Symphony.

Despite my commercial viability rant I am still wanting to use Symphony to the max, learn if I can too.

So with that I am looking to promote Symphony as the only CMS worth using.

I have my ideas of what my clients want, but I was interested to hear from the masses on what they believe are the killer features that help sell Symphony to their clients.

Nick would you consider to change the title with a category, perhaps future of symphony, or killer features, then the team could also put this category before other threads. see my `this forum’ category labeled topic

Well do we have an agreed category list?

There are many. For me, some of the most important are:

• the complete, absolutely complete, separation of the data layer from the presentation layer. Designers have one-stop control over every single bit of markup that gets output by the system. I haven’t seen that anywhere else.
• ability to directly consume/integrate any XML content, local or remote
• ability to create unlimited custom data types (sections and fields) so you can create a fully-modeled application
• XSLT for templating (of course)
• JIT image manipulation. Upload an image once and you gain the ability to display it in almost any size/crop imaginable. Want to completely resize every single image in a gallery? Change just a few characters of code in your template. Done.

What else….

@ Nick No, but since the team or an admin should take the task of reassigning some topic’s categories, or forking interesting parts of topics into new topics, possibly under new categories…. I suppose we should just let it grow organically;

Stimulate the community to think about a possible category for their post, if it addresses a specific thing that doesn’t have a category yet. This square brackets notation [any category before a title] and freedom to assign any category is simply great and no other forum I know has it, yet our forum barely has categories, while traditional ones do…

Its OK if these categories are ‘working titles’ they are just the blueprint for future structure and can be changed later.

More importantly they facilitate potential new community members to easily find all the mention of greatness, or smart design resources, or workflows and applications used by this community, that mostly are burried in other technical topics.

Is this forum a communication tool to let symphony grow or only a technical support fallback?

@newnomad - so what do I do? How do I create a prefix?

@czheng - I was looking for client speech, for example say I was selling E-Commerce, I would not say is as such, I would say how it would benefit them, so I would sell it as Increased Sales.

One for me is one that Lewis created, Mailchimp, I think that is a massive selling point for me as I can sell 2 products in one.

@ Nick:

[any category] entrytitle

but what does that do? Does it do anything visually special?

Is this forum a communication tool to let symphony grow or only a technical support fallback?

It’s everything :-)

We use the same list as czheng above:

• technical benefits of using Symphony for rapid prototyping
• XSLT and XML are web standards
• back-end usability and consistency
• large pool of modular extensions for specific functionality — rather than bloat the UI with unnecessary features, the user only has the power to edit the things they need to edit

But the reasons we give to clients aren’t the same as our own reasons. A client generally doesn’t give two hoots about XSLT being a great templating language per se, or that as a developer we can model any data requirement. For a client, the focus is on prototyping and iterative development, performance and a usable backend that meets their requirements.

But I imagine we have clients who don’t know, or even care, that Symphony is being used, so long as it meets their requirements.

@nickdunn,

Exactly, but the ability to manage your own keywords via an SEO Manager is a selling point, as is Mailchimp obviously,

I used to think that the Author specific sections was a killer feature, but it disappeared I believe.