Symphony 21
Seems like the pay for model didn’t work? Can’t really say why the guys over at 21 Degrees have gone the route of giving Symphony away, but having done this blogging thing for a while, I can’t help but remember distinctly the outrage the blogosphere went through when Six Apart went and made the free Moveable Type into a pay for model. This is interesting in that it’s really going in the completely opposite direction. First come out with a pay for model, then give it away. The cynical side of me thinks that this means they’re trying to get people to jump on the Symphony bandwagon and then slap the price tag back on it once people have developed and spread the word about it, and therefore made a connection with it and invested their time into the product because it’s ‘free’.
Don’t get me wrong I think it’s great to give it away (because it really is a beautiful system), however I couldn’t find anywhere on their site the license information about the terms and conditions to downloading and using Symphony 21, and more importantly why and where they think they’re going with this free model. What can I say, the guys are fighting a hard battle and if they want to win the blogger market, they’ve got to be transparent themselves, they’ve got to blog about their system themselves. They’ve got to keep their users informed.
You have to download an installer which is directly linked to your Symphony account (is this a legacy thing from when it wasn’t free?) and then have to go through the motions. I’m quietly wary about where this is all going to be honest with you, simply because we’ve kind of been down this road before and I decided that I wasn’t going to be putting my eggs in one basket that wasn’t open source so I wouldn’t be rammed again.
My problem with Symphony was (before the 1.0) that the templating system was XSLT (or XSL or someth). Thing about that is, is that it’s pretty horrible to learn, use and make templates in.
(They also had some UI issues, but I think they fixed them)
↓ Quote | 26/9/2006
I’ve not had a chance to install and play around with it, but i’ll definitely try it out to see what they’ve done. Hell I was planning on learning a new language (I’m jumping into Python soon I think so we’ll see what wins me over).
↓ Quote | 27/9/2006
XSLT isn’t really a language, it’s more of a style sheet.. (transformation template to be exact). We use it for a few of our projects and it took me a few hours to get into. It’s very pleasant since it lets you really seperate your design from your data, and makes distribution of your data to foreign interfaces much easier.. since it’s already in a perfectly legible xml structure.
(For instance, if you have a category list you could write is as:
Example
Example
10
(i hope you’ll replace those with </>’s.. cause i dont have the energy)
and then have the XSLT transform it into your table list, or whatever you want to use to display it.. That way, anyone interfacing against the site can make legible XML DOM procedures to cut out the interesting bits.) :)
Python is a great language, by the way. Especially for small utilities.. I had a slight obsession with it for a while, though I’ve not really had the time to do anything with it recently. Pretty nice that you can get a functional TCP server running in like, 4 lines of code. :) Beats the hell out of Winsock..
Have you tried C#, btw? I believe if you get Mono, it runs without a problem. It’s a very pleasant language, especially if you’ve used C++ and/or Java. :)
↓ Quote | 27/9/2006
gah.. you didn’t..
Here’s what that “Example” bit should’ve said:
<categories>
<category>
<title>Example</title>
<description>Example</description>
<products>10</products>
</category>
</categories>
I hope I got all those right.. ^^
↓ Quote | 27/9/2006