Symphony.

Hi fellow Symphonians!

I’m the group leader for the new documentation working group, and I’ve got a favor to ask all of you (especially those who have been around the Symphony community longer than I.)

We’re looking to mine the forums for valuable discussions that could be worth integrating into the user/developer docs for Symphony. There is a treasure trove of useful material here, and it wouldn’t be hard to reuse it in a more formal fashion.

If you have Bookmarked Discussions that you find extremely helpful (or any other worthwhile unofficial resources) please post links to them here.

Cheers!

• On beginning extension development
• On editing an existing entry form the front end
• Compilation of XSLT resources

There are many many others. I’ve got a list or two somewhere I think…

• Performance Gotchas in XSLT
• Do you speak DS Editor v2
• Symphony 2 .htaccess file
• Unified Root (to www or not not www)
• Tip: Don’t execute Data Source if a URL parameter is set
• DS: Getting all existing tags?
• Github?!
• using git for private development and symphony

Something for the developer documentation, maybe:

• Manipulating admin page output (Alistair)

• Front End Author Login
• Tip: Don’t execute Data Source if a URL parameter is set

Remote login using auth-tokens — there are two ways to remote-login:

• http://www.example.com/symphony/login/cb256704/
• http://www.example.com/example-page/?auth-token=cb256704

And a short tip regarding code formatting problems if you are using Markdown (which is actually to do with XSLT and indentation). Put this in your CSS file (it won’t work in IE6 in “quirks mode”, so make sure you have a strict doctype):

pre {
    white-space: normal;
}
pre code {
    display: block;
    white-space: pre;
}

There is one feature for developers that has never really been documented: We all know that it is possible to add scripts and stylesheets to the backend via extensions. Only a few know that it is possible to automatically check if a file has already been added to the page head or not and that it is possible force duplicate file attachments to the page head:

addScriptToHead($path, $position=NULL, $duplicate=true)

Setting the $duplicate variable to false will only add a script if it is not yet attached to the backend page. This is a quite important feature when you aee dealing with multiple instances of a JavaScript based field extension (e. g. Mediathek). The same works for stylesheets:

addStylesheetToHead($path, $type='screen', $position=NULL, $duplicate=true)

Is there a chance that the documentation — beside the Symphony core — will feature a few more XSL/XML/xPath related articles? I really found Allen’s screencasts very helpful while starting to use the system but the old and archived Overture website seems to be gone. It was a great resource.

• My own article/tutorial ideas which I will never get around to getting through
• State of the Documentation (esp the repetition of explaining Data Source chaining/Output Params)
• Implementing multilingual sites (here and here and countless other threads)
• Caching (a definitive guide to the whys and many hows)

I also think some XSL/XML/XPath related articles would be a nice complement to the Symphony specific stuff. I’ve worked with XSL/XML/XPath for a couple years now and I’m quite comfortable with it, but even just recently engaging in this forum I’ve been pointed to techniques and elements in XSL I hadn’t looked into yet (keys, xsl:number, the Muenchian method+).

Not sure how advanced it should be, but XSL/XPath is definitely something a lot of newcomers to Symphony stumble on. Maybe more advanced stuff could be covered by linking to good, external articles (ie. Muenchian article which I think bauhouse mentioned somewhere).

Or rewritten - that article on Muenchian grouping could do with a few diagrams and more complex examples to demonstrate the point. Good idea though - including some more involved XSLT tutorials with a Symphony bent. That could potentially bring a lot of people to the platform.

Wow, this is great, all! Keep ‘em coming. I’ll add: Help with Git

• XSLT and HTML5

Here’s an old thread about the beginner’s guide: The Curse of Knowlege: A (hopefully) short rant about jargon

Not sure if this is appropriate for docs but…

• Symphony 2 on nginx web server

@robphilp - Rowan just posted an amazing article on his personal site on how to get Symphony CMS running on nginx.

• Learning Symphony

• Namespace declarations in Dynamic XML DSes

• Simple custom DS

Just a thought, sorry slightly off topic. But how about a ‘tips’ page under the learn section of the site. Where you could put nitbits of knowledge that are not long enough to be an article, but still worthwhile. You could then ask people to submit their tips. What do you think? Good idea or bad idea?

Hm. Will think about it..