The Symphony Network is evolving: We are in the middle of the transition from a theme park to an international airport. Besides the main site we now have Nick’s extensions site, Mark’s Symphony Ninjas, Stephen’s and Marco’s xPathr and many more national projects. As we’re about to see more satellite sites coming up, it’s time to think about how to visually tie them together, hence forming a strong and clear Symphony identity across the network.

Let Symphony Factory enter the stage.

Symphony Factory

The idea behind Symphony Factory is to provide an easy-to-use HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework to create websites for the Symphony Network with a unified design. Think of it as something like Twitter’s Bootstrap or Zurb’s Foundations, but specialised for the needs of a Symphony Network site.

The factory will offer:

• layouts to create single or multicolumn designs
• snippets to create common layout elements like articles, forms, buttons, tables, dialogs and more
• content structure and typography
• a universal Symphony Network navigation bar

We hope the factory will make the development and maintenance of existing sites easier and encourage others to create additional ressources.

Symphony Factory will be freely available for all Symphony Network sites as a Git repository. Also, the new default workspace shall be based on a modified version of the main layout.

Funding

The goal is to make Symphony Factory available and ready to use for the community late summer 2012. But creating a framework like this takes a lot of time and effort. To turn this idea into reality, Symphony Factory depends on your help to fund the work.

Johanna and Nils Hörrmann are up for the challenge and willing to invest their time. If you like the idea of a design framework for Symphony and want to support the project, a donation would be very much appreciated.

The basic goal is 2.000 EUR (approx. US$ 2.500), which will cover research, design and documentation. Of course, work will not stop after the initial release, but the more money is raised, the faster the factory can move on.

We are excited to make his happen – and hope that you think so, too. Thanks for your help!