Symphony.

Hi,

I am to xslt and symphony in general. A few questions for the start:

1- What is the “normal” procedure of adding/uploading images to articles? I want to give the author freedom of where and how to place the image(s) in his article (i.e. floating text) and be able to use multiple images.

I guess wysiwyg or pure xhtml is the way to go. Or is there an easy way to upload images and get the path info needed for the img tag (for not tech savvy users?

2- I’ve read the front end user management is still in beta, right? How would I show/hide navigation, pages, content on user login status?

Sorry if I’ve missed some documentation about the above. Any help pointing me into the right direction would be nice, though.

Greeting panic

1.) Depends. If you don’t want to link one image to one article you can use the Mediathek extension by Nils. It provides both a way to browse your images from your Articles editor and insert them into your text and to actually link the article to them so that the images will be returned in the XML, next to the text, title and whatnot.

From there it’s a matter of taste: You can let your users insert the images on their own, giving them more flexibility and power to edit their entries but also providing room for mistakes. An alternative would be a clever XSLT-algorithm that takes the linked Mediathek-images and places them inside the text, spreading them evenly, when the entry is displayed. This is of course more inflexible but also more foolproof.

Another nice way somebody came up with recently is to edit the <img /> tags in the content on the fly (using something the Symphonians like to call Ninja Technique). This way you can resize them using JIT and giving them special properties without having your editors to insert them manually.

2.) Again, depends on what you mean by “user login status”. If you mean “backend administration login status” then it’s a freebie: Attach the event “Login Info” to your pages and look for <login-info /> in your returned XML.

If you mean “I want a forum with total strangers being able to create accounts and log in” then yes, its in beta and will be released in the next couple of weeks.

1.) Thanks for all the hints. I’ll test drive them…

2.) I’ve thought about some kind of members area (front end only). And depending on the user login status additional menu items, extra content is displayed…

You can let your users insert the images on their own, giving them more flexibility and power to edit their entries but also providing room for mistakes.

Just as a side note: depending on your text-formatter Mediathek offers the ability to drag and drop images into your textareas using the correct syntax (Markdown, Textile, plain HTML). The resulting markup could then be joined with the meta data in your XML provided by Mediathek using the ninja technique phoque mentioned.

1) i did something similar to what you’re trying to accomplish. if you take a look at the xslt utility i wrote based off allen’s ninja technique. if you use nils’ mediathek extension, and like he said, you can drag and drop the images into the post itself. when you have the user upload an image, you can also let the user have different selections for the dimensions or even where the image should be (left, right, center, etc). one thing to keep in mind is that if you use a text formatter, the img could be wrapped in a p tag, so additional xslt may be required to make the image float left or right in which case you’d need modify my xslt utility to fit your xml schema.

I would avoid using WYSIWYG editors in Symphony. I’ve had issues with them in the past with pasted text, at one point even crashing an entire section of a site, instead look at a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) editor.

I’ve made a placeholder one that’s similar to the one used here in the forum that you can find here: http://getsymphony.com/download/extensions/view/36832/

Thanks again for all the help and hints! As I am fairly new to symphony it’ll take some time to test them all and find my way around it.

dougoftheabaci I am currently testing the WMD editor “replacement”, too.