Symphony.

I see the value in screencasts here but due to the abstract nature of extensions, it might be hard to capture the concept with an image.

Certainly don’t want it to become like this.

Ensembles on the other hand would most definitely benefit from showcasing a gallery of images.

I’m not sure if it’s entirely possible but I like the idea of being able to browse available extensions in the Symphony control panel. I’ve used a few other CMSs that have attempted to do this that have mostly worked.

I imagine it would work something like this:

when you go to the extensions area you can view all available extensions for your version of symphony (this list would be cached and updated daily etc). Once you’ve found one you want to install you hit the install button and the extension is downloaded in the background and installed for you. Considering most extensions are very light weight I can’t see the actual data transfer being a big deal.

It’s probably not the Symphony way though - considering this means you wouldn’t be able to set them up as git submodules as easily, and hence updating existing extensions might be more difficult. I dunno. Just throwing an idea out there :)

Actually, this was the Symphony way, I think with version 1.5 and earlier. Things have changed a bit since the goal has been to pare the core down to absolute essentials and offer other features through extensions. This would be a good feature to revive through an extension, though.

Agreed — all three Downloads types could do with categorisation and screenshots. Some authors have added screenshots to the Description which is useful but throws the layout off a little.

I think there are a few improvements that could be made with regards to Extensions (and so some extent Ensembles and XSLT Utilities). I have colleagues who come to me asking whether a particular extension exists, rather than going to the website. Because:

• when there are 70+ extensions and five per page, that’s a lot of paging
• there’s no categorisation so one must mentally parse (i.e. read) every title/description to find a needle in the haystack
• when descriptions are long, or not effective, it is difficult to build a mental model of what the extension does. Particularly with custom Fields, a screenshot would be an instant description
• you never know what version of Symphony an extension is compatible with and have to visit Github for the README to check
• there is no way of discovering when a new version of an extension is released unless you follow the project on Github
• the search can be pretty useless

I think this could be partially solved with some tighter integration:

• adding categories or tags to extensions
• enhance a naming convention (e.g. some custom fields are named as “XYZ Field” whereas others “Field: XYZ”)
• allow uploading of a screenshot
• show the release date and version?
• show which version of Symphony it is compatible with (Firefox addons do this well)
• look in to how the full-text search can be improved

I like Henry’s idea of browsing extensions from within Symphony. This could be provided with an extension, provided the Symphony site offered some form of XML feed to sort/page/filter the list of extensions.

However, if Extensions specified Symphony version compatibility, the extensions page in the Symphony backend could itself report when a new version is available. Am I right in saying this was the case in pre-2.0? Some sort of flag indicating a new version (that is compatible with your Symphony version) is available, and a direct link to download it.

As for the stats tracking extension, I think it would be a good idea, a few things to think on:

• The system needs to be reasonably secure, you wouldn’t want someone creating an infinite loop that increases the ‘installations’ counter.
• What do we want to track? I think installation is obvious, but what about entries created and pages served?
• With those last two statistics you wouldn’t want your server communicating with the central stats server every time they happened, so obviously you need to track them locally and push to the central server every few hours.
• Perhaps while installing Symphony you would be asked for a statistics api key which might be found in your account settings. If you enter your key, then the extension is installed.

Anyone have something to contribute?

About the extension overview: in my opinion, this the extension system could use these improvements:

• Extension categories and/or tags
• Show amount of downloads
• Ability to rate extensions
• Sort extensions by downloads/rating/last updated (show latest extensions by default)
• Ability to filter extensions by version compatibility (ideally, users should be able to indicate whether an extension is compatible)

At google.nl, symfony is #1 and symphony #8.

Speaking of extending the extensions section, some type of feedback/discussion would be useful. Usually extensions get their own forum thread anyway, why not put it into (or at least link to it from) the extension entry page?

ashooner: I agree. Right now the extension section isnt more than a list of links to github. Clicking on the extension’s title should lead to a page with the infos carsten mentioned earlier.

I think this was discouraged because the thread for each extension started to get very long and contain documentation, bug reports etc. Moving to Github means each extension can have its own documentation and issue tracker.

Having a forum thread for discussing implementation and improvement ideas is good though.

Just a thought but a lot of the limitations seem to be due to lack a time… Couldn’t a lot of this solved by opening up sections of this site to others to administer and develop? I’m assuming the site is all done with Symphony and there are at least a few people who could use their skills to easily implement what’s been suggested. If necessary the “extensions directory” etc could even be done on an entirely different site, couldn’t it?

skeary: I strongly disencourage using different sites for things wich actually belong together.

There was a good reason why Overture and Symphony HQ were merged together.

My 2 cents on why Symphony over Joomla. Symphony is straight up lightning fast!. I started with symphony and Joomla at the same time trying to figure out what would work best for my small business. Symphony by far was more flexible and as mentioned has the lowest overhead of the 2 systems. Joomla on the other hand has the + of being able to quickly edit / switch templates for the site look. The learning curve of xslt was tough for me at first as I’m not an advanced programmer and don’t have tons of hours a day to work with it. This being said I put together a quick joomla site to get things going, while secretly mirroring the site in symphony. Once I have it set….. Joomla gets trashed! I wish it were easier to get the symphony site looking good with easily editable templates, but I really enjoy the help you guys provide and the system that is Symphony…

I can understand why someone would choose Symphony for a small site and it's probably a little easier to administrate than Joomla. But I've always preferred Joomla to Symphony because I've used it more. Joomla is very good, there's a lot of great free and commercial extensions available, pretty steap learning curve for an administrator though. Drupal is also a great platform to create complex sites, but I'm not a fan of it just because I don't wanna learn another system. Joomla meets all my current requirements. I don't think there's a "best one" of them.... it depends on your goal and technical expertise. There are some useful resources which can help you have a right choice when choosing your needed CMS. I recommend two pages providing a comparison chart of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal: http://www.threehosts.com/ratings/comparison-software/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html and http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cms-comparison-drupal-joomla-and-wordpress. Both present the information in an easy-to-understand format. The best recommendation I can give you is to do some good research on other available products so that when you made your final decision you can stick to it and don't have to change the whole system after some time because this then can get time consuming and causes additional costs. A full list of these programs is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listofcontentmanagementsystems. But the most popular ones are presented on http://www.simplescripts.com/script_list. Platforms on SimpleScripts are categorized and this helps you make your decision more easily.

chears maredame,

I really don't know why you spam joomla or any other cms here. just the sentence:

but I'm not a fan of it just because I don't wanna learn another system

says enough for me.

I neither a good programmer not firm in all of this 'I don't want to know' content managment systems, but there is definite no CMS which can mess with symphony.

So stay happy with joomla, it you cup of tea; but let me drink mime.

@moma

it you cup of tea; but let me drink mime.

nice one :)

@moma

[…], but there is definite no CMS which can mess with symphony

Good one… oh wait… you mean it.