Symphony CMS

Symphony is a free and open source content management system written in PHP using a MySQL database backend. The current stable version is Symphony 2.0, released 8th December 2008. Symphony works exclusively with XML and XSLT, technologies developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.
History
Twenty One Degrees Pty. Ltd. formed a partnership with Michael Simmons to develop a Weblog software, called Typeworks on October 2004. The system combined the interface designed by Michael Simmons and the underlying system developed by Twenty One Degrees called, ModMatrix.
On March 2005, Typeworks officially changed its name to Symphony. At the same time, Symphony 0.9 was released as a commercial application for USD$49. The beta code was only made available to pre-order customers.
Since the release of version 1.0, Symphony has drastically changed its focus from a Weblog software into a developer oriented content management system.
Releases
* On December 2005, Symphony 1.0 was released.
* On 21 September 2006, Symphony 1.5 was released and changed its license to freeware.
* On 18 February 2007, Symphony 1.6 was released.
* On 22 March 2007, Symphony 1.7 was released.
* On 23 January 2008, Symphony 2.0 beta was released and changed its license to MIT Open Source.
* On 8th December 2008, Symphony 2.0 was released.
System Design
Symphony is a developer oriented content management system. Based on MVC programming principles, the system's data and presentation layers are powered by the open standards XML and XSLT, respectively. Symphony provides complete separation between these layers, allowing developers full control over the system's outputs, whether they be XHTML, XML feeds, or any other kind of document.
Features
Compared to other content management systems, Symphony may seem rather lacking in terms of features. This is due to the fact that Symphony adopts the philosophy of a content management framework whereby the system provides the building blocks for a developer to create the features they need but does not come pre-installed with any feature sets of its own. These building blocks are broken down to 4 types:
* Fields
* Sections
* Data Sources
* Events
Fields are atomic data types such as a person's name or a phone number. Sections are the logical container of fields. Data sources are snippets of XML drawn from the database, related and organised by a section. Events are actionable logic such as posting a comment or making an online purchase. Symphony enables the design and development of these building blocks through the system's web interface.
Vulnerabilities
On 2 August 2008, a vulnerability was discovered that allowed malicious users to gain administration privileges.. A patch was released shortly after.
Criticisms
When Symphony was first announced, the developers' overtly bold claims and flamboyant marketing language caused some negative backlash.
The developers of Symphony during the 1.0 release had openly stated that they will only support standards-compliant web browsers, which excluded Internet Explorer 6. To this date, it is not fully compatible with Internet Explorer 7.
Symphony currently does not have comprehensive documentation and relies heavily on the community forum as its main resource for developers.

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