have larger communities (pinax, django cmses,…)

Playing the devil’s advocate here, but sure the team has thougth about their baby’s position compared to ‘the others’. I am waiting out to see if 3.0, X-forms, ecommerce, and a vibrant community could make symphony the choice over the others based on the fact it can do all what they can in a fraction of the time…

Even as a less able system it could make a dent in the community if its advantages are clearly played out, just like textpattern used to be so hot.

PS Did I ask about X-forms and raved about frevvo ? …;-)

NickToye: Symphony is ready for commercial use. I will agree that it’s not ready for commercial use for you and I don’t mean that to insult you.

Section search is an extension. It’s really up to the developer to decide if he/she is willing to spend the time to updating it. Your statement is akin to saying that your favourite Firefox Extension is no longer supported, therefore Firefox is not ready for commercial use.

The case here is, there are two alternatives that others have pointed you to – Yahoo and Google search. You just happen to not like either offerings.

Fair point on the lack of documentation. That’s something we do need and are trying to address.