Symphony.

My apologies if this topic has been covered... I did my best to search older discussions, but didn't find what I was looking for.

Here's what I would like to do: I'm building a Flash site that will be fed by Symphony generated and maintained XML. I'm pretty sure I will need to do a custom nav in order to provide tracking strings and flash movie paths to the site. I would like to keep the admin work flow as simple as possible, preferably the same as it is already.

Here's my question: What would be the best strategy for adding a few custom fields to the navigation? That data seems to be generated automatically when one adds Pages through the admin. Does a custom data source need to be added? If so, how does this get incorporated with the default nav data? How does this affect the admin process?

Sorry if these questions seem clueless... its just because I still am at this point! But I'm loving Symphony so far.

I create a 'nav-data' page which outputs an xml tree that hold all the nav info I need for my nav templates. I then add it as a dynamic data source to pages (though I suppose you could load it completely independently if you are calling it from Flash.

Pros: You can develop and reuse your navigation xsl (or flash) independent of your data structure, and add whatever data you need.

Cons: It's an extra http call, no getting around it, although it can be cached if added as a dyn-ds.

So this has to be maintained as a separate data source then? I was hoping there was a way to add a field to the "Page" (or "Section"?) creation. I assume this is the point where navigation data to get created.

Oh well, I'm just being lazy... it doesn't seem like too much trouble to maintain a custom nav data source.

There exists a Page Select Box which you could add to a Section. It'll maintain a reference to a physical page, so you can query it using the $current-page-id params from a page.

I came to my solution because I use entry-pages, so many of my urls are not symphony Pages, but still need to appear in navigation.

Thanks... this should get me pointed in the right direction.