Symphony.

Hi,

I am new to symphony cms. What's the best way to create 'flat pages' (like in django) eg. 'about' , 'contact' pages. in symphony.

Do we need to create a 'section' even if it's going to be a single page like 'about'.

noussh.

It depends very much on the contents you are going to place in the various pages but, if they’re more or less the same (for example they all have in common some text), you can create a section named “Pages”, add the fields you need to it plus the Page Select Box Field and use this latter one to relate each entry to the pages.

You can also use an extension like Limit Section Entries to create a "static section" for a page with only one entry (no entries table for that section).

Good thing is, since you only tie that entry to a page via a datasource as usual, you can still use that content in other places if needed.

I'm still finding my feet with Symphony so still redefining what I think is the right way to create 'static' pages with it with every build. At the moment, I'm leaning more towards hard coding the content into the page template rather than having to load in extra data sources. As the pages are static or flat, they're unlikely to change so don't need to be managed through the section editor. I leave the sections to handle more categorised data that may sit below or within any page on the website.

I'm open to suggestions on this though so will be watching this thread.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

I have created 'section' called "static content", with 'Page Select Box Field'. (thanks @theBigMandarino) I have not implemented the front end code. This would help clients to edit existing content. I think this is the elegant solutions than creating 'sections' for each page.

Hard coding the content is fine if we are maintaining the site. I wouldn't trust a client to edit the page templates.

Side Note : I really liked the symphony's minimalism and flexibility especially coming from Drupal, EE, Wordpress Camp. It's very easy to grasp concepts like sections, data source, page. But I got stuck at XSLT / Xpath. I am sure more and more users would have adopted symphony if we had a simple template system. May be I might change my opinion once I am comfortable with XSLT. Anyway thanks for making Symphony awesome and looking forward to be a part the community.

noussh.

May be I might change my opinion once I am comfortable with XSLT.

You bet!