Back in 2010, Craig Zheng made a deal with Wrox to write a book about Symphony CMS. Unfortunately, the Symphony book project was cancelled.
After nine months and ten chapters, Wrox decided to cancel this book project in June 2011. Symphony Start to Finish was to be the first comprehensive guide to building websites and web applications with Symphony. It was meant to cover the next major version of the platform, but after Symphony lost its only full-time developer, progress on that version was delayed significantly, and in the end Wrox was unable to accommodate the extended timeline.
The considerable work put into the manuscript will be incorporated into Symphony's free online documentation.
Thank you for generously donating your book to the community, Craig.
The Symphony book was made available for free on GitHub. Keep in mind that the manuscript is not finished and was a work-in-progress that refers to Symphony 3.0 (which never was released beyond the beta, which was really an alpha) and Crane (there were plans, which were scrapped, to rename Symphony to avoid confusion with the Symfony PHP framework). There is still a lot of valuable information to be gleaned from Craig's work, and now it's up to the community to rework it to align this content with the latest Symphony release. Feel free to fork, update and send pull requests.
- Chapter 1. Why You Need Symphony
- Chapter 2. Symphony in Action
- Chapter 3. Getting Started
- Chapter 4. Symphony Anatomy
- Chapter 5. Content
- Chapter 6. Front-end
- Chapter 7. Data Flow
- Chapter 8. Templating
- Chapter 9. System Management
- Chapter 10. Planning Symphony Projects
- Chapter 11. Adaptive Techniques
Chapter 8 is a particularly good read for anyone who is just getting started with XSLT.