Symphony is a web publishing system made for web developers. It gives you all the power and flexibility you’ll need, while keeping out of your way. The Symphony developers have spent an inordinate amount of time making sure that tedious tasks are quick and simple, and that your workflow is intuitive and streamlined.

Symphony has a bucket-load of features, but rather than tell you about them all, it’s better to let you discover them for yourself. Check out the live demo or download the Symphony installer and try it for yourself. Below is an overview of Symphony’s main features.

Designed to do things your way

Symphony lets you organise everything the way you like, from your publishing environment to your website’s URL structure. Built to be versatile and customisable, Symphony really is what you make of it.

Powered by XML and XSLT

Symphony’s templating engine is pure XSLT goodness. XSLT is a standard recommended by the W3C, so learning Symphony means that you’re learning skills that you can also use outside of the system. If you already know the XML and CSS standards, then chances are you should be able to quickly pick up XSLT.

Symphony allows you to create small blocks of XSLT code called utilities, which you can use as building blocks to construct your site’s pages. Due to the nature of XSLT, these utilities are highly reusable, so the next time you’re developing a website you’ll probably find you’ve already done half the work.

There’s no need to bother with complex SQL queries; Symphony can take care of the heavy lifting while you just worry about what data you’d like. Of course, if you want to write the queries yourself (or maybe a PHP event on page request), you can.

Rapid developement means more time to relax

It takes 4 minutes to setup and install Symphony. It takes 3 clicks to install Campfire services (our extension system), 2 clicks to update the system and 1 click to get the latest stats on your website. Symphony is about getting things done quickly.

Features

The Engine

• Symphony is modular, which makes it a cinch to move your files between different websites, collaborate on a single project and share themes with the Symphony community.
• Of course, if there is something Symphony can’t do, there’s no problem. Campfire services, Symphony’s extension modules, can add extra functionality where it’s missing.

The User Interface

• By making every aspect of the publishing environment customisable, Symphony gives you complete control over how you and your authors publish. Every field is customisable and reorderable, and you can even apply validation rules which make sure they are correctly formatted.
• You can manage everything from within the admin interface, but Symphony is also designed to work with FTP, so if you’d rather edit files directly on the server or with your favourite text editor, you can. All your changes will be reflected in Symphony and on your website immediately.
• Symphony’s XML-RPC Campfire services allows desktop applications like MarsEdit to publish entries to your website remotely.

The Development Environment

• Maintenance mode is very useful for testing and debugging a live site. Switch on maintenance mode and visitors will be directed to your maintenance page, while you can still see and browse your website as normal. A set of handy debugging features are also enabled during maintenance.
• URL schemas give you a clean and efficient way to create dynamic pages.
• Did we mention that XSLT is a very cool templating language?

Requirements

Your Server

• PHP 4.3
• MySQL 3.23 and above
• XSLT Support (LibXSLT or Sablotron)
• Some common modules: XML Support (LibXML), ZLib Compression Library and mod_rewrite Apache module

Your Browser

• The Symphony admin requires that you use a modern standards-compliant browser. We recommend Firefox and Safari.
• For the best experience, make sure you have cookies and JavaScript enabled.