Symphony.

hi all,

first i’d like to say that i’m new to symphony, but i’ve been fallowing it’s progress for about over a year now, and i’ve decided to make the big step -to finally use it in a project.

but like all newbies i’m having a bit of a problem wrapping my head around some concepts.

for example, is it possible to limit the creation, or disable the “create new” button for a specific content? if this is possible it would make symphony a great solution for page based cms. the site i’m planing to use symphony with is not a blog-style (river of news). rather the pages have a set structure of basic information and no river of news style.

my first intuitive approach was to create a section, let’s say “home” and of course all it’s associated pages e.g., data source, utilities, etc…
i left the option: “hide this section from the publish menu” unchecked. this meant that the “section” would be listed under the menu point “content”.

but, this solution has a drawback, it allows the admin user the ability to create additional content/pages. it would be great if there was a “limit”, or “disable create new” option on the page that creates the sections. that way one could use the “section” as a page and not just content for a page. the admin user would only see the content to be edited and not the “create new” button on the right.

also the project that i would like to use symphony with is in two languages. it would be much appreciated if someone could give me some tips on the workflow for a i18n implementation with symphony.

thanx

Welcome Curtis, from the lurking depths :-)

Knupska’s Static Section should have what you’re after. It limits a section to a single entry to allow you to create “one-off” sections suitable for specific pages.

Craig did have a Page Templates extension although this is somewhat deprecated for the latest Symphony versions. It allows you to define a “template” for a page (XSLT, attached DSs/Events etc) so that the page can be cloned quickly by a non-developer. However it doesn’t solve the problem of adding bespoke content to the page using content entries.

The upcoming Symphony release is supposed to have translation support. Community member Nils has been instrumental in getting this implemented so I should probably leave it to him to flesh out the details!

@nickdunn i downloaded static section. it was exactly what i needed. yesss! now i only need to get some i18n workflow tips, and i’m good to go. man am i happy :-)

thanx

i downloaded static section. it was exactly what i needed. yesss

Great :-) One down, one to go!

I believe Symphony now supports full translation of the backend (as of 2.0.7), and translations can be downloaded and installed as Extensions (here). I think these would be places to start:

• Localisation: Symphony 2.0.7, Localisation Manager, Translations, Extension Developers (a forum redux post of progress to date)
• Localisation in Symphony (more of a technical explanation of how to create a translation)

hey, thanx for the tip. i had already checked out the localization stuff. it looks more like it’s for the backend/admin section. what i need are tips on creating a multi-language symphony website.

you know like, the user enters the site and can toggle his/her’s language.

There are no set ways of doing this, since each site has slightly different requirements. Some useful forum threads:

• Translation
• Attempting to assign language values to variables
• rederect on browser language using htaccess
• How would I go about setting a global language variable?
• Language Field

Generally I’ve found there are two types of content you’ll want to translate.

Firstly there are the buttons, headings, links and labels which are usually written into your XSLT/HTML as plain text. You’ll need to swap all of these based on language selection. I’ve found storing these in a flat XML file works well, since they change infrequently.

Secondly you have the content-managed content (entries). You probably end up storing a Language against each entry you create. The Language Field may come in useful here.

Quite a few people have asked about this, so it’s something that comes up time again. An Ensemble or Tutorial would be great as a reference point for the different techniques that can be used.

thanx! you are right a tutorial/screencast would be great, cause this looks like it’s not going to be all that straight forward to figure out.

i’ll give the language field a try.

You might also want to try Page Fields for per-page content. I forgot about this before.

I’m going to add a multi-lingual site to my to-do list. Could you outline a brief list of your requirements so that hopefully some of them can be covered?

well basically i’m looking for something like this:

1. browser language detection (redirect user upon language detection)
2. url sub-page structure for language e.g., http://www.site.com/de/bob.html
3. ability to switch language from text link, or image link e.g., language: english | deutsch
4. use of language field to set content/page language.

that’s a short but sweet list for now. it’s more, or less the standard stuff.

naturally it would be awesome to have some kind of option to translate the existing content to a given language. for example on the content page there would be a select box populated with predefined languages, then one would select a language and click a create button. there after creating a copy of the previous content, but tagged as the selected language. the user would then make the necessary changes to the content and publish it.