I want to attach my CSS to your XHTML. I’ll be sure to use AJAX after I’m done, baby.
Introduction
The web development industry is already littered with jargons and acronyms and we’re not doing anyone favours by contributing to the litter box. Anybody who knows what “Roundtrip Filters” means know what I’m talking about. For Symphony 2 beta, we’ve managed to trim system specific terms to eleven but our goal for Symphony 2 final release, we wanted that list to reduce further. Not that the glossary list is particularly long to begin with - six, down from a whopping eleven - but for every term eliminated, the system becomes a magnitude easier to understand. That is not to say Symphony is now granny friendly, it is still a developer-oriented system and fundamental web development knowledge is still a prerequisite.
In Symphony 2 Rev 5 and prior, the glossary is:
Workspace, DS param output, Section link, Maintenance, Ensemble, Blueprints, Data source, Events, URL param, Handle, ?debug
In Symphony 2 RC1, the list will be:
Blueprints, Data source, Events, URL param, Handle, ?debug
No sugar in my coffee please
So what happens to the obsolete terms and consequently the functions they are attached to? Calm down before you get an anxiety attack, they have simply been repurposed or superseded by something better.
Workspace - Although it was never a requirement to put website assets inside the workspace folder but as Symphony’s development went on, we and the community became accustomed to it. In Symphony 1.7, we even introduced a new XSLT parameter, $workspace to take care of often-used references to the workspace folder - and therein lies the problem. This kind of feature addition - to accommodate for something that’s system-specific - is exactly what we want to avoid.
DS param output - Those of you who follow the Symphony 2 beta progress will know by now that DS param output have been replaced by XPath filtering.
Section link - with the addition of the XPath filtering feature, section linking will be replaced by non-feature specific means. This is something I won’t talk about just yet, partly because it’s a whole subject in itself and partly because I’m terrible at explaining concepts without pretty pictures and a pointing device.
Maintenance - Now, hands up those who’ve accidentally left the site in maintenance mode when you thought the site is live? I thought so. Maintenance mode is now gone. If you need to throw a site in maintenance mode you can use Symphony 2’s new redirect event instead.
Ensemble - This feature has been repurposed as an extension. The extension may still be called Ensemble, but it’ll be the name of an extension rather than a system term.
Now more people can enjoy coffee
Those of you who are familiar with both Symphony 1.7 and Symphony 2 beta will know that we’ve made the association between XSLT and Symphony much more defined and transparent. In version 1.7 and prior, XSLT documents like masters and utilities were dynamically mixed together along with a page’s XSLT into a super XSLT document. This sort of ‘smushing’ is not in the spirit of XSLT and in Symphony 2 beta, we replaced it with the use of <xsl:include> and <xsl:import>. This sort of change help users who are already familiar with XSLT to learn Symphony with minimal learning curve.
Coffee is an acquired taste
We have put a lot of effort in concept unification. Trimming of system specific terms is one aspect of this. However, even though Symphony 2 will be quicker to learn, it won’t make it any easier. Concepts will be less confusing to grasp but the developer still need to put in the hard work of designing sections, fields and pulling data into data sources. I have found through my experience that Symphonians tend to be anal retentive perfectionists (admitting is the first step towards recovery). So I’m sure you guys will find solace in the fact that Symphony will always be a developer-oriented system. Its focus is flexibility and power over rigidness and one-click creation wizardry.
Nils 10 November 08