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Yeah! It's fixed now. Welcome to the Builders Collective, @guillem_l!

I am in the process of stripping out the proprietary data from our agency site so we can use it as an example of a Members-based ensemble. It's still kind of rough around the edges, but I spent some time last week squashing some bugs so it would be ready for the migration to becoming an open source project.

Then, I'll use it as the basis for demonstrating and documenting my ensemble development process.

So, I've finished stripping out the proprietary data from our agency site. But now I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in an ensemble that lacks any design, but is full of all sorts of functionality, including an implementation of the Members extension.

So, I actually have a domain that I have been using for this project. You can see how long I've been thinking about this, as the original version was built with Textpattern. Another version was built on the Symphony Forum ensemble. Then we had the first Symposium in London, and we tried using the domain to build a Symphony 3 site for Symposium 2010 and even got as far as a rough wireframe of the layout. But Symphony 3 just wasn't ready for prime time at that point. Then, I thought I could use the Design Admin ensemble, but I didn't really want to continue with that after discussions about finalizing the Members extension would have made this version obsolete fairly quickly.

Now that I have been running our agency site on Symphony for close to a year, I have something ready that I know I can build on, but I'm not sure how I would like to design the site. And, if we are going to make this a community project, I'd like to have some input from the community on design and content.

So, before I initialize the Organization ensemble repository, I'd like to clean it up a little and have some sort of basic design ready to go before I push it up to GitHub.

It might be fitting to use Foundation to get this project up and running quickly.

Perhaps, we can treat this like an ideal project. What process would we use? I was thinking it might be good to cover the following steps:

  • Determine goals and objective
  • Establish requirements and scope
  • Engage in content strategy
  • Create and gather content
  • Develop information architecture
  • Design wireframes
  • Layout pages
  • Prepare the server environment
  • Model data
  • Build templates
  • Integrate content
  • Test and deploy the application
  • Analyze performance and analytics

I'd like the project to inform how best to improve the documentation for Symphony and to extend that knowledge into a more comprehensive resource for web developers who are concerned with crafting beautifully designed, elegantly executed and expressively engaging websites.

I would be really interested in the ensemble
I think a minimal design would be good, so it can be used as a starting point/ study case for other projects.

Looks like a lot of work! Thanks Stephen :)

Going through all that steps will require some serious commitment, but it defenitely worth it.

I finally have the ensemble ready as an alpha release. It is very alpha, as I've gone through the process of updating from Symphony 2.2.1 to the 2.2.x branch of the GitHub Symphony repo. And all the extensions have been updated to the latest versions, but it has not been fully tested.

Unfortunately, I think I'm experiencing some problems related to an older version of PHP (5.2.12) running on a shared server (Joyent), which is resulting in 500 errors.

I'll see about migrating to a more up-to-date server.

Just installed this ensemble, had a quick look into it... looking at all the features it's a great resource to learn from stuff like the members extension and forum discussions. This will be very usefull for research, but will also make a nice platform for ensemble development i think.
The site seems to work fine on my local mamp server and i like the minimal design.
I will be studying this ensemble some more... nice work!

@Cremol, thanks for the feedback. Glad to hear it's working for you!

This is basically all the functionality that we have on our agency site, except stripped of all proprietary assets, such as CSS and images.

  • Public Site
    • Flickr feed
    • Twitter feed
    • Team profiles with individual Twitter feeds if available
    • Portfolio filtered by categories and industry sectors
    • List of services
    • Blog with comments managed by disqus (with the option to manage comments with Symphony)
    • Contact form to direct messages to specific addresses
  • Intranet
    • Features a minimalist responsive layout
    • Implements the latest version of the Members extension
    • Login with username and password or with OpenID via Google Apps
    • News with option to email individual posts to members
    • People listed in the format of a corporate directory
    • Forum based on the Symphony Forum ensemble
    • Resources to maintain documentation for the organization
    • Links to external sites, articles and resources
    • To do lists (not fully implemented, so not showing in the navigation)

There's a lot more I would like to add to it, but I don't have the mandate to do that at work. So, I'm going to carry on with the work on my own by building more features onto this public ensemble.

Future Road Map

I'll be scavenging old ensembles to build in other half-implemented ideas into fully baked features:

  • Clients
  • Projects
  • Time Tracking
  • Calendar
  • Proposals
  • Document Creator
  • Form Builder

Another fork is planned as a self-contained ensemble for a web design and development project:

  • Content Strategy
  • Content Inventory
  • Page Tables
  • Site Maps
  • Wireframes
  • Layouts
  • Templates

But Marco (@alpacaaa) has been waiting around for some help on xpathr, so I want to put that on the top of my list of priorities. It's time to turn that application into a Symphony ensemble.

i'm working on my version of Discussion Board, which mimics features of this forum.

it's based on members, email template manager, member forms, form controls and some custom events. current state is about 3/4 before beta, i think.

you may take a look at the ensemble if you wish. all work is on branch sym-2.2.1, not on master. i also deployed live demo for testing purposes.

Nice work, @ixi. That looks great. And you've implemented categories! I'll be interested to see how you've implemented read discussions.

But Marco (@alpacaaa) has been waiting around for some help on xpathr, so I want to put that on the top of my list of priorities. It's time to turn that application into a Symphony ensemble.

I've got some news for you.

The extension seems to work fine and has a lot of features that haven't been integrated on the frontend yet. There's a workspace branch that should have been named tutorial because it's an unstyled basic walktrough of the extension.
I've been working on a working workspace version that has an awful layout but it's very close to what I would like to see in the first iteration of this app.

However, great work on the ensemble Stephen. I'll try it as soon as possible and get back with my thoughts.

@bauhouse, there is a bunch of custom events, tracking activity on discussions and discussion-member relations. the one called 'discussion-read' triggers silently when user view particular thread. it works fine.

then, the bad part - filtering. i load all discussions and filter it inside template. i believe the right way is to make custom datasource to filter discussions - that's on my todo list.

by the way your ensemble is huge, i have to say. i enjoy amount of passion and dedication that you bring into Symphony community. thanks! you are inspiration, just like the original Bauhaus.

@alpacaaa, thanks for the update on xpathr. That's great news that you've been forging ahead on this. I'll take a look at what I can do to help.

@ixi, thanks. The original Bauhaus has inspired me a lot. The Symphony community feels like a Bauhaus workshop where we focus on the fusion of art and technology in this lovely application. I'm glad to be able to make a contribution to this community.

Regarding the forum, the filtering is definitely the challenge for me as well. The original Forum ensemble uses a custom datasource for this, but, while it was working at one point, I think I may have broken it in this version of the ensemble. That's one of the big pieces on my todo list as well.

I finally have the Builders Collective ensemble working, now that I've debugged my issues running Symphony on Joyent. I'll be adding to the feature set and adjusting the design. If anyone would like to contribute to the effort, please let me know.

The Default Workspace: A Bare Bones Ensemble

It would also be good to discuss what we would like to see in a bare bones workspace. Now that Symphony 2.2.5 has been released, we should start working toward a completed workspace that will be ready with the release of 2.3.

I'd like to help. Me on github.

@ixi, thanks for volunteering. I've added you to the team.

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