There are a lot Content Management Systems(CMS) out there. Some are quite specialized for one purpose: Magento for e-commerce and more or less WordPress for blogs. Others are supposed to be a scaffolding that any designer can use to build almost anything, like Drupal. Each has it’s purpose in its own light, but when it comes to a great light weight and easy to use CMS, I must say that Symphony 21 is certainly one of the best.

Symphony 21 advertises itself as a CMS for developers. Quite often the CMS back-end for these sites, such as Drupal, are so complicated that actually letting someone other than a developer alter them is just waiting for disaster. Realistically and in practice, the site creator is often the one who changes the content anyway, so it makes sense to have something easy for a developer to make alterations.

Symphony 21 utilizes XSL and XML for its templating, which makes it much faster than other PHP based CMS’s because it is some library doing the rendering and not PHP. Utilizing XSLT of course also has the nice advantage of being perfectly formed output.

The other great thing about Symphony is that it doesn’t impose “it’s will” on you. Meaning you have complete control of the rendering and data types. Symphony doesn’t wrap the output HTML at all, so it looks exactly how you want it. Creating the data types and sources is quite intuitive as well. You simply indicate what specific data fields you want through the CMS, and they will appear in the XML to be transformed by XSLT. Finally, it’s light weight, so your not getting everything and the kitchen sink to slow it down, but you there are extensions if you actually need a few other pieces.

For a developer, I don’t think it could be much easier and yet still have complete control. It does have it’s drawbacks though. I really only use it for sites where there is only the concept of an administrator and no end users. This is because it doesn’t come with a great front end user system. Adding front end users certainly could be done with or without an extension, but I am not crazy about the user management.

That said, I really think Symphony 21 is a great and easy CMS, which I will certainly be using for sometime to come.

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