Symphony.

Hello there,

Thanks in advance for taking your time to read this post.

I’m currently planning on building a website for my parents’ business and it will simply have a main index page with 4 links(ie. About us, Contact us, Location, etc). So the structure itself isn’t too complicated.

I was initially thinking of creating:

• 4 Sections(About us, Contact us, Location, Menu)
• 4 Pages (Identical)
• 4 Data Sources (Identical) Then connect them together.

I’ve been reading and following the tutorials but it’s always the beginning that’s causing the trouble for such beginners like myself. Would the above be a good idea or is there a smarter/efficient way for achieving this structure?

Thanks again,

Sam

Reassuring to find other beginners kicking around :)

I started my first real Symphony project and first jump into XSLT about 5 days ago so your in good company here.

I seem to work best by just jumping in, don’t really go with the mindset of ‘I’m now developing the final project’ but go in and just try and get as close as you can to what you want, then start again using what you’ve learnt ( if time is on your side anyways ).

That structure seems ok, though it may be more beneficial thinking about what you want to have in each ‘section’ in terms of input or functionality. When you mention things are going to be ‘identical’, it seems to me there’ll be scope to abstract alot of the functionality and serve it to one page and use URL parameters to dictate whats served to that page.

But then I’m a beginner also so my advise doesn’t exactly carry alot of weight lol. Someone may be able to help you better if you outlined what exactly you anticipated giving you problems.

I’ve been reading ‘Beginning XSLT 2.0 by Jeni Tennison’ and its helped me quite alot if you’re not familiar with XSLT, I’d recommend it.

If all 4 pages are identical, you could succeed by creating one section (with fields like title, content, etc…) and create 4 entries in that section (one entry for each page).

Then you can create one page that takes a handle, and one datasource that takes that handle to show the correct entry.

For example:

www.yoursite.com/page/about-us could load page.xls with handle ‘about-us’. The datasource could filter on this handle to only show the entry of your content where the handle is called ‘about-us’.

So to make it short:

If 4 pages are identical, you can create a site with 1 section, 1 page and 1 datasource. If the 4 pages aren’t identical, but the section fields are (for example, they all have a title, a content area and an image), you can create a site with 1 section, 1 datasource and an x amount of pages, depending on how different the content is.

I hope this helps you some… otherwise, just ask ;-)

@Ryu Thanks for the recommendation Ryu, I’ll definitely look into that book! Symphony is a whole new challenge for me as well but jumping in seems to work! Lucky I only have a few items on the website ;)

@kanduvisla Thanks for the detailed instruction! After reading your comment, I basically restarted the whole thing because your structure looked much more efficient than having 4 different sections.

So I created one Section which contains various input fields, and within that Section, 4 Entries containing the contents of each ‘links’. Then added 5 Pages(including the home) for the actual navigation.

One thing I came across though, is that in the Components, I created only 1 Data Sources and I tried filtering the entries by {$title} which didn’t work then I tried {$page-title} and it worked perfectly by printing correct entry to its respective page. But that was a pure trial-and-error. I’m not so sure what really made this to work.

Anyhow, the website is working just as I planned and all I have to do now is some CSS work.

Thanks again kanduvisla and the same goes to Ryu. I really appreciate your time and help.

Good to hear. {$page-title} is a standard parameter in your parameter pool created by symphony. It represents the name of your Page in Blueprints > Pages. (you can see this in the debugger: http://yoursite.com/?debug)

So I guess your entry names are the same as your page names. That’s why your filtering on {$page-title} worked. Because Symphony picks out the entry with the same name as your page. This is actually a quite interesting technique you stumbled upon there.

I’m also not very new in Symphony. I created 3 to 5 websites now with it, so I am also still learning new ways to do things. Still haven’t found the holy grail however… :-)

If you plan to have a 1:1 ratio of static content entries to Symphony Pages, you might consider adding a pages field to your static content section. This would basically serve the same purpose as naming your entries the same as your pages, but I think it will maintain the link by ID rather than name, which makes it less breakable.

