Symphony.

Hello,

I have url parameters working great for sections where things have a known pattern for page depth up to a maximum depth. This seems to follow your examples closely, but my site is nearly so uniform in depth.

Where I am struggling with the easy way to do something is what to do when the depth is variable. Here is an example structure, from the root, up to this deep:

/section/subsection/area/topic/page

but it will not always be the full depth as you can see from this longer example.

/section
/section/subsection-1
/section/subsection-1/area-1/page-1
/section/subsection-1/area-1/page-2
/section/subsection-2
/section/subsection-2/area-1/page-1
/section/subsection-2/area-1/page-2
/section/subsection-3
/section/subsection-3/area-1/
/section/subsection-3/area-1/topic-1/
/section/subsection-3/area-1/topic-1/page-1
/section/subsection-3/area-1/topic-1/page-2
/section/subsection-3/area-1/topic-2/page-1
/section/subsection-3/area-1/topic-2/page-2

My Questions:

1. How should I set up data source, pages so they can take a variable depth (authors should be able to easily add subsections,area, topics and pages so they can maintain the site without advanced logic)
2. How do you organize the admin area so they can find and edit the pages they are looking for. It would seem that if these are all in one section (so they can be dynamic) that it would be one huge list of items.
3. Anything else I should be aware of that your experience can help with in getting this setup.

I have tried to do things like include multiple data sources, with dependency on first dataset but have not been able to get things set up the way is needed.

Thanks in advance

davlun

It sounds like you need an arbitrary page tree structure. I have to admit this is not exactly one of Symphony's strengths; it works far better for more structured and semantic data. If you can structure you're data in such a way to give it more meaning, it will be far easier to implement. i.e.: You would create a section for each specific type of data (case studies, reports, news etc), have separate datasources, and top level pages with url parameters for these.

Of course, this is not always possible.

Rowans Breadcrumb Field has been designed in a way to somewhat solve this problem, but it is currently marked as an unstable release (I have used it a bit, and have not found any major issues, but I would always strongly recommend against using unstable code in any production environment).

I did this for a geographic location system that had variable structure and it was quite complicated to do. There were many datasources, lots of datasource customisations and lots of logic in the xsl templates.

Quite a complicated task.

Thanks for the responses folks. The problem is that as a cms based system, our editors will need the site to grow and shrink in those areas where needed to accommodate the audience needs of the site.

I was hoping there was some way to do this and it seems like there may be a way but something outside the standard capabilities of the tool. I would think that many sites will have areas in their sites that are not balanced, and mine is definitely that way.

I guess I have to try and restructure the site somehow, or start over.

Thanks,

Davlun

So been looking at our structure and think I can work something out to make it work in symphony more balanced.

Thanks for your help, will let you know if I have any questions.

Davlun