Chaotic Pattern: Article > Developer’s Chat #2

Developer’s Chat #2

Our first developer’s chat was a good start but in this podcast we’ve increased participants by 33%, length by 90% and juice by a staggering 300%.

In this developer’s chat podcast, we discussed the next version of Symphony; the potential of a version number change, making Symphony open source upon release and many other juicy tidbits. Don’t miss it!

About Symphony’s Progress

Allen C.: First of all, I’d like to start with the progress of Symphony. Alistair, how is it going with Symphony?
Alistair K.: Yep.
Allen C.: Yep? It’s going…yep?
Alistair K.: Yep, it’s “going” [said with a sigh of grief]. Nah, things are going good. We’re making good progress.
Scott H.: It’s a tough question to be continually asked.
Allen C.: I guess what you can do is…we’re up to a point now I think we can divulge more information about what you’ve done specifically. For example, a lot of the things are ripped out of Symphony. The comments feature is ripped out and it is now a campfire service - we’ve mentioned this in our past podcast. The other one is the abstraction of widgets. We’ve removed them out of Symphony’s core and it’s now made into individual campfire services.
Allen C.: So they’re all pretty much done, right? The structural changes in Symphony are complete.
Alistair K.: Yeah, the structural changes are in and also the API for creating widgets. The campfire API has been finished off to allow more integration with Symphony - specifically integration with the preferences area.

About Symphony’s Going Open Source

Allen C.: Scott, we have been talking in length about making Symphony open source.
Scott H.: Yeah, it’s been something we’ve always wanted to do.
Allen C.: Is that plausible?
Scott H.: There’s a lot of infrastructure type things that needs to changed to better organise Symphony to be…
Allen C.: Just to give listeners something to work with…something more specific. The accounts page for Symphony…it’s kind of odd that something is open source but you have to register to be able to download.
Scott H.: Effectively there’s no real change that we need to make like you said earlier except one of legality…currently Symphony is not free software, and it should be because people who are using software on their own website should have the power to modify it and configure it to their own needs.

Discussion

Excited by Symphony 2? Confident about Symphony going open source? The podcast is chock-full of news and I’d love to hear what you all think!

Almost-guaranteed discussion of intrigue

Nils Hörrmann 27 July 07

Wow! I’m impressed and I’m very, very anxious to see the new version! Well, I’m also a bit frightened of having to migrate site and not just being able to update - but let’s see what you guys are coming up with. Do you have any screenshots or screencasts to exemplify some of the new features?

Btw, Allen, I love these podcasts. Would it be possible to have an iTunes podcast? That would it make easier to download new episodes and to stay up-to-date.

Thanks so far, Nils

Jiri 27 July 07

I really applaude this regularity of these blogs guys!

btw are there still these sunday chat sessions?

Michael Eichelsdörfer 27 July 07

Did you say Symphony 2? So it will not be 1.8! It will be much more than that!

Dru 27 July 07

Well I’ve just finished listening and all I can say is “Roll on Symphony 2.0!”. The changes you’ve made sound fantastic and the options it opens up to developers is quite outstanding.

The migration process seems like it may be quite involved due to the sheer volume of changes that have been made but really, for what we’re getting in terms of improvements and new features, it’ll be worth it!!!

Now… where’s that beta… (just kidding :) )

yfhahn 28 July 07

It’s like winning the Wordfest contest! I am having trouble doing work instead of tearing myself away to listen to this podcast. Oh it will be an emotional day when I can find some time to start building the kind of crazy things into Symphony that Drupal handles (quite badly) right now…

yfhahn 30 July 07

Just listened. Thank you so much for your hard work and also being very cool guys (with cool accents).

BTW, Symphony 1.8/2’s tagline should be “Scarily Possible.” ; )

Egor 30 July 07

Can’t believe I missed this chat. All sounds very exciting. Bring on the beta!

yfhahn 1 August 07

It’s like winning the lottery : ) After actually thinking about what you had to say in this podcast, I think “secret feature #1” is clear:

Any custom field can now have any number of “child” custom fields which can similarly have children CFs, and so on.
Custom fields can have single or multiple values which can be added on dynamically.
You’ve added a static custom field type, aka just a “label”, which is now all that “Sections” are.

The elegant abstraction here is that you’ve eliminated “sections” which is really just now a root label CF which can take child CFs, and you can add “sections” at any point in the CF tree, e.g. a group of CFs under a label.

If this is really the case, it will be a very emotional day when Symphony 2.0 is released. Also, it must’ve been one daunting task to interface well (though I have no doubts that that’s been done) since any level of nesting might be possible…

Discussion Etiquette

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Prefix your comment with [wordfest] to participate.

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Chaotic PatternExclusively Symphony, straight from the source

Aside

27 July 2007

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