Sites
Websites in various stages of design, development, and production
@kanduvisla opened an issue about the possibility of rendering the Symphony admin pages with XSLT.
Symphony 3 had been developed to make this possible.
The Symphony book project was cancelled.
Project Cancelled
After nine months and ten chapters, Wrox decided to cancel this book project in June 2011. Symphony Start to Finish was to be the first comprehensive guide to building websites and web applications with Symphony. It was meant to cover the next major version of the platform, but after Symphony lost its only full-time developer, progress on that version was delayed significantly, and in the end Wrox was unable to accommodate the extended timeline.
What Now?
The considerable work put into the manuscript will be incorporated into Symphony’s free online documentation.
It started out as a live build of a Symphony site during An Event Apart, while listening to Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, and many other fascinating people. Symphony Ensembles have been a fascination for me since the Symphony 2.0 beta releases, as they serve as blank slates and starting points for many of my experiments. Over time, I came to become involved in the role of helping to maintain the Export Ensemble extension, in the absence of the original developer of the extension, Alistair Kearney. The DesignProjectX ensemble was intended as a set of tutorials for newcomers to Symphony and XSLT.
The Symphony CMS 2012 Boston Symposium is being held this weekend, a two-day event starting today. The Symphony discussion forum event thread announces the event details.
I have been using the Piano Sonata ensemble for my personal blog. It needs updating: the site is still running on Symphony 2.0.6 and the content hasn’t been updated for quite a while.
In these days of collaborative, open source development, it makes sense to be transparent in the process of building software, so that users can know whether to trust a product and invest time in learning about, using and sharing the product with others.
In the past, design agencies have been known as environments where open source software development was not a priority, where secrecy, bourne out of a desire to build proprietary products that could be sold to customers, was, more often than not, the goal of the effort.
The Advocacy Working Group will be focused on advocating Symphony and its core approaches and technologies.
@nickdunn, the idea of Google Docs API integration in Symphony sounds very interesting. Our team members are transferring a lot of our processes to Google Apps, so that would be a good fit for us.
@newnomad, thanks for reminding me of @czheng’s reference to A List Apart’s article on Strategic Content Management. Kristina Halvorsen’s talks at An Event Apart have articulated a challenge that we often run into in getting sites to launch: content is often an after thought. The traditional process usually means that shoehorning content into a design, which doesn’t fit actual content requirements and forces a redesign after the fact. Obtaining or creating content early, so as to be able to design around the content, opens the door to endless iterations.
I’m curious to find out what process others are using to create content for their sites. The reason I ask is that I just came across a web application called Simplenote that synchronizes with the Simplenote iPad application and a desktop application called Notational Velocity. The API is not currently public, but you can sign up for access.
I’m interested to see how this could be adapted into a Symphony CMS publishing workflow, so I’ve applied for membership to the Simplenote API group on Google Groups.
As mentioned previously, I am building this site on the Piano Sonata Symphony Ensemble designed by Rodrigo Galindez and adapted for Symphony by Fazal Khan.
I also mentioned that there were some items that I felt were missing. Here’s what I have done so far to add some missing features.
In an effort to try something new, but still be able to build quickly, I’ve simply installed the Piano Sonata Symphony Ensemble designed by Rodrigo Galindez and built by Fazal Khan.
However, I see that there are several missing features. I’d like to have a list of links that I can maintain on the site. Maybe that should be maintained within the content of each blog post. I’m just wondering what Fazal did to ensure that the images appear at the top of the post, but not at the bottom of the post. Perhaps the XSLT is looking for the first two paragraphs, then inserting the image after the second paragraph. Clever.