Symphony.

A new Extension, “Page Templates” is now available for download. Comments and feedback can be left here but if you discover any issues, please post it on the issue tracker.

Enables the creation of Pages from predefined templates. Here’s a screenshot. Comments/suggestions are of course welcome.

http://github.com/czheng/pagetemplates/tree/master

EDIT: I’ve gone ahead and “released” this, adding it to the Downloads section.

I’ve had a quick play with this Craig and I have some initial thoughts.

1: It would be good to be able to lock editing of templates for all but admin users.

2: Would it be possible to have editable zones in the templates where during page creation, end users would see a rich text editor and be able to insert content that way?

3: Would there be a way to have a template based on a particular datasource but edit the filter properties (perhaps creating a new datasource on the fly) during the page creation process?

So far the extension seems pretty stable, no weird behavior yet.

Neil

@neilalbrock

1: Sounds good.

2: I wouldn’t do that as, while it would make creating pages easy, it would not help you once you have to edit one.

3: I wouldn’t do that either; Pages and Components are separated from each other for a good reason.

@phoque

Okay, I will follow my original thoughts with some more.

As regards (2), there should also be a method of editing pages created from these templates. The reason being, that it allows users to create ad-hoc pages after the initial site build is complete. We had a client ask for this on our last project. Our solution seemed less than ideal.

I accept that (3) is a perhaps beyond the intended scope of this extension. However, I can see that it could have it’s uses. Also, by automating the process, it could be tightly controlled, hopefully avoiding any issues.

This makes me very happy. Will let you know if I see problems. Thanks!

OK i got one, but its tiny. Readme says it’s in /blueprints, but its currently in /publish. I just changed the location=> 200 instead of 100 in the fetchNavigation array.

So does this just pre-populate a Page with the content of the page template, or does it actually maintain control over the content/settings of the ‘spawned’ pages?

Hmm. That’s strange. In my install, it’s in Blueprints. What version of Symphony are you working with?

Right now, this extension basically just bootstraps the Page creation process. Once the pages are created, they’re just pages.

That’s odd, I’m on build 375, but my symphony/assets/navigation.xml has a ‘publish’ group with index 100. Would another extension rewrite the indexes?

And navigation groups are working in your sections? Because I thought “Publish” was no longer present in recent builds…

The version i’m working from is an upgrade from rev5 I think. But yeah, they work. EDIT: That is to say, this could definitely be my problem with my old upgraded version.

Ok, thanks. Will look into it.

@ashooner: On both the master and integration branches from GitHub, Page Templates was installing to Blueprints as expected, but on the 2.0.2 package release it was installing to Publish. Though both the package release and the GitHub master branch have the same version number (2.0.2) and build number (375), they are in fact different versions. The nav group indexing must have changed sometime after the package release.

In the meantime, I came across this commit, which enables extensions to specify their navigation group location by name rather than by numeric index. This seems to be the more future-proof solution, so I’ve updated Page Templates accordingly. Unfortunately, now it works even less elegantly with the non-GitHub package release, placing Page Templates in an empty nav group. I’ve updated the README requirements accordingly.

Hi, I’m getting a weird error when I try to create a new template:

Fatal error: Cannot access protected property contentExtensionPageTemplatesNew::$_errors in /var/www/web43/web/extensions/pagetemplates/lib/class.templateform.php on line 137

I’m running this on Symphony 2.0.6.Can’t see why this should break as the context is obviously correct, but as there are bigger brains than mine here, maybe someone can help?

Haven’t had the chance to test this on more recent releases. Will take a look as soon as I can…

I love the idea of Page Templates but haven’t gotten it to work.

Seems to install/enable fine but I get a blank screen (locally) when I try and create a new template. Any ideas? Things I should check?

Symphony 2.0.6, Local installation, MAMP

Thanks

Update: On my test server I get the same error as “AppSol” above

I’ve got an update ready that, I think, will fix at least AppSol’s problems, but Github has been down so i can’t push it. Will let you know when it’s up.

Edit It’s up. Try that and let me know if it works…

Well as Christopher Biggins used to say “Safari, So Goody”, no problems yet.

Kudos for the extension as well, I use Symphony as my CMS of choice, but I feel it’s weak area is it’s management of Site Architecture and this goes some way to addressing that.

Thanks.

Glad you find it useful. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

czheng, thanks for that update, working great in 2.0.6. It’s definitely useful for me.

If I have any ideas or if I “extend” it a little myself I’ll let you know.