Symphony.

Hi

How can I create a list of company products divided to categories? And how to make each product to include standard meta information: pic, description, price, tags, etc?

Can I do that with Symphony? May be any tutorial?

You most definitely can.

I recommend you download a stable version of Symphony (2.0.6 is a good place to start, since 2.0.7 has a few bugs to iron out.)

http://getsymphony.com/download/releases/version/2.0.6/

The default install (“workspace”) is of a blog, but the idea is exactly the same: Articles (blog posts) consist of fields such as Title (text input), Body (textarea), Published Date (a date field) and is associated to a Category.

Start by looking at this. You can build a section from scratch by navigating to Blueprints > Sections where you could create one named “Products”. You can then add as many fields as you like to model your meta data.

Concepts: Sections, Fields, Field Types

Yes, this kind of custom product database is exactly the kind of thing that Symphony excels at. However, there is not an out-of-the-box solution, you’ll need to learn how the Symphony “system” works and some XSLT skills to get it all to display correctly.

Here are some steps to get you started, I’ve included some links to the help section for further reading:

1. In the Symphony backend, go to Blueprints > Sections, and create a new one called products. Then proceed to fill this section with all the kinds of fields that you’ll want: Product name, price, file upload for picture, tags, and add a Select Box for the categories.
2. Once you’re done with this, go to the Content > Products section and test out your new section by adding some information to it. Consider adding 2-5 test products. You can always go back and add new fields to your section if needed.
3. Now, go to Blueprints > Datasources. This is where you’ll scale down the results of your categories. Try Filtering the results of your datasource by the category field you set up. You could name this parameter {$thecategories}, this name would be different than the name of your categories field.
4. Finally, go to Blueprints > Pages. Here, you’ll create the pages within your website. For example, You might want a Home and a Products page. For the Products page, you’ll want to attach the Datasource we created above. Then, in the URL Parameters box, put in that parameter we created above, this time without the {} marks. So it would just be $thecategories.
5. Now, you’ll have to learn some XSLT to write within your pages to display the information as you want to. Try the W3Schools tutorial to get you started on XSL and XPath.
6. It really helps to see the XML output of a page to write the XSLT/XPath. Go to http://www.yourdomain.com/your-symphony-install/products/?debug

Its a little overwhelming at first, but if I could pick it up, I think most anyone should be able to. Look through the Help section a lot.

Thank you very much for your replies! Now going to learn Symphony deeper :)