@kanduvisla Thanks for the explanation, now I can understand why it worked.

@ashooner That looks interesting, I’ll look into it. Thank you for the suggestion :)

By the way, does Symphony still run an irc channel? I tried connecting @ freenode but it was empty.

I’ve had good luck using the Static Section extension for a handful of static pages. It seems to work fine with Symphony 2.1.

I’ve always found that dealing with static pages difficult in Symphony. If you have more than a dozen it gets out-of-hand. How do other people build a lot of static content in Symphony?

Well, look at what I just found: http://screenr.com/VnX

 Quick preview of a new Symphony Page Template Extension.

I hope this gets released soon! :-)

I hope this gets released soon! :-)

It will. And it’s only a wheel for a bigger Static Page Management solution. This one is for Developers (user role) only, the bigger one for Authors as well.

Complete Symphony beginner here too.

I really like what I discover about Symphony so far, but as others have mentioned, I struggle with the fact that Symphony is not really page-based.

My experience is that most clients want to be able to add/manager ‘content-pages’ themselves (without delving in XSL obviously). With ‘pages’ I mean content-pages (not Symphony Pages) that can be nested and are part of a ‘heterogeneous’ navigation (same level as Section Pages).

Many people speak of ‘static pages’ but I mean ‘pages as Entries’: they’re not static, they are Entries, managed by editors in the Admin. This is not yet possible a.t.m. in core-Symphony, right?

One simple way would be to create a ‘page-content’ Section and have page-entries in this section. You could ‘remove’ the section-page from the URL with a .htaccess file. This, however is a bit hacky and only part of what is often needed. The other thing, obviously, is a userfriendly way of managing these pages (preferably in a visual drag/drop Tree).

I have browsed the forum and read various threads discussing this, with various extensions, but I can’t really see how to best think of this. Is it/will this become core-functionality? It’s probably because I don’t have any experience with S. and its extensions, but most of the discussions, including this one, fail to give me a clear answer/direction.

Apologies upfront if these issues are discussed too often already to warrant a new reply. Thanks for your patience and the wonderful product, I’m on the brink of becoming a huge Symphony fan. First, however, I’d like to understand it better and build a few sites ;-)

This is not yet possible a.t.m. in core-Symphony, right?

Well, symphony handles pieces of data. If you can describe a page with symphony fields (title, image, text) you can fit it into a section. The order entries extension could come handy to sort the pages (for in the menu).

With ‘pages’ I mean content-pages (not Symphony Pages) that can be nested and are part of a ‘heterogeneous’ navigation (same level as Section Pages).

This could be made using the section described above, with a select box link, linked to the same section to create subpages.

Hope this helps.

My experience is that most clients want to be able to add/manager ‘content-pages’ themselves

Most of the time I don’t want clients managing a site’s structure willy nilly. They don’t know IA and letting them add pages wherever they feel goes against all the hard work I spent setting up the IA. I want them to come to me when new content needs added so I can help steer growth so it doesn’t get out-of-hand and a visitor to the site can find what they’re looking for.

They don’t know IA and letting them add pages wherever they feel goes against all the hard work I spent setting up the IA.

Often true, but compare it to Wordpress ( I use WP because I often see it used, and use it myself, as the fallback for customers that do want this functionality). It’s trivial to teach a client how to add a static page to a Wordpress site. Even though Symphony is often better-suited, WP gets chosen for that reason.

As far as whether or not a client should have access to site structure, maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t. But for me, when they are paying me to create a site that lets them manage content pages, that is literally the bottom line.

I think this thread has hit on a very good point: I’ve never been fully satisfied with the workflow for nested, heterogeneous pages, not for myself & def. not for some of my clients. Jonas’ Page Prototypes extension sounds like a great step forward in handling this use case nicely.

Thanks for the quick replies.

This issue seems one of the most FAQ for Symphony newcomers. I’ve read through a lot of the discussions already but have yet to grasp ‘simple’ solution. This obviously has to do with the fact that I’m a complete Symphony n00b, though.

