Today is the Day

at 17:01 on 07 December 2005, John wrote:

It certainly "looks" as good or better than many other close-to-free or free systems.

As for functionality it's pretty light though, at least from the demo. There isn't even a "View Site" button (yes, I get that the title does that, but that's not good enough).

I don't see any actual benefits over existing systems - and actually it seems very feature light. Neither the elevator pitch on the homepage or the demo are convincing.

at 17:04 on 07 December 2005, John wrote:

Oh yes, I forgot to add: ditch the transparent menus, they appear right over other text and are very hard to read. It also wreaks of style-over-function, which isn't a feature of a CMS.

at 17:07 on 07 December 2005, Shexy wrote:

Same here, the use of XSLT does not really impress me. I looked at the demo but is not really advancded. But maybe it will be in the future, i don't know.

I must say i haven't got any knowlegde about XSLT so maybe i don't know what i'm talking about here. But the current features do not impress me. I'll stick with wordpress for a little longer...

at 17:42 on 07 December 2005, Matthew wrote:

I've been heavily involved in building sites out of CMS's for the past couple years, and have worked with both Typo3 and Drupal for most of that. Let me tell you that the way the back end looks is very important to clients - it's where they spend most of their time - and if one looks scary, even if it's more powerful, they'll be scared to use it. I'm not sure if Symphony is a fully featured CMS yet, but if it does become one, then I wouldn't hesitate to use it as the back end is inviting and easy to use.

In the next couple weeks I've been wanting to revamp my site. I need to create a portfolio, but I want to keep my photos on it too.. arg! Such conflict, integrating 2 different apps. I think I may try out Symphony if it gets good reviews.

at 18:01 on 07 December 2005, John wrote:

I'm not saying looks aren't important - but focusing on looks at the expense of usability isn't better. The point being that right now it looks like the Syphony team has focused more on how to make a CMS look, then how to make a CMS function.

Tell me the transparent dropdowns are a good idea.

Aside from that there is really no "feature set" apparent.

It certainly doesn't stack up against a free version of MT. Unless you like learning/using XSLT to create a site that's 10 pages as some sort of intellectual exercise.

at 18:19 on 07 December 2005, Nicholas Rougeux wrote:

This looks remarkably similar to Mint (http://haveamint.com/). Several points deducted there for unoriginality.

Limiting the styles entirely from IE users is a horrible decision despite its lack for proper standards support. Lack of support doesn't mean you should completely ignore it.

The "editor" when publishing is just a code view. Is this how it's meant to be? Are there WYSIWYG tools that will be there in the future or are just not showing up? If not, then that's more points deducted since there are many decent editors out there.

Not meaning to sound harsh or pompous, but the layout is far from complicated and while I'm glad they used CSS, they could have done so better. Try scaling the text size up. It breaks immediately and things like the navigation don't scale properly. Everything is so tiny that I need to scale the text and the layout shouldn't break, at least not right away.

Sorry to say but in my book, this isn't really impressive. It could be done bette

at 18:32 on 07 December 2005, Matthew wrote:

I too noticed a striking similarity with Mint.

I don't think the transparent drop downs are bad, because they don't go too far down the page. Where they do cover content, it's not obscuring much of the menu.

That said, I would like to see a more apparent user-control system in place. Since this is not free it will not be adopted for joe-user blogs like Wordpress or Moveable Type, but will be looked at by users of things like Drupal or Mambo. These users build large websites, and need to have a clear way to say "this group of users can edit these pages, but not these". I'm not sure I see an easy way to do that with this product - though some comments on the site I found lead me to think that it's not too hard.

XSLT is really not hard to learn at all. Think of it as a way to say "put this element of the XML here, and make it look like this". Here's some links if anyone wants to check out XSLT..

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/08/holman/

http://www.w3.org/TR/xs

st

at 20:03 on 07 December 2005, Clemens Krack wrote:

There goes the hype...

at 00:59 on 08 December 2005, Bramus! wrote:

I'm impressed by it!

- Excellent usage of XSLT (it's the future, really - think of what you all can do with simple feeds to layout them)

- Very nice unobtrusive (or however one writes that) javascript built like it should (using prototype (NOT "Prototype" -- notice the p/P))

- Nice AJAX Implementation (thnx to LiveHTTPHeaders and Ethereal which makes analyzing it all more easy)

- Extensibility

- Etc

>> Kudos Symphony!

--

FYI: Those claiming that Symphony stole its layout from Mint: check your resources!

As you might know, Symphony used to be named TypeWorks which was announced about a year ago (January 2005). Some screenshots were also released back then, including the one at

http://inblogwetrust.com/wp-content/uploads/TypeWorks.jpg

and the one at

http://www.ideasapiens.com/blogs/is/archivos/typew_feeds.jpg

In both images you can see that they have used the layout since then and that nothing has been stolen.

Case

at 02:12 on 08 December 2005, Matthew wrote:

I never said it was a bad thing that it looks like Mint, and I'm sorry that I may have inferred it. I love my Mint install, and since these two apps look so similar they will build up a nice "suite" for my site. I won't even have to skin them to get them to look similar!

This is certainly not a bad thing in my book. I don't think anyone stole anything in this case.

at 02:14 on 08 December 2005, Jezz Lee wrote:

I would'nt bother as long the demo is so crappy, Sorry lads but c'mon.

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