Who cares?

[nilshoerrmann]

I'll play devils advocate. @jensscherbl [asks on Twitter]():

What's going on? No one using Symphony anymore? Is it dying?

I say, yes, it will die, if no one takes leadership. Is there anyone willing to really lead this project actively? With knowledge, vision and enthusiasm? Or is it dead already?

[iwyg]

It's true, actually no one is using Symphony. I'd like to say "yes, I'll take leadership". I really love the content concepts of symphony and i'd love to see the same functionality born again in a top notch state of the art application, but:

In my opinion the step of considering a rewrite was necessary but at this point maybe a bit premature. We still don't know what we actually want to achieve.

There's also a gab between the two parties "Symphony is the concept" and "Symphony is XSLT".

The XSLT vs PHP templating vs both discussion just doesn't work out. We can't implement both, totally different concepts. And to be true, if you choose xslt, no one will ever use it (except you an me).

We have settled for Laravel which is, in my opinion the wrong choice and not well suited for this project. But actually we don't know yet what's the best choice because we have no concept and no master plan.

[designermonkey]

I have been committing time to this quite a lot, and to be honest (as we are being) I'm fed up with it as there seems to be no involvement from any other source to come up with ideas on how we actually do this. I have also tried to allow time to help @bauhouse with the docs site, but havent been able to (sorry Stephen). I also seem to be the only person managing the spam on the main site, and I can't continue to do it all (other than package releases and maintain code, which @brendo still does heroically).

All that seems to happen is what usually does, that there are too many opinions and no concrete ideas.

I am willing to do this at a secondary level, but need help from at a minimum, two other bodies. I thought that they were @brendo and @allen but I havent heard anything in a while and I'm fed up with chasing people.

A single person really needs to take charge of this and delegate responsibilities to those chiefs who are willing to work on the planning before the code.

A real shift in direction needs to happen here, that being:

Opinions will be heard and listened to, but decisions will be made, and not everyone will like them, some may even give up on the project because of it, and I'm at the point where this needs to happen, specifically base decisions like: Which framework? Personally, I don't think it's going to be the Laravel that everyone thinks, but packages from Illuminate are definitely going to be used, just not all of them. I will continue that discussion on the right thread.

(As Thomas has posted before me)

We have settled for Laravel which is, in my opinion the wrong choice and not well suited for this project.

Completely agree here, and I have been doing a lot of research on this topic and I think I have a winner. I'll post to the other thread though.

To end my rant. I don't want to see Symphony die. I have invested too much personal time in this over the last three years (not as long as some), and have switched jobs numerously due to politics around it. It is like a surrogate child to me.

[nilshoerrmann]

A single person really needs to take charge of this and delegate responsibilities to those chiefs who are willing to work on the planning before the code.

Everyone seems to be waiting for @allen to take leadership but so far he didn't. That's okay, but then there needs to be someone else giving this project structure and perspective. Someone to answer the question what Symphony is about and what for.

[ijy]

I certainly hope not. I'm planning a new project in Symphony as we speak. The points raised in the twitter conversation however do seem somewhat valid. Things are stagnating, the community is shrinking, and the direction is lacking for the future of Symphony. I think most people are in agreement that it needs some fairly big changes from the core up which is why Symphony Next begun. It's going to take someone to lead it for others to follow however.

The XSLT vs PHP templating vs both discussion just doesn't work out. We can't implement both, totally different concepts. And to be true, if you choose xslt, no one will ever use it (except you an me).

Harsh truth but I'd have to agree. Although I think outputting XML is a masterstroke and XSLT is therefore a natural choice for templating it's just too far away from what all the cool kids are using these days and XSLT itself appears to have been abandoned in terms of support in the browser and on the server. We're swimming against the tide. Whenever I try and advocate Symphony I get the same responses again and again.

We have settled for Laravel which is, in my opinion the wrong choice and not well suited for this project. But actually we don't know yet what's the best choice because we have no concept and no master plan.

A plan and a leader is definitely needed. I doubt any decisions will be a consensus agreement by someone needs to stamp their authority and make the decision for things to move forward. Symfony components may well be a better choice.

The warning signs are definitely here. I hear the death toll.

[bpierre]

You’re right, the discussions have been interesting here, but now we need actual code. Someone should take the lead, make some technical decisions, and start to scaffold something (or delegate precise tasks to some people) to enable contributions. It’s okay if everything is not perfect from the beginning (e.g. a wrong framework), but having some code base would enable a lot of things.

[iwyg]

I personally have some settled points:

• Concentrate on the section module system, this is the whole selling point.
• Rip out the internal xml data stuff (except for configuration)
• Write the Application from scratch but take the components that are already there, e.g symfony/doctrine.
• Supply a modern UI with a well documented API using AngularJS.

