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A new ensemble, "Symphony Demo" is now available for download. Comments and feedback can be left here but if you discover any issues, please post it on the issue tracker.

This is a very cool ensemble, Cremol! A great demonstration of Symphony's capabilities, containing really interesting ideas.

Thanks! :)

Bump! just looked at it and love the way of using a section to build pages. This makes it great for client managed sites!

@Cremol - Very nice!

Bump! just looked at it and love the way of using a section to build pages. This makes it great for client managed sites!

This approach (using sections to manage pages) works well for small to medium sized sites. It is most definitely a bonus for client managed sites. However, large sites may (as we've found at least) suffer performance issues.

Yep, it does work quite well for small sites. It can make things a lot more logical for clients. For any brochure-type sites I always use the pages section approach.

For anything bigger, with their own dedicated datasources etc, I use traditional symphony pages, with a 'Content' section for any top-level page content.

This approach (using sections to manage pages) works well for small to medium sized sites. It is most definitely a bonus for client managed sites. However, large sites may (as we've found at least) suffer.

Agree, small portfolio sites it's a great approach. Larger, works better with traditional symphony techniques. Great case study for how flexible Symphony can be as well.performance issues.

EDIT Blockquotes messing up on Chrome Mac

That looks very cool, thanks Cremol!

Thanks for the response guys,

I think the entry based pagebuilding is a good approach for simple websites when clients want to create new pages themselves. I used this method before on a portfolio site. This is what i like about symphony, the flexibility to sculp a cms to the projects needs.

I would add, Cremol, for a demonstration ensemble, showing off Symphony's flexibility is perfect. Good job!

@cremol, just browsing the ensemble to see whats what and was wondering if anyone has an approach for a better parent child page relationship to output in the url?

At present the current approach is using {$root}/page/{$page-title}.

But if we start using the parent child approach and we have 3 levels deep.. the url doesn't reflect the depth of navigation into the page hierarchy. Any thoughts as to how this could be reflected in the url?

I,ve considered an approach for this during development, but it seemed quit complex...
I gues you would have to manipulate the httacces file somehow.
i haven't build an extension yet, but i think it's possible to make an extension with the parent /child approach build in the section and output a httacces redirect, like in the language redirect extension.

So for the extension enthousiasts out here,this could be a challenging project!

Ahh, yep cool, Was thinking of some sort of reflection field in the section and use it as output param that included parent-page and current-page combined.. but an extension that takes care of it would be sweet!

@cremol, DavidOliver pointed out to me the breadcrumb field might be of use for generating a tree based URL structure. I'm gonna have a play tomorrow and see if it works out.

Symphony Demo updated to version 0.2 on 13th of October 2011

Hey Martijn. Thanks for sharing this. I have implemented the page/entry/nav structure on a few low traffic websites recently and they seem to perform absolutely fine. Even without caching.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has used the entry based page structure on and high-traffic and information-rich websites. I suspect that with Cachelite enabled, it would stand up pretty well.

I'm not sure I want to let my clients loose on the colour palette, but giving them the ability to add pages is a breath of fresh air :-)

Hey Stuart,
Glad to hear you like the ensemble.
I think dealing with lot's of traffic should'nt be a problem at all.
I think it would preform exactly the same as normal entries, because the pages are just entries in a section.
The cachelite extension would help, but i don't think it's really necessary.

There are some interesting devolpment's going on a drag and drop interface that could maybe be implemented in the future to structure the page hierargy.
And maybe the page stucture can be reflected in the url as well with the url router extension, but i haven't really looked in to that yet.

For now, get funky on the colour palettes if you want!, (but it's not required :)

Cremol,

Figured out a way to have nested URL structure using a customised 'parent field' and overriding the GET[symphony-page] param in a small extension before page loads... thanks to a tip from @designermonkey.

It's still beta, but works a treat locally.

I've done this for some sites with decent traffic (and currently building a few more). I prefer entry based navigation as it gives me far more control on the Content. My favoured way to work is using the plain old SBL field, and linking an entry to its parent.

I do like to use Datasource caching when its a high-traffic website as it helps quite a bit with DS generation.

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