Symphony.

I was just looking at the documentation for symphony and I was wondering if for newcomers if there was some way of visually explaining how datasources and sections work in the scheme of things.

There are a lot of unfarmiliar words at play when you first step into symphony and I get the feeling a simple introductory chart/workflow method for attaching data to a page would a great way to quickly explain an example of using symphony!

what do you guys think?

what about a prezi?…

oh yeah! forgot about this.. I was thinking just a pdf or image in the documentation to explain how it all links together.. I am a visual person and a lot of early adopters/newbies who would come from a design background would easily grasp the concept if it was explained visually.

Datasource > section > template > HTML etc.. but show the workflow combining say a list of blog posts from start to finnish so we can grasp how it all fits together?

The above is probably the wrong order anyway hence grasping it visually will help a lot.

Yes, we’re working on an image like this… Not sure how soon we’ll do it though. If you guys want to brainstorm ideas, feel free to do so and post them here.

Cool, will see if I grasp the jist of what is involved or at least how I see it.. and then get some feedback from yous guys?

moonoo2

Heres my first attempt at some kind of visual explaining the ideas of Symphony. I felt a “blog” use case might be best to help people understand, maybe that information is extraneous though and not needed.

Also, I wasn’t quite sure where to fit Events in. I guess they’d be near the bottom by the Pages, but also connected to fields?

This is up the right street in my eyes.. I really believe if newcomers can grasp how it all fits together visually, we might pick up a few more visually orientated design/tech hybrids like me! I love the code, but struggle to visualise how it all fits together.. this goes a long way to explaining it!

nice one

Very nice, Jesse. I was thinking of something a little more generic, though. Symphony’s greatest strength is its flexibility, and I think it’s important to highlight that first before mapping out very specific projects that make lots of assumptions. Something like what you’ve done could be a great complement, though, to a more general visual overview of Symphony’s anatomy, like this:

This is awesome!

Spot. On. Amazing :-)

Yeah, I think that is more generic and explains things well. It makes pretty good sense to me, but it would be interesting to hear questions from people who are not as familiar with Symphony.

Also, one minor point. I know the correct XSLT term is “Stylesheets” but this doesn’t make sense to people who are unfamiliar with XSLT. I think we could include the word “templates” instead or in addition and it would make total sense to people.

Templates is already a term in the system itself, and in XSLT itself. So we’d be saying that Symphony’s page templates and utilities are XSLT templates which can contain xsl:templates!

This is fantastic guys and very much needed for newbies! I can easily grasp what bits are missing when it comes to constructing a page etc.. nice one! TheJester12, Czheng… Awesome!

This should make things a lot easier to grasp for new users. For a more complete picture one might add extensions as a big vertical bar on the right side connecting to all Symphony parts, not?

Well, extensions is such a generic concept though, so it’s tricky. They can do something as simple as adding fields, or as complex as changing the whole workflow. I’m not sure how you represent that…

I think perhaps a dotted vertical line from top to bottom, to demonstrate the scope to which an extension can… extend.

Insanely Great!

Good idea, Nick. As per usual.

I love how responsive this forum is! such a great place to be right now! Sad no? you guys rock and it’s a testament to all of you that this stuff just keeps getting better and better.. benefit a lot of people if this is included in documentation me thinks!

benefit a lot of people if this is included in documentation me thinks!

Sure will be. Along with lots of other cool stuff ;)

In the meantime, here’s an edit based on Nick’s suggestion. Does it do the job?