Where do you get the inside scoop of all Symphony related mysteries? Inside the core system engineer’s brain of course. Since brain biopsy is illegal without consent, we can only do the next best thing: a podcast interview.
It’s not everyday that you get a chance to speak to the guy who’s written the mojo that lives in your servers, unless of course you work with the guy. Then again, I’ve never been in a position of a podcast journalist in this bizarre, yet refreshing role. You can either read the transcript below or alternatively, for the bandwidth-gifted, listen to the podcast.
The interview: Part 1
- Allen C.
- Hello and welcome to the Chaotic Pattern podcast, this is Allen Chang, your host. Today I am interviewing Alistair Kearney, our very own Symphony core systems engineer. With the coming update to Symphony, I’m sure there are quite a lot of questions on people’s minds and today, I will attempt to squeeze some answers from Alistair.
- Alistair K.
- Hello
- Allen C.
- Hello Alistair, how are you?
- Alistair K.
- Howdy, I’m good.
- Allen C.
- Okay, let’s get into the interview.
- Allen C.
- What’s happening with the much anticipated update coming to Symphony?
- Alistair K.
- Well, we’re still working hard. There’s no mystery this has become much, much bigger than we’ve first thought it would be. I think our initial plan was to release this back in the beginning of May and well, we’ve definitely gone past that! We’re sort of three quarters of the way through the bug list I feel and we’re putting some final touches on some of the cool new features improvements.
- Allen C.
- So would you say that this is not version 1.7 point “whatever” now?
- Alistair K.
- Well, considering how much work we’ve put into it, how many new improvements and bug fixes there are, it’s highly likely that this will be a larger version release than 1.7.10, which is what we’ve already said on the forums.
- Allen C.
- That sounds good! I’m personally very excited about the release and that I definitely feel that a lot of the Symphonians out there will also very much like this release.
The interview: Part 2
- Allen C.
- So what have the team been working on recently?
- Alistair K.
- Well, as I mentioned, many of the bug fixes. Personally I have been working on a few more major improvements, one of which is the ability for non-unique page names so long as they are under different parent pages and this includes the URL Schema as well. So if you had a page called “home” but you have another page called “home”, as long as they are under a different page hierarchy, that’s fine and you can also have your URL variable named “home” so long as they’re in unique locations. This is driven by the database now instead of generating the hierarchy on the fly. I’ve also been working on some [new] image manipulation functionality including some smart caching. Currently, the caching is done automatically, it’ll delete the cache every sixty minutes and when file is requested the next time, it’ll re-cache it but that was horribly inefficient, so now we have some nice smart caching in there…and a new crop mode, which I think everyone will really like…but I’ll keep the details of that secret for now! One of the other major improvement is to the custom fields area. We’ve got vast UI changes and a couple of new as-of-yet unannounced custom fields.
- Allen C.
- Oh, sounds really good! I know that personally, the limitation of not having same page names in different hierarchies has been one of the biggest issues for me, especially with working on some of the client projects in the past so this definitely is a really good thing for Symphony, especially if we were to take Symphony to the next level.
- Alistair K.
- That’s right. Because it isn’t completely obvious when a user starts with Symphony it only emerges when they start doing more advanced things and it is quite a large hindrance.
- Allen C.
- So, what is the main goal of this update?
- Alistair K.
- Well, we’re really looking to put Symphony into a stable, feature-complete state so that the team can focus on some other new Symphony-related services, in particular those that revolve around developers and aiding developers. We have a few interesting announcements relating to those services and some other things, which we will release closer to the update.
- Allen C.
- Both Alistair, I and the rest of the Symphony team know about this and we’re all very excited, we just can’t say anything just yet. So watch out for the announcements that’s coming later, nearing the update.
- Allen C.
- So, what have you been doing outside of Symphony’s core development?
- Alistair K.
- A number of things. We’re looking to move hosting to allow more flexibility with deploying these mentioned Symphony services. we’ve been acquiring some new projects which haven’t commenced yet but might go ahead in the coming months and mainly trying not to think about Symphony twenty-four seven!
- Allen C.
- I will ask one last question; home-made green-pea soup or jazzy thin-crust pizza with rosemary?
- Alistair K.
- I will have to go with the pizza, I think.
- Allen C.
- Yeah, I think you can’t go past “Jazzy” pizza.
- Alistair K.
- Oh yeah, gotta love a jazzy pizza. I’m not a big fan of - what was the other one - pea soup? [amused but awkward laugh]
- Allen C.
- [sympathetic laugh] Okay, thanks a lot Alistair.
- Alistair K.
- No problem, see you later.
- Allen C.
- See you.
- Allen C.
- Alistair has given us a clearer picture of Symphony’s coming update from the eyes of our systems engineer. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled to chaoticpattern.com for more information on Symphony and Symphony updates. See you next time!
Discussion
Want to know why Alistair doesn’t like green-pea soup or wonder what “Jazzy” pizza’s toppings entail? If light culinary talk is not your lust, perhaps you want to discuss something with more Symphony meat? Well, go ahead!
Allen 8 June 07