Ravi: Meu nome é Ravi Rajakumar e eu sou o desenvolvedor principal no Social Science Research Council (SSRC). O SSRC é uma organização fundada em 1923 que foi criada em torno da ideia de formalizar a prática de pesquisa sobre ciências sociais.
Craig: Eu sou o coordenador de comunicação. O que significa que faço um tanto de tudo! Francamente, eu não sei o que teríamos feito – Eu não consigo imaginar como estaríamos tentando construir o site agora se não tivéssemos descobrido o Symphony.
Ravi: Porque o sistema não está preso por um conjunto de templates pré-definidos, você tem muita flexibilidade. Você pode começar com algo muito "cru" e apenas ir da entrada ate a saída e ver o que você vai conseguir, sem um monte de decoração que você tem então a desmantelar.
Craig: Na verdade não é nem mesmo de como o Symphony faz isso melhor do que outras ferramentas… É apenas o que não poderíamos fazê-lo com qualquer outra ferramenta.
Ravi: Because Symphony is based on the real "bread and butter" open standards of the Internet — the future of where web development is going (XML, XSL, HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL) — you can always find expertise in any of those technologies.
Craig: The nice thing is you've got this community of developers who are committed to the product because, as developers, you almost feel like it was built for you. A lot of CMS are built for your average user such as someone who wants to get a blog up really quickly. As a developer when you have very specific things that you need to do and you're using any of those other systems, it's like you have to fight against it all the time. When you're using Symphony you don't have to fight against it, it works with you. You feel like it was build for you. For me that generated a sense of commitment to the product because I wanted to see it continue to grow and get better. I wanted to see people use it because it makes development that much easier.
Craig: The most important Symphony, for me, is its flexibility. It can be anything you need it to be; to fit almost any situation.
David: The Forward is a one-hundred and eleven year-old media company started as a Yiddish-language daily, focused on helping Europen immigrants assimilate to American society.
Aram: My name is Aram David. I am the webmaster of The Forward. Before the website we were only able to reach a small sample of people who either subscribed to the paper or were in some of the select distribution areas. Now because of Symphony's ease of use and our ability to put content up very easily we are able to reach an international audience.
David: The choice of a really good CMS is fundamental to our focus on the website. We need non-technical personell to have a very user friendly backend.
Aram: It's so easy that writers who have absolutely not technical ability whatsoever can go in and without any training and publish stories.
David: It's almost amusing, if not ludicrous, to consider the Forward website before Symphony compared to after. With Symphony we were able to instantaneously [train on swarm] Forward.com into a state-of-the-art newspaper website.
Aram: When building from the ground up you have infinite capabilities. Another great thing about Symphony is that there is no ceiling — we can really custom-tailor it to us specifically. We made this enormous leap thanks to Symphony in the matter of a few months and we were able to win [awards].
David: A Webby; we have won a Web Marketing award; we have won an Internet Marketing Association award... I can't extricate Symphony from the importance of what we were able to achieve.
Aram: There would be no website without Symphony.
David: The best things about Symphony are that it is easy to use, it was cost-effective to deploy, and it will grow with us. We can't envisage any needs that are going to have that we won't be able to integrate using the Symphony platform.
My name is Brad Smith and I, with my business partner Ryan Sims, we run a company called Virb, and we produce a website called Virb. On the side Ryan and I, we launched a company blog (I guess it's been five years ago) called the Big Noob. That's what we used Symphony on the first time.
The biggest attraction was that not only could we make Symphony do whatever we wanted it to on the frontend of the the Big Noob, but with custom fields we could lay out our admin (panel) to look like exactly what we were doing. We wouldn't have "Image Field 1" and "Image Field 2" — we were able to customise and have it display exactly as we wanted it to.
The ongoing goal of the Big Noob is to move out of a blog format and move into a collection of creative content. What we noticed as we looked around at all these other CMS was they they were all so blog-based — it was title, entry, draft or posted, and append date — and that was it. What we love about Symphony is that as the Big Noob grows and we roll out a new version, and as we walk down this path of more creative content and stepping away from the blog nature, Symphony is there to do that. We can really really grow.