[jonmifsud]

I'd love to say I'll be one of the guys @designermonkey to chip in. I'm following discussions as much as possible and giving my bit where I can. I've taken up far too much on my plate at this point in time to be able to say I'll give it primary attention.

However I'm positive I could chip in with smaller bits time permitting; at least until I wrap up my Masters after which I should have more time in my hands.

I still use symphony on a Daily Basis, for me symphony is the Ease of doing things. Of course XSLT plays a big role here for me; I do like it as it's much cleaner and more organised than php template engines i've used. Then again I'm sure these have evolved quite a bit. I do think that having the right tools let you work so much faster. With the proper prepared ensembles & templates we've been popping sites with around 1-2 weeks of dev time (single dev) which usually consists of slicing up and css; which most guys can handle easily. (took around 1 month to build the ensemble with all customisations but was totally worth-it)

Whilst I won't pass much comments in regards to laravell as I really haven't had much time to dive into it, it does seem like there's a division between those collaborating, I certainly like symphony for being what is; as long as it does what it currently does; simple interface and quick templating it will be the tool of choice.

We've actually first used it cos of the amount of external XML feeds we have to interact with; we still use these feeds albeit differently however I'm really happy with Symphony's flexibility.

[designermonkey]

I'm going to let you all in on some knowledge now, I may get told off for this though. There was an offer to have the core built out by a dedicated team of paid staff to get the momentum going, but @allen never held the chat with myself and @brendo about managing this. Life has once again got in the way for all three of us. If we go ahead with the paid route, then things will definitely change, and that is what the discussion was to be about.

I will rekindle the fire here and get this moving again. I will make hard decisions, and piss some of you off too, but they will be in keeping with the core of what Symphony is and has been throughout its life.

@allen will always be in charge as intellectual property rights are his, I may even piss him off a little, but I will bow to his word when it gets given.

I will set up and pay for an area where we can properly plan this project out, as GitHub just doesn't cut it for something like this IMO. The code will always remain here of course.

There are key people I need to talk to ASAP, so Ill crack on with that.

[iwyg]

@designermonkey This all sounds terrifying familiar.

[jurajkapsz]

What's going on? No one using Symphony anymore?

I asume it was a question for the big guys. For my part, I use Symphony actively and exclusively, from beginning 2012, but did not wanted to promote let say not that optimaly made projects, as I was learning to handle the concept of Symphony, which I really like and which gives me all the possibilities. I am focusing mainly on front-end development and want in time to dive further into extensions and what I will be later able to.

I also like XSLT, despite its or my limitations.

I certainly hope not. I'm planning a new project in Symphony as we speak.

So do I, moreover one is already started, and its for one of major universities in our country. And there should be more comming. Starting to warming up.

Is it dying?

It is dying then? Well, at least if I could be able to tell them something with a straight face...

I understand that there is more to it. But just to know.

Thanks for everything so far.

[designermonkey]

The current code base will still be viable for months to come, and will work in production for longer. This is all about the future.

[designermonkey]

Thanks @rowan-lewis and I hope things work out soon.

[iwyg]

indeed, all the best

[ijy]

@rowan-lewis I hear there's potentially a full-time Symphony gig around these parts. Maybe co-incidental timing. ;) Your experience certainly wouldn't go amiss at this stage. (nudge to the leadership).

[jurajkapsz]

Cool. All the best!

[allen]

Okay guys, this post will start off neutral, then a little depressing, then it'll get better. Just a warning.

@designermonkey mate, don't worry about me getting pissed off or anything. I only have gratitude for yourself and all the other contributors that's still willing to put some effort into the project.

To clarify, if this isn't made clear before, I don't consider Symphony mine. I'd like to think I had a big hand in helping shape the project based on my ideals, alongside the community. I really don't see the project as my thing; especially not in a way that I would exert any direct control over.

However, if I'm not mistaken, I think that is what is exactly missing here. Perhaps the community is expecting the opposite; looking for me to offer more assertions and direct project input.

So a little about what's happening with me. Aside from a few support contracts, I have not been doing much Symphony related work. This was largely due to the Soario debacle that @iwyg, myself and others had experienced first hand. This had left me rather jaded (even more than the other thing!) and I had to step away from the project to wash out the awful aftertaste that's, while almost gone, is still lingering.

I have a love/hate relationship with Symphony. I love the project, its ideals and all the people involved but it's also been the main source of grief for my family. Symphony has been with us for almost 10 years now (technically, over 10 years for myself and Alistair). To my family, they see me in perpetual start-up mode, despite the best of my intentions. I don't fault the project and my family doesn't fault me. The best way I can describe it is that I see a shadow cast over the project when I am near it. It really is just a personal issue that I need to resolve.

As for @brendo, he has recently landed a new job. I shouldn't speak for him, so perhaps he can offer more details about this, if he wishes.

