Symphony.

Hey, I read in the “Symphony 2.0.1 Update” thread people were looking for starters guide on how to put together a Symphony website from beginning to end. I have just discovered Symphony in the past month and have been playing around with it a lot and I have lost of cool experiments to come!

Anyways since I have been experimenting I have been putting together this post http://skylerrichter.com/blog/ It has a lot of holes in it I plan on finishing it up this week. This being part 1 of the post I am only covering how to make a simple blog but I doing it from scratch.

I was hoping for input on the tutorial and maybe some read overs for my terrible grammar and spelling, ha!

I hope this is what some people have been looking for maybe it helps some one.

Skyler, always good too see more Symphony tutorials! Thanks!

One question...why eliminate the builtin sections to achieve a blogging platform? It seems Symphony is capable of blog behavior out of the box.

PS...Will send you some 'readover' comments privately.

Skyler -

I applaud you for pulling together a tutorial series for Symphony 2. Thank you so much for setting time aside to help the community in such a great way. I will also read over your post in greater detail and forward on any comments.

Again, thanks for your service to this community.

If you know how, make a tutorial on how to make browsable categories.

cenazoic -

I completely agree that Symphony is capable of blogging right out of the box. But as a web designer and out of the box solution is not what I want. I want a fully customizable CMS which Symphony most certainly is.

The goal of the tutorial is to show people how you can build custom solutions from the ground up using Symphony, And try to explain all the under laying technologies. Showing people how to achieve the functionality of an out of the box installation will show them how symphony can be used to build scalable solutions. Not just install blogging script and skin!

Ecko -

A solution for your question will be covered in part 2 of my article "fun with urls"

Good stuff. If you want to start fresh without the default workspace, do not upload it when you first install Symphony. This will keep you from having to delete pages and components individually.

Interesting! Ill make note of that in the tutorial.

Thanks for the tutorial. I'm checking it out to see if there's something new about Symphony I missed.

Thanks a lot for the tutorial! Symphony looks just perfect for me, i know XSL quite well, but i had no idea how to start using Symphony. Some concepts might seem obvious for people how have been using it for months (like data sources, utilities), but i couldn't find anywhere a clear explanation how to use them. Thanks again and keep up the good work! Is there any hope for a 2nd part?

/me cries in pain

We all know where symphony lacks the most. And it doesn’t even seem as it would get any better. I mean apparently this great and useful tutorial has been taken offline for some unknown reason (up keeper lost interest?). It’s very sad to notice that we have lost information that this system is currently in need of.

I’m lacking in coding skills quite a bit so these tutorials that tell about the usage through examples are almost irreplaceable. I mean, I can’t find anything matching through Google. I can experiment and learn, but I’ll probably end up doing things the wrong way. It would be nice to have a tutorial like this one which explains things more in depth.

I’m one of those Drupal kids who have used to good documentation and hundreds of free modules so you shouldn’t mind if I’m sounding like a spoiled brat :D

@JX-47: Did you go through the documentation tab up top? There’s a good amount of info in there.
There are also other resources scattered throughout threads on the forum, but i’m not 100% sure which ones they are.

And it doesn’t even seem as it would get any better.

New documentation system is in the works as we speak. There is one project ahead of it in our queue right now, but I’ve been putting in time on the evenings and weekends in hopes of getting the docs to you all a bit faster. Can’t give you a precise date, but know that they’re coming…

Still hanging here ;)

@wtdtan

Yes, I have looked at them, but they are mainly links to other sites which tell about code, not Symphony. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely incompetent - I read the documentation and it helped me. But unfortunately it only got me so far. Maybe I’m a bit picky or something else, but just reading doesn’t really take me anywhere. I can’t solve the logic very well without examples. That is my problem. I mean, when I tried to learn PHP I read about it from the internet, spent numerous hours and days doing it, but at some point I noticed that I still couldn’t actually do anything. I didn’t know how to use the code, I didn’t know how to create anything with it.

It’s just so much more efficient to “learn” the right way than learning the wrong way.

@czheng

I really have no right to bumb in and ask for anything and I really do appreciate the effort you guys have put into this system. Don’t get me wrong. It’s your system and you do things with it as you like.

@JX-47

I’ve been wanting to create some screencasts to show the basics of Symphony, but haven’t found the time. I’d stick with Symphony. It’s really different from other CMSs and it doesn’t make a lot of sense until you get that “light bulb” moment. After that, things get quick and easy. The XSLT is the hardest part.

New docs will be chock full of examples and screencasts and such…

Well I appreciate your interest and possible contribution. I’m very interested from XSLT as a coding language and that is why I chose symphony. So I won’t be leaving you guys any time soon :D I have Symphony set up on my test server and I’m trying to do stuff with it (mostly I fail, but through error you learn!). I’m anxiously waiting for some extra documentation. But don’t take any pressure about it. Please. Not because of me anyway ;P