Symphony has a bucket-load of features, but rather than tell you about them all, it's better to let you discover them for yourself. Check out the live demo or download the Symphony installer and try it out. Below is an overview of Symphony's main features.
The Engine
- Symphony is modular, which helps make life easy if you're moving your site around, say from a local development version to the live online site. This is also great for collaborating and sharing themes with the Symphony community.
- If your site needs more than what Symphony is capable of, Campfire services (Symphony's extension modules) can add extra functionality where it's missing.
The User Interface
- By making every aspect of the publishing environment customisable, Symphony gives you complete control over how authors publish. Every field is customisable, from order to validation rules.
- While you can manage everything from within the admin interface, but Symphony is also designed to work with FTP, so if you'd rather edit files directly on the server or with your favourite text editor, you can.
- Symphony's XML-RPC Campfire services allows desktop applications like MarsEdit to publish entries to your website remotely.
The Development Environment
- Maintenance mode is useful for testing and debugging a live site. Switch on maintenance mode and visitors will be directed to your maintenance page, while you can still see and browse your website as normal. A set of handy debugging features are also enabled during maintenance.
- URL schemas give you a clean and efficient way to create dynamic pages.
Zero, zilch, nada
Symphony is absolutely free, so why not take it out for a spin?
Once you create your Symphony account, you can download the latest version of Symphony and get started using it.
Symphony Resources
Overture is the resource website for all things relating to Symphony. It features Campfire service downloads, a Symphony wiki, screencasts and more.
Overture's community forum is full of friendly and knowledgeable Symphony users, and the Symphony team are always quick to respond, so it's a great place to go if you have questions.