Symphony.

Hello,

I am entirely new to Symphony and planning to use it on one of my upcoming projects.

Coming from Expression Engine, I have one main question:

My new project will contain two blog style sections (“projects” and “people”) but there will be a bunch of static pages as well.

It will be a breeze for me to create a blog with Symphony (it’s probably the best CMS ever for doing this), but how can I create simple static pages that my client can maintain himself, ideally using Markdown or Textile?

Can anybody provide a snippet of code or point me to a tutorial?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Hello Tintin and welcome to the forum.

There are many ways to implement static pages and static content. Does your client need to create the pages by himself or does she only need to edit the content?

If it’s the latter I usually do something like this.

• create a Static Content Section with the necessary fields, especially with a Pages Field and and an Entry Orders Field
• create a Static Content Datasource with a Page Select Box Filter and {$current-page} as page parameter and ordered by the order field
• add the Static Content Datasource to the static pages

The Mediathek/Subsection Manager can help to add images or files to your static content and some Ninja XSL techniques are probably helpful as well.

Hey klaftertief,

thanks a lot for your help. Luckily, my client won’t need to create pages by themselves, only edit them.

The roadmap you’re suggesting seems very promising, however I’ll need a few days to muddle through it (I’m still a newbie after all).

The ability to sort the pages seems quite handy as well. That would have probably been my next concern. So let’s see how far I get with this…

I use a static page approach that is similar to what klaftertief proposed, but it doesn’t require the two extensions. My approach uses a Text Section with only two fields: Name and Body. I make sure to use a unique name for each entry and then simply filter on name to produce the content for each static page.

Search for the static page extension, it allows you to create “one off” sections that can contain only a single entry. Useful if each content page has slightly different content rewuirements (fields).

Out of interest, why did you pick Symphony over EE?

I have something very similar to what @wisolman has on my personal site, it’s almost identical to a blog structure but is more simple in terms of the section structure. It’s simple and effective for a handful of static pages and it’s light in terms of database load.

Once you have the “static page” section set up, and some simple XSL templating to create a navigation that combines any dynamic pages with your static pages it’s a piece of cake to add more static pages as you need them.

Hey everybody,

thanks for your input. Seems like a very friendly community around here.

I need a bit of time to implement what you suggested.

@Nick: I’ve worked with EE1.6.9 a lot but don’t like the new version (EE2) at all. The new control panel is even more confusing than the previous one. Sure you can build great sites with EE, but with the new control panel it takes me ages to get anything done.

When I looked for a new CMS I had to choose between TextPattern, Movable Type and Symphony. I opted for Symphony because I was amazed by the fast installation process and the simple control panel (only 3 (!) buttons, wow, still can’t believe it).

I also liked the three main tutorials on this site. Usually, when I do a tutorial I get stuck at some point because the author forgot to provide some vital piece of information. But in this case, everything worked like a charm and I had the impression that everything had been tested and thought about very thoroughly.

I’ve worked with EE1.6.9 a lot but don’t like the new version (EE2) at all. The new control panel is even more confusing than the previous one. Sure you can build great sites with EE, but with the new control panel it takes me ages to get anything done.

Even more confusing? Hard to believe. Definitely no fun left.

(I know EE 1.6, because — like you — I have built some sites with EE before I switched to Symphony.)

I also liked the three main tutorials on this site.

Craig (a.k.a. czheng) put a lot of work in the tutorials.

And did a very good job!