Okay, moving on. @designermonkey is accurate in saying that there's been talks about an interested party that is keen to get Symphony Next moving along quicker. The interested party have been quite involved in the community and the way they want to contribute is via a structured working group format; contributing directly to the OSS codebase as set out by working group management. I'm only being vague with names right now because I haven't asked permission to disclose yet. He reads these discussions, so I'm sure the topic will come up soon enough.

While I don't know how we're going to handle Symphony Next yet, there seems to be more than a few Symphony contributors that are still invested and keen on carrying out the project.

Are we able to put together a list of contributors somewhere on Github and formalise a new working group structure? This time, I want to elevate decision making rights over to two or three individuals. We also need to start delegating roles now.

[iwyg]

Thanks allen for the heads up.

[designermonkey]

@allen, thanks for that.

However, if I'm not mistaken, I think that is what is exactly missing here. Perhaps the community is expecting the opposite; looking for me to offer more assertions and direct project input.

I have avoided making assertive decisions for that reason, but I will start to do so now.

Like I've said earlier, I can only do so much as part of a triad of lead roles, as I honestly believe that it takes a minimum of three voices to run an OSS community efficiently.

[jensscherbl]

Just to be clear, I also still use Symphony on a daily basis for most of my client projects, big and small. But lately I feel a little worried about starting new larger projects on a platform with such an uncertain future.

The other thing is, while I am quite familiar with Symphony by now, I can't really recommend it to other developers looking for a good solution to their problems. Development is still pretty active thanks to @brendo and and all of you here on GitHub, but just keeping on coding isn't enough if the platform lacks proper tutorials and documentation, if the extensions site is managed (or no longer managed) by a community member no longer involved with the community, etc.

I know I'm demanding quite a lot and everyone is just developing Symphony in their spare time (which is awesome), but I need to do client work and don't have much time or money to develop the CMS first. That's why I stopped developing my own custom solutions and turned to Symphony in the first place.

That said, I wouldn't have a problem with Symphony as a commercial project, where I could pay a reasonable licence fee and rely on a dedicated team to push things forward. Maybe a free and open source core could even be a good starting point for more advanced, commercially supported extensions (like user management, caching, multilingual, etc.). Just an idea.

This was largely due to the Soario debacle

Don't know what happened there, but it sounded all so promising...

[brendo]

Symphony is a concept, it's not XSLT.

Having said that, the idealogy that Symphony never assumes your frontend is what leans the conversation back to an abstracted templating implementation like XSLT ;)

Personally, the importance to me is the data abstraction. Having the data readily available as PHP/XML/JSON is what will make it a powerful product. The current codebase lacks an API which is why the power users are frustrated when trying to develop complex or highly custom applications. We provide the data as XML, or you dig it out of the database yourself.

The next solution should be flexible enough so that models can be serialised to be XML, JSON or PHP so that you can template them however you like, whether it's with the client (Angular), with PHP (Twig) or XML (XSLT).

Aside from that, the lack of direction is largely because of unfamiliarity with the proposed technology. Its hard to make recommendations when you haven't used Laravel/Composer/Angular JS etc.

The cool kids argument is an interesting one. It's assumed that by using the current trend technology we can capture a lot of potential devs that will help with our progress. What is more the reality is that because of our unfamiliarity with the tech we may make mistakes and these users will not be interested anyway because it's a 'hacked attempt'. Or it works, we get an influx of new devs who take the project to new heights :)

It needs a coordinated effort though, on all fronts, including the often forgotten docs and marketing!

[jurajkapsz]

including the often forgotten docs ...

Maybe its all about docs.

Anyway, whats for sure is that my clients or people I showed to like the Symphony's concept. Whats more, they are having real experience that they can actually handle their content with ease, of whatever subject, and for me to craft that data into whatever googlish design I can think of, in W3C style. And thats brilliant, as it is.

Ok, life is also about money. Could there exist also some community donation options? Ok, I don't generate much or regular revenue yet, and it won't be of the heights of the west (but who knows, its all about work), but if it's not raining, drops should be fine too. Also, I have been jerky delivering further translations, but Slovak is from a bigger part done and I am using it in latest projects (want to finish it all before publishing, best with 2.3.3), and I also want to create Czech translation too. Ok, the time was the limiting factor for all. But in the end that would add two more countries (quite IT oriented too, who isn't anyway :) and I believe it would gain on interest and potential too. During this summer I have to finish what I have in progress now, but these two points are on my list afterwards.

[jonmifsud]

I'd agree with Juraj, in the fact that docs are probably the stumbling block for new devs coming in; the symphony concept is very nice indeed; however unless you have XSLT knowledge it's not as easy to start templating as there's not much of a complete guide. Similarly if you want to do something slightly more complex then what the Symphony back-end allows you; you'd just have to delve in the API; no simple examples of what's achievable.

