Symphony.

My multi-user site is very user centric. All content is displayed on and through an author page: /author/[name]/[content-type]

(An Author page with a "name/content" as the URL Parameters).

So for example, a user's blog would be at the following URL: /author/nickdunn/blog/

There are 5 or 6 different [content-type] variables, so in the Author XSL I do a choose/when and call certain templates to change the content views. However I'm thinking this is poor in terms of data performance. On /author/nickdunn/gallery/ I display images, but since my Blog data source is also attached to the page, it's querying all of the blog posts too. 14 data sources attached to the one page.

Ideally I'd like each [content-type] as its own Page in Symphony, rather than pushing them through the single Author page. The only way I can see to do this is set each [content-type] up as a page with the Author page as its parent page:

Parent: /author
URL Handle: blog   
URL Parameters: author-name

But this results in a URL in the form /author/blog/nickdunn/ rather than /author/nickdunn/blog.

Is this one for .htaccess, or an altogether more cunning solution? Or one so blindingly obvious I can't see it...

Cheers in advance.

Maybe you can add a custom field select box - to each of your sections - called type. Then you filter your data-sources through this custom-field.

The gallery-data source will then only load data, when the type says gallery, the blog-data source only loads data when the type says blog, etc.

That is indeed a cunning idea, markrickert thank you!

After chatting with the symphony team I've settled with a more abstract solution, with .htaccess. They allow me create true sub pages, so for example:

site.com/nickdunn/ is rewritten to index.php?page=author/nickdunn site.com/nickdunn/blog/ is rewritten to index.php?page=author/blog/nickdunn/

Where "blog" is a sub page of my "author" page. Both pages accept they name as a URL parameter.

But again, thank you for the idea!