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Hi,

I’ve just started trying to get to grips with Symphony, so apologies in advance if I’m covering old ground.

I’m trying to convert an existing blog as an exercise before I use Symphony for anything more complex. The blog consists of pictures and sound files, and I’m trying to work out the best structure. From what I’ve been reading I could:

  1. Have two sections - pictures & music. I can then have pages for each, but can a data source pull both and sort them together by date like a traditional blog? I’m not sure if this is feasible.
  2. I see it’s common to have e.g. an images section, with the items linked to a relevent article. So I could have pictures, music & posts. But the posts section would be essentially redundant as there are no article-type posts.
  3. Lump everything into one, with optional fields to cover everything. Not very elegant, and may make creating separate pages for music and pictures awkward.

I see there are also some relevent extensions, but I’d like to avoid using any until I’ve got an idea of the core.

If anyone has any advice on this that would be great. I have a feeling I’m missing something simple here.

Finally, can the 5MB file upload limit be raised anywhere? Some of the music files exceed this and I’d like to avoid requiring FTP for new posts.

Sorry for the length - any help is appreciated.

Fish

Hi Fish, welcome!

The simplest way to implement this would basically be #3, lump the images and audio into a single section, where they would have the same fields. This would be simplest because, as you mentioned, you wouldn’t need to combine 2 different sections, you could easily filter and order them. You can still use 2 different sections, it will just take some fancier XSLT (particularly when its time to create a list of latest from both).

Really, you should let the nature of the content decide its shape. if your audio and image content are really different, then they deserve their own sections, and we can figure out how to get your sorting working.

Will these pages (image pages vs audio pages) show up next to each other on the site? For instance, would you have example.com/2010/08/02/some-audio and also example.com/2010/08/02/some-photo? Or could photos and audio be in separate sections of the site, such as example.com/photos/2010/08/02/some-photo.

The main question will be: How do you want to handle pagination? Do you want to offer “Pages 1 thru x” (in this case only solutions 2 and 3 will work) or do you want to offer an Archive á la “last months posts” (in this case solution 1, 2 and 3 would work).

In my opinion, solution 1 would have the nicest section layout, the sorting could easily be done in the XSLT.

Finally, can the 5MB file upload limit be raised anywhere?

Yes, in manifest/config.inc.php

  1. A data source pulls from only one section, but a page can use multiple data sources. So you can have two data sources to match your two sections and then merge the two on a page using XSLT. Another possibility is to use a custom data source.
  2. Do you want the pictures and music merged on one page by date or (3) do you want them on separate pages? Will there be text accompanying the pictures and music postings? You can do it either way. For the pictures you might want to look for a gallery extension.

Looks like all three of us were typing our responses at the same time.

Hi all - thanks for getting back to me.

I had a URL structure like example.com/music/an-item in mind - I suppose I am thinking of them as separate types, so separate sections would be my inclination. I need at least to be able to filter by type, but I realise I can still just do this in one section with a drop-down select.

I hadn’t thought about the pagination, to be honest. I don’t see it as necessary per se. The current incarnation of the site has all items in a blog stream as a homepage, but it’s really just so that something goes there. I’m more concerned about the two types being distinct and accessible separately, and like phoque says, the first option seems like the nicest section layout. There’s at most a caption with each item, so there’s no text-blog element involved really.

If it’s possible to intertwine the two sections with XSLT to produce at least a ‘latest posts’ from all sections, I’ll attempt that I think.

Thanks again for the feedback. I suspect I’ll be back on the forums before I know what I’m doing :)

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