Symphony.

So I am new to Symphony, and gradually understanding it more. I am currently working on a section of my site where I am somewhat spinning my wheels on figuring out the best way to develop it.

There are two parts to the section: 1) the “bandlisting” (left) that shows all of my entries, and 2) the “bandinfo” (right) that will have information and tracks I recommend.

My dilemma is trying to identify an efficient way to make the “bandlisting” hyperlinks update the “bandinfo”. In addition, I was hoping to put a pagination within the “bandlisting” section (if that is even possible).

I know symphony currently has the Step 4. Create an Individual Entry View tutorial and I was going to try and use that to develop this section, but I wasn’t sure if adding in the pagination was going to throw a wrench in that idea. Before exhausting myself trying to get everything to work, I wanted to run this by you guys. Thanks in advance!!!

Option 1: AJAX.
Use jQuery (or whatever library tickles your fancy) and pull in the content from entry pages with the glory that is AJAX.

Option 2: CSS.
Use CSS to select the individual elements already on the page and position them so they can be seen (bit more difficult, works best if they’re all the exact same height). All entries are on the page as default.

Option 3: jQuery tabbed-interface.
Use jQuery to do option 2 for you with some added sexy animations.

Ajax is definitely the best option here in my opinion, it gives the ability to call content dynamically (in the same page), and leave all of the links useable for non JavaScript users (opening a new page), whereas using CSS to hide/display content with JQuery panels etc (on the same page), would break any design based on your image above when a non JavaScript user visits it.

Hey guys, thanks a lot! I think I better getting cracking at learning AJAX - web development is no joke! I really appreciate your input!

It’s actually possible to do CSS tabs that work great the problem comes if they’re different heights. If all pieces were going to be a set height it could be done with CSS.

See this tutorial.

@doug - thanks for following back up - I really appreciate it. Honestly, I think fixing the heights of the parts shouldn’t be an issue; it’s not ideal, but I do like my odds with CSS since I have no experience with AJAX (though, I do want to learn it). I am going to give it a whirl. Thanks again!

Before you give up on AJAX, let me tell you that from personal experience if you’re using jQuery? You can set it up in 5 minutes if you know what you’re doing (from no files to working prototype). You’re basically using the load() function from jQuery. You basically target an element you want to load your content into, pass a URL and an ID into this function, and it grabs the content.

So, for example, if I has an ID called ‘information’ that I wanted to pull into my ajax DIV it would look like this:

$("#ajax").load("file.html, #information");

Or something like that. It’s been a while since I used it. Check it out an http://api.jquery.com/, trust me it’s a lot easier than you think.

I use MooTools, but completely agree with Doug on time… It’s so quick and easy you’ll fall off your chair in surprise!

Hey, thanks guys. I will be reading up on that site this week. Thanks again for continually hitting me up - I am a novice and hopeless perfectionist ; ]