Not saying we should necessarily do all this for 2.3 however I think for Symphony Next to pick up its essential.

[ijy]

This was largely due to the Soario debacle

Is Soario no more then? What happened there? I agree, it all sounded so promising and it was actually that email that got me to take another look at Symphony.

The cool kids argument is an interesting one. It's assumed that by using the current trend technology we can capture a lot of potential devs that will help with our progress. What is more the reality is that because of our unfamiliarity with the tech we may make mistakes and these users will not be interested anyway because it's a 'hacked attempt'. Or it works, we get an influx of new devs who take the project to new heights :)

I definitely don't mean to suggest that any decisions are driven by what is popular at the present time but just that as I mentioned at the start of the threads it needs to align with the goals of Symphony and Symphony Next. If one of the goals is to attract a larger user base and make Symphony 'cool' then that impacts of choice of tools. It also potentially impacts on use of XML and XSLT. As cool as they are, they are a barrier to entry and will leave Symphony in a niche status. I'm happy with that if the community is. If it does what I need to do then fine, I'm happy with being niche. But that decision needs to be made with open eyes and then not wonder why adoption isn't as high as other CMS' later on. Any action needs to start with firm goals and a vision for the project.

The advantage of using current common tools is that they provide current day transferable skills. Using the same template language as the the likes of Craft and Drupal for example, would mean that those users already have half the skills to jump over to Symphony. The potential disadvantage would be what happens when those tools fall out of favour? We'd be pitching an out of favour toolset again. Just pointing out that there are always pros and cons so the only thing we can fall back to are the project goals.

[jurajkapsz]

About docs:

• Maybe all those XSLT utilities could be bundled right into the docs, giving credits to their authors and made them coauthors this way. This could be also one part of maintaining and further updating the docs.
• Also I am having troubles searching through the discussions, returning mostly general results and sometimes huge threads. But maybe its only about me. E.g. I do struggle sometimes with english finding the right words. Anyway, maybe the forum could be updated with tags and further attributes. Similar to categories, you could have e.g. all the known extension names at hand, so it would be enough just to select them and that would also become a tag, and later a dedicated search option. The same maybe for statuses (open, solved, proposal.. ?) or use cases (dates - date handling, filtering, beer session ...). All in all, I could land into a desired comment directly. There is lot of material there and that could have a doc aspect too. Maybe those discussions don't have to be threads, but dynamic streams build upon attributes and relations. Spok, beam me up :)

[jurajkapsz]

Is Soario no more then? What happened there?

I am interested too. Had no idea about this.

[allen]

Soario is currently on stasis until we find another investor to help kickstart it again.

[iwyg]

that's quite a nice euphemism…

[DreAmigo]

Symphony is awesome and i absolutely love all the backend. However, when i try to include the Symphony into a few new projects in the last few months, the XSLT wasn't very welcoming for the template. Its just another language to learn however not very keen for developers. I think, that is the main and unique point of making Symphony not as popular as WordPress or any another CMS. The Symphony backend with its flexibility is 1000% better than WP and any another CMS that i could test lately.

I would love to use into all projects because make my life of building the backend so so easy..... But when i get to the template part its absolutely a nightmare.

Hopefully it wont die soon. :)

@abocati

[jensscherbl]

There was an offer to have the core built out by a dedicated team of paid staff to get the momentum going.

Would be nice to get some more information on this soon. If there's a commercial entity with a budget behind it, maybe even some of us could get hired for a few month, so we don't have to take on new client projects during this time and can work on Symphony full time?

The more I look for an alternative and try other systems (ProcessWire, Craft), the more I wish I could stick with Symphony and that it will reach a level where I can wholeheartedly recommend it to bigger clients and other developers.

What we need in my opinion:

• People working on the new codebase.
• People working on the new user interface.
• People working on high quality pro extensions (for user management, caching, multilingual needs, etc.) that get regularly updated to always work with the latest stable core releases. Maybe we could even have an ecosystem where extensions like these can be developed and maintained commercially by third parties.
• People working on a new community site (with blog, tutorials, docs, extension directory, job board, showcase, support forum etc. built right in like on the current site). This needs to be built and managed by a single person or group, leaving this stuff to individual community members independently wouldn't work very well long term (see current extension site).

[designermonkey]

I was unable to have a conference call yesterday as other things (work meeting in the pub) got in the way, so I've loosely scheduled it in for this weekend and am waiting for a reply.

When I know more I will definitely let people know.

The main thing I'm trying to do is get something on paper (so to speak) this weekend, as to what is expected from this project. A project brief if you will, so we at least have something to start with.