I believe EE has struggled with the same issue. The (paid) Structure Extension seems the de-facto solution. I believe something similar could be very beneficial to the adoption of Symphony.

@creativedutchmen thanks for your reply. Het helpt ;-)

@MrBlank I agree completely, it’s very frustrating to see clients ‘mess’ with your carefully created IA. It’s equally frustrating to have them add colored fonts, huge images and funky tables to your carefully crafted content. This is why I try and limit their ‘options’ (Markdown instead of Tiny, etc.) regarding editing and structuring.

But still: I agree with @aschooner in that it is often simply what clients pay for and demand. Not being able to add/order pages could be a showstopper for some of my clients, even when in reality they will never use it. Expecially since most clients have seen it done in ‘simple’ CMS systems such as Wordpress and Wolf CMS.

The challenge is to find a balance between flexible features/functionality and a thoughtfully crafted, but rigid, system.

@aschooner I agree. Indeed it seems a lot of work w.r.t. Extensions is being done at the moment that could potentially answer some of my questions. The Pages Prototypes extension looks great (if I understand it correctly ;-) )

Another challenge for me, and I guess for more newcomers, is to have an idea about current and de-facto extensions. Development seems so rapid that it is difficult for me to see what extension I should use. For example: I have looked at the Mediathek extension, but I understood it is already being updated by somehing called a Dynamic Sub-Section-thingamagic?

Maybe it would be good to have these most-used, and current, extensions listed in the Featured part of the Extension Downloads section? At the moment there’s only two but I am under the impression that most Symphony dev’s use certain extensions in about every project.

For example: I have looked at the Mediathek extension, but I understood it is already being updated by somehing called a Dynamic Sub-Section-thingamagic?

Mediathek is the extension you should currently use. It’s stable and should work in the 2.0 and the 2.1 branch. Subsection Manager is the next update of Mediathek: it introduces a new name to make more clear what the extension actually does and it features a new interface which allows inline editing as well.

If you need subsection management now, start with Mediathek. The Subsection Manager will contain an upgrade script that will automatically replace all Mediathek instances with the Subsection Manager field. I’m currently trying to fix the outstanding Subsection Manager bugs but it might still take some time of testing until the final version will be released.

Ah, and have a look at the compatibility chart to get an overview of the status of the different extensions.

@Nils thanks. Mediathek looks like a nice add-on.

Will it allow me to add/link media from the entry? I was a bit confused with the way images and articles are linked in the default Symphony Ensemble/theme.

Another one for my wishlist: a proper file/asset manager ;-)

Thanks again. What do you think of my suggestion to ‘put some more meat’ on the Featured Extensions list?

Will it allow me to add/link media from the entry?

Not sure what from the entry means to you, but the field allows you to attach images from a media section inline. It offers inline creation as well — so you’ll need two sections, say an Article and a Media section, where the latter can be managed inside the first one.

Another one for my wishlist: a proper file/asset manager ;-)

What kind of asset management do you need?

Thanks again. What do you think of my suggestion to ‘put some more meat’ on the Featured Extensions list?

I think this is a great idea. The Symphony team just started forming working groups — maybe the documentation team could take care of this proposal.

( Loving the active Symphony community already ;) )

@Nils thanks. I noticed in the default Symphony theme that an Image was linked to Article with a SBL. I would have thought it to be the other way around (as with Categories). I was confused also with the fact that I did not find Images under the Publish and could not add them in Article entries.

With from the enry I meant that, imho, it makes sense to add/create images from within a new (article) entry, not first create an image, then create an article and then go back and link the image with the article. If I understand you correctly Mediathek allows me to do that.

As for a file/asset manager: Often clients need to be able to manage files in the CMS: add (multiple) images, preview them, rename, etc. It would be nice to have this in Symphony. CKEditor has CKFinder built-in so that might be a fine alternative but I found the CKeditor Extension does not have it.

The static-/content-pages issue is far more important to me though, so hopefully extensions like @klaftertief’s Page Prototypes will soon address these.