Symphony.

Hi All and thanks in advance.

I just have a quick question in regards to organising your content. Im happy with the concept of having Sections which represent multiple blocks of data i.e. Section 'Articles', it contains the following fields 'Name', 'Text', 'Date' and I have 4 Entries which means I can quickly display the 4 articles.

What im struggling with is where to store data that will be shown as part of my 'Article' page but only requires one entry. For example a title for my sidebar or a title for another area on the page. I want to add this data into the 'Article' Section because it needs to be updateable but I'll have circumstances whereby I have 7 entries all with same Article title.

So on my articles page, I'll have the articles themselves which comprise of 4 articles. How should I store the data that is only required to be entered once - like titles etc.

Im trying to learn the correct methodologies, any help will be very much appreciated.

What I've learned is this: if you have to enter the same data more than once, something is wrong with your model. Of course, in some cases the "cleaner" solutions require more work, so if you really need to update is up to you.

Something you could do is separate the article content from the "other" content. So, you'd create a separate section for articles and sidebars. You could then create a new section "pages" with links (select box link or subsection manager) to your articles, sidebars and other things you'd like on that page.

The biggest downside here is that entering the data will become a lot less easy, and your clients might start to complain "I just wanted to change the title on page x, but it has changed everywhere, please fix!".

If I understood your question right, the above solution might be a lot of overkill. If you are pretty darn sure there will be no exceptions (no article with a different sidebar), you can use the static section extension, and create a new section: settings or whatever. Put it in the same navigation group as your articles section, and your user has a single place to edit article wide page settings.

Hope this helps!

Just a quick sidenote:

The Static Section extension hasn't been updated in a while and is considered deprecated (as far as I know). There's a new extension Limit Section Entries for Symphony 2.3 which covers the use case of Static Section.