[ijy]

One key thing for me is that Symphony remains open source. I like to be able to hack personal projects and play with ideas without having to have barriers of buying commercial licences first. I use commercial software but I'd always look to have a versatile open source CMS in the arsenal. It's the reason why I don't use the likes of Craft. Not because I begrudge paying for it but it wouldn't be worth it for personal projects and with only so many hours in a day I'd always look to have a solid open source CMS in the arsenal and take the time to get to know well and that would always take precedence.

[jurajkapsz]

Speaking of liking disliking xslt, ok, there are other templating languages, I wasn't also bored with jsp and struts logic some time ago (ok, thats more about java, haven't looked further) but it actually came to me, that I favor xslt mostly for the wysiwyg's content manipulation, e.g. creating an interlinked and counted faq list just from headings and their following content, or more important, enriching content tags with various attributes (schemes, classes, etc.) I wouldn't want the redactor to care about. This is a killer feature for me.

[designermonkey]

Dear everyone,

Even though I said what I said earlier in this thread about leading the project, and asked for help from at least two other people to do it, I'm sad to say I'm stepping away from the project.

I've had no response from anyone about helping out in getting a roadmap and project plan together for Next. And I fear that this is the killing blow for this project. It is in a headless state at present.

From a personal perspective, it's become quite apparent that I can't dedicate enough time to Symphony anymore, and I am putting off some quite important personal responsibilities including my kids and setting up a company (which I planned years ago), and this is all because I spend too much time trying to make sense of the priorities for the community, and basically getting nowhere.

It's mainly because of this over the lack of any actual taking of responsibility from any other party that I've come to this decision. I will still be around, and available for help with the 2.3.x codebase, but I will no longer be active in the community management.

I hope you all prove me wrong and get a great product together in Next.

[nilshoerrmann]

Thanks for all your time and work, John. I'll close this topic as I think the main question has been answered. Farewell, Symphony.

[michael-e]

@nilshoerrmann: You are right that the main question has been answered for now. But saying farewell is a bit too stagy for me.

I won't say farewell. Currently Symphony is the CMS I love. The 2.x codebase is good for some other years to come. One day — which is not the same as "now" — many of us may need a "next step" of Symphony. But I don't expect that we will arrive faster by pushing harder or by saying farewell.

Regarding this next step: I have the feeling that there are too many diverging visions at the moment, and this is one of the reasons for @designermonkey not being able to get the project starting. But there is another, more important reason: Some of us are rather occupied by their business, which may mean that Symphony has helped them to make a living. The latter is definitely true for me. Being grateful means giving back to the community, but there are times when you can't give as much as you would like to.

I still believe in Symphony 2. It has not become any worse while we were discussing Symphony Next. On the contrary: Some of us are still working on making the codebase more stable. (And I am glad that @designermonkey is still on board for the Symphony 2 codebase.)

Please think it over. While the right time has not come for something really new, you can still love Symphony 2.

@designermonkey: I understand and respect your decision. And I hope that you will be able to achieve your goals when the "community manager workload" is gone. At the same time I hope to meet you here for many years to come. Thanks a lot for your hard work in the past.

[jonmifsud]

I'd like to echo @michael-e's statement. Whilst symphony Next has stalled, Symphony 2 still works wonders for what I need to do at this point in time.

Recognizing at some point that we'd need to make the next step, assuming people in the community would like to see it, we'll need to somehow keep the community active rather then say farewell. I'll have some time over the weekend to analyse my own personal commitments over the short-medium term, as well as what symphony is to myself. And from there see how much I can give back to the community.

@designermonkey thanks a lot for what you've done; and sincerely hope that we keep seeing you around here even if not as a project leader.

[iwyg]

@designermonkey I actually wasn't aware that you were waiting for people to contact you. I certainly would have. But anyway, thanks for all you efforts in keeping the project alive, very much appreciated.

[brendo]

Big hat tip to John for all his work and effort of the past 2 years working with the Symphony community. He has been persistant in assisting new users, planning new features (Associations wouldn't be around without his collaboration and drive with Nils) and triaging issues. It is a shame we haven't been able to put a head on the Next project, but I completely understand the dilemma of many project and not enough time, especially with your growing family. Perhaps in future we shall see you around :)

Echoing Jon and Michael, Symphony 2 exists and still will for some time.

The Next project is really about taking Symphony and making it a CMS for the now. It was anticipating future needs and desires to be able to have more control and power that some developers have grown accustomed to with the new wave of frameworks. Since Symphonys inception, JSON and client side frameworks like Backbone and Angular have hit the scene and we've been fairly reactive about that.

Symphony is, I believe, the best CMS when compared against the frameworks of it's era such as Wordpress, CMSMS, Joomla, EE, Drupal etc, but it shows it age (code wise, not UI) and crude architecture when you have excellent frameworks like Fuel, Slim and Laravel starting to mature.

