Symphony.

I’m in the process of building a site with quite a bit of frontend editing possibilities required, containing sections with subsection managers and multiple possible date and time dates.

While replicating all the functionality in the frontend that already exists in the backend anyway, I was wondering if it wouldn’t actually be less work not to use frontend members alltogether.

The idea would be to use ajax/iframes to get the required parts of the backend edit pages and display them in the frontend. Kind of like what the HTML-Field-Extension does in the backend. This way the authors would be »proper« backend authors or managers.

Has anyone done this before? Could this be a good way to go, or would it be even more pain in the end?

I have used a regular symphony backend login form on the front end that forwards them back to the front end and once they are logged in to symphony (as a restricted author) let them access the custom event forms on the front end.

With your custom login form they dont need to know symphony exists and if they did somehow get the url, you can remove all the editable sections from view with the author rolls extension so the backend would look empty.

in this way you wouldnt need front end membership but i would only do this for the clients to use not for like a social lots of members type of thing.

There have been discussions here a while ago about re-building the backend in the frontend, maybe you will be able to find them. From my experience: It will be a pain in the ass no matter how you do it. The backend is inflexible (and PHP-ish), so you can not easily add/change to it. The frontend. on the other hand, has no XSLT utilities for creating and validating forms. (I have done such an XSLT layer myself, but it is not polished and still not flexible enough to be useful to anybody else. You could try Nick's Form Controls, but you might not get very far with it, depending on your needs.)

I am running a very big web app which is "frontend only" for authors, using XSLT, datasources and events. But if your demands are very basic (and won't grow), it might be simpler to include parts of the backend in your frontend.

Nick Dunn, started a modal editing extension which pulled the section edit screen into the frontend if an edit button for that entry was clicked.

Might be worth a look?

@jeff, @michael, @andrew,

thanks so much for your input. Will have a look through all the options and see what’s working best in my case. Good to see this forum is still alive! :)

It’s a shame Nick isn’t still around here … his Modal Editing Extension still seems to work out of the box in Symphony 2.3.6.

Hmm … I’m not sure if it wouldn’t actually work without it as well … still, this seems to be the best way to go at the moment.

Urghs … double-posting. Forgive me!

@animaux

Have you seen Sections Event extension? It's purpose is to ease creation of frontend admins. I strongly recommend it if you go the Frontend route.

2nd Vlads comment! Sections Event is the bomb :)

@vladG and @moonoo2,

Thanks guys, I never even looked at this apparent cathedral of an extension before :) I’ve come down the backend-route quite a bit, but will take a closer look tomorrow.