Symphony.

I’ve started to rebuild my personal site and would like some input on how to design my sections.

The site have two main (frontend) sections: Blog and Articles. There are also a couple of complemantary stuff, like imported tweets, Flickr images and Delicious bookmarks.

Currently, all frontend sections also have a Symphony section of their own. This makes the backend easy to understand, since all fields in a section has relevance for a new entry.

But I’m now trying another approach: One, or perhaps two, backend sections. One for main content, and perhaps another for the complemantary things. This makes the backend forms a little harder to grasp, since wether a field should be used or not depends on in which frontend section the entry is for. (One of the fields needed to achive this is a “Frontend Section select box”.)

But so far, my impression is that this is road that makes DS’s and XSLT easier to maintain. As one example, I want to have a page that lists content from both the Blog and Article section, if the content is tagged as “Review”. With a single section this is easy, just a filter. With separate sections for Blog and Articles, there are some XSLT lifting needed to have the content sorted by date on the frontend.

Since I’m the only one who will enter stuff to the site, the risk of a confusing backend is not that big. I’ll now when a field should be filled or not.

But what I would like to know if there are, beside usability issues, any arguments for one or the other approach?

Would it be possible to hide and show fields according to what section is choosen in the Frontend Section select box?