Next is about matching those frameworks, while delivering Symphony's concept. Our contributors lead busy lives and it's been difficult to get everyone together and get this idea formulated and off the ground. I'm not saying it won't ever happen, but it's unlikely to happen as quickly as we'd all like at the moment.

[iwyg]

My suggestion is to let this just settle for a couple of days, open a new issue, and ask one last time who is willing to take over responsibility for the project and who is willing to contribute in the first place.

If there's still no one, we really should consider this project dead.

[jurajkapsz]

@michael-e , @jonmifsud - me the same. I will want to continue. The concept is best I know, I could say the only one right.

Also thanks @designermonkey for everything and wish you all the best (of course all others the same), and also @nilshoerrmann as of this thread too.

NB: I will be a dead bug next week starting today and about two weeks in august because of traveling (august in Germany :), not that things should be stuck on me, but I vote for happy upcomming years with Symphony.

[bauhouse]

As you may know, I bet my career on the hope that I would be able to continue working with the Symphony community to build the new community site and develop the documentation site. I quit my job at the agency where I was working to pursue this effort. I thought I could also pursue my academic interests at the same time. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this has diluted the focus I should have had to make progress on the work.

Disillusionment

On the other hand, there had been the opportunity to work with Allen and the Soario team. When this opportunity disintegrated, I needed to start working on other opportunities. When I discovered that I would be working largely on my own to create the Symphony forum and documentation sites, this was the opposite of what I was hoping for. I was looking forward to collaborating with some really smart people to build the new site. At the time, the bulk of the effort was going toward the core development, which was definitely the higher priority, and I'm glad to see that the team seems to have been able to achieve a high level of stability for the Symphony core because of their efforts. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in making Symphony the best CMS in its class.

When the discussions arose about the next direction for the Symphony core, I began to wonder about the future of the documentation project. One of the reasons that my efforts on the documentation has stalled is the worry that all the work that would be going into it would be discarded by the time it was finished. The other reason was the lack of a collaborative team to keep the project going. And what would be the point of continuing on with work on a community site as many of the members of the community were starting to fall away? I discovered that those who had been the core members of the community were doubting that Symphony and XSLT really mattered, at least in terms of making a living.

Now, I feel somewhat responsible for contributing to the lack of confidence in the future of Symphony because of my lack of focus. I know that I have lost a great amount of credibility in my own estimation, as well as that of the community and the agency I left to pursue this work. I am sorry that my meager efforts have been too little, too late.

This conversation is happening just when I was planning to put my academic pursuits on hold to rededicate my focus to the Symphony work. I didn't want to announce anything for fear of setting expectations that I could not meet, but rather to under-promise and over-deliver.

A New Opportunity

The opportunity that I have been working on happened this week. Yesterday, I accepted an offer to become a Digital Design instructor at the University of the Fraser Valley. Because of this appointment, I was hoping to be able to dedicate my efforts to build the new Symphony community site and create the documentation I would need to be able to teach the students how to build websites with web standards, including XSLT. I was also hoping to make a pitch to a freelance client this week for a Symphony site.

I still believe in Symphony. I'm still willing to help lead the community, but I know that I can't do it on my own. I also know that I don't have nearly enough knowledge about the core technology to lead the effort. My hope this year was to be able to learn about making a more significant contribution to the effort.

If this is the end of the road for Symphony, then I will have to learn something new anyway. And somehow, I'm going to be taking what I learned about XSLT here and applying the same knowledge to another system or framework. In fact, that has been my hope all along: to prove that XSLT can be a portable, standards-based templating language that solves the fragmentation problem across our industry. Maybe something like, instead of Ruby on Rails, Ruby goes to the Symphony.

A Wager

If there are people who are still willing to pitch in and keep this project alive, I really don't want to lose the wager that I made with myself at the beginning of this year. I really don't want to have no other options but to use WordPress, Drupal, etc. That would be such a sad state of affairs for designers and developers everywhere. And it would be such a sad waste of many years of effort on the Symphony project and community. I have two months to have a new community site and documentation site ready for the beginning of classes in September. If you're willing to give this project two months of your time, let's see what we can accomplish. If not, I'll have little choice but to move on as well.

[designermonkey]

I'm just going to chime in again...

Firstly, thanks for all your kind words, I really appreciate them.

Secondly, I still fully believe in Symphony CMS, as it is now. The concept, the application of that concept, the use of solid web standards like XML and XSLT. Just because the hipster programmers are continuously swinging their focus on to new ideas and technologies doesn't mean they're right. XSLT and what and how we do things with Symphony are solid.

I will continue to use the software as it is and was still happy to see it mature into 2.4, and even 2.5

My issue is with the Next project. Too much want and too little give. @bauhouse I have loads and loads of stuff around Symphony 2 and what we were going to do, and I'm very happy to help you out from a discussion perspective at least, I just need a lot more down time than I have had for years. I'm still here, just not in a lead capacity.

Thirdly, my overrated opinion: Symphony is not dead, and is a viable product fora while yet. Symphony Next may be, and may have to be for a time. There are new signups every day on the site, and not just from spammers, so we need to realise where we are now, and solidify that position before a project like Next can work. @bauhouse is actually better suited than me to lead the team, but his focus is actually where it should be, where we are now.

I am with @bauhouse on this topic, and we need to get the site finished, and document it all.

[designermonkey]

I say we...I mean you all.

[DavidOliver]

John, kudos for good prioritising, and all the best with the kids and company! Thanks for all the community work and interesting posts/discussing.

Like Michael and others have said, even if Next’s time isn't yet I see myself using Symphony and don't want to say goodbye to it. Brendan seems to sum it up well above. Maybe a bit of time for people reaffirm core concepts and consider the technical options without having to commit the project to them isn't a bad thing at this stage? As a beginner programmer I hope to learn more about PHP and application design in the meantime.

I also seem to be the only person managing the spam on the main site, and I can't continue to do it all

I feel very limited in what I can offer technically, but I tend to check the forum quite often and would be happy to help with moderation/spam.

[padwanRO]

Hello all, it is the first time you see me posting in here and that is for a couple of very good reasons, but i will get there at the end.

First of all I will introduce myself. My name is Daniel Popa and I'm the managing partner in Xander Group also, among a few other companies and start-ups, I'm the CEO of Xander Advertising and Xander Software. Those are two small companies based in Brasov - Romania where I currently live.

I discovered Symphony CMF back in 2009, in time as i scratched the tip of the iceberg i grew to love it's elegance and simplicity, and i took my colleague VladG and started to implement all the websites we`ve done since then on top of Symphony. And we have done quite a few.

Using Symphony for our in house projects and for clients it wasn`t always as easy as we wanted, and tweaking it, and the admin interface to give our clients a better user experience, could prove an awful and huge effort both financial and time consuming but we did that because we love it and because we love what we do and i believe it defines who we are.

When Symphony 3 emerged and it came to that discussion of compatibility between Symphony 2 and Symphony 3 and refactoring things in order to make Symphony 3 the next usable thing in production my first thought was at that time to hire developers to do that in order to move things in that direction. After a long debate with myself and my associates and also several discussions with VladG, i tried to figure out how beneficiary will that be to our company and what is the financial effort and the most important if that is feasible. The result after also watching the community trend it was that "we will wait to see what happens next and meanwhile we will try to bring Symphony 2, which is more mature and stable, to do what we want ". We did that and it took us ages to come near what we wanted but way distant from what we really hoped to achieve.

Now, not long ago, the Symphony NEXT idea kicked in and at that time i knew that this is going to head off in the same direction we envision the perfect tool we need. At that point the urge of having the tool faster came up again and after i gave it a lot of thought i decided to come forth and offer financial support in making this happen. So i tried to contact Allen and finally i succeeded in doing that after a few attempts, i presented him my offer and he agreed on it, so i started to move the things in that direction as i know that only this way we will make it happen faster.

Now you will know that i`m the one who was refereed to "offer to have the core built out by a dedicated team of paid staff to get the momentum going" by John (@designermonkey), and now to put everyone at ease, first of all Symphony NEXT will stay open source.

However my company support is more or less conditioned by different factors and conditions:

• Allen will have to provide the new architecture, direction and technology;
• The project management will be handled by someone assigned from the core development team, and is just a thought Allen was referring to @brendo;
• Xander Software (it's a new start up and it was initially the Xander Advertising web development division) will have two permanent developers in the "core development team", those will have also a pair programmer so that will make it 4 people i have to pay monthly in order to make this happen. This thing will be permanent until NEXT is released, and after that they will keep actively develop in the core development team as time permits during the working hours;
• Allen have to select the programmers that will work in that team (Xader's). I don't have them yet so i posted an job advert all over Romanian recruiting websites, that advert was written by Allen and unfortunately till now i didn't had to much success in finding the qualified candidates that`s why i made the search wider and i decided to find and relocate programmers from another cities of Romania to Brasov where our headquarter is. Even if hiring an developer from outside Romania is a great financial effort for us I also started a discussion with someone here (i wont give his name as yet) who is a well known contributor to Symphony since ages and i hope he will join us here in Romania at least for a few months in order to get things going. My decision was made and i hope he will agree too and we will manage to get him here as soon as possible.
• In exchange for our contribution Allen will also architect some custom parts which will be used by Xander in our projects, they will be Xander's property.

Due to various personal and business reasons, at this very moment, people who invested a lot in this project and this community leave the impression they neglect this Symphony NEXT idea. Which i know is not entirely true as i have had chats with some of you and i tried to do it with others, and i also know what i did in this direction as explained above. The situation as i see it now is at that point when, please excuse my language, "the shit hits the fan" and by that i mean there are moments in peoples lives when they actually have to live, they have families to carry on and give them attention, they have personal issues to deal with, they failed some things and they need time to regroup gather their inner force and courage to raise and try again or they had a major change in the life as they used to know it and now they have to addapt. I strongly believe that we have to be patient with those people and give them some credit and understanding (they deserve it after giving to this community a lot of input and time from their lives) and this thing is not something we do by being unhappy that things does not happen at the speed and rate we can do it or wish to, jumping to conclusions and launching "incendiary" presumptions or even taking rush decisions.

Bottom line, Symphony is alive and kicking, we use it on daily basis, some of us, and we still love it. What is somehow staling is the launch of the NEXT stage of Symphony but as the idea arise steps have been done in that direction and we will keep doing those steps, just keep in mind that everyone have a personal life to deal with and sometimes life beats the movies. Remember, till this NEXT discussion was started Symphony was alive, it still is and it will evolve in to something we wish but that is just if we have the power to stick together and the patience for people that worked hard but now at least for a time they need some personal time to sort things out.

Now at the end of what i had to say i will get to tell you as promised why is the first time i post something, so here are the reasons:

• My written English is awful, i learned English on cartoon network, reading tutorials and documentation. I speak better than i write and i have a good vocabulary now (that is what i like to believe), to write this message it took me 2 and a half hours and during this time i was happy that github has a spell checker and Google translate exists.
• I have a lot of projects going on and some of them are start-ups and that is the most delicate moment and they require a lot of attention and time, so for that reason i read everything is written here but i don`t really have the time to socialize, in the last two years i barely had time to have a life time to time.

Anyway I'm glad to meet you all, don't despair be patient things will happen.

[nitriques]

I would also like to add my voice in here. My associates at Deux Huit Huit and I have been usign Symphony since two years and a half now. We contribute a little to the project by fixing some bugs and contributing extensions. I would also like to put some emphasis on the fact that (quoting @brendo)

Symphony is, I believe, the best CMS when compared against the frameworks of it's era such as Wordpress, CMSMS, Joomla, EE, Drupal etc, but it shows it age (code wise, not UI) and crude architecture when you have excellent frameworks like Fuel, Slim and Laravel starting to mature.

Symphony NEXT is AFAIK, too big of a project. It would need permanent and constant investment of time and money in order to be successful. From the beginning, I really like the fact that Symphony was community driven, without any company being it. But this comes with the facts that changes are slow, doc is not up to date etc.

Deux Huit Huit and I are more than willing to continue contributing to the 2.3.x versions. I feel like there is not much features I would like to add into the core. I also think that TDD should be embrace since this is a crucial part that will save everybody a lot of time.

[alpacaaa]

Reading this stuff makes me a little sad :'(

[jonmifsud]

From the discussion it seems that symphony is very much alive. I currently work for a corporate developing in house projects, alongside two other developers, and now we've been using symphony (almost exclusively) for the last 2 years. And there is no plan whatsoever for this to change. I'd assume there could be the possibility of financial contribution to the project if required however i cannot guarantee anything as I'm not the one who calls the shots.

In the last few months I've been working on a batch of extensions and an ensamble, which i have partially shared... However i still need to package These in an appropriate manner to be usable by the community. I currently also have other personal commitments which do not quite allow me to dedicate as much time as I'd like to the community. However I hope to wrap up these commitments between late this year early next. Which hopefully is in time for Symphony next contributions.

Thanks to @padwanRO your dedication to the project is certainly outstanding, i hope that we as a community keep going strong so your efforts will not be in vein.

@alpacaaa actually makes me quite optimistic, goal realignment plus plenty of people looking to continue using Symphony

[bernardodiasc]

Hi everyone, Thanks Allen and the other nerds for bring this great product and our community. Symphony is a awesome CMS. Mainly with the concept. I humbly thank all you folks, from my heart. That every effort be blessed.

I am actively working in a seaquake-market where people without tecnical instruction is getting websites done. This is nice, becouse this is the main purpose of a CMS, right? But make profit is more easy when users care about quality (that's not my cenario). Actually, for me working as a volunteer is fucking hard with this tide, but as much my free time allow, you can count me in with Symphony 2 and Next.

[edit] I would like to put my efforts on marketing level.

[nitriques]

@germchaos

where people without tecnical instruction is getting websites done. This is nice, becouse this is the main purpose of a CMS, right?

Absolutely not. If so, just use Wordpress. CMS is there to MANAGE CONTENT. Not presentation. Not design. Not layout. Content only. It's up to the developers to leverage the CMS in order for the client to update the content of their website.

Symphony is geared towards developers. They are our clients. Not those who only edit data.