Symphony.

Hello everyone,

My name is Hanna and I am a web designer, a good friend of mine told me to check out symphony for future projects and after reading and viewing some of the sites made with symphony I am impressed with it.

I am planing on building a design portal (design news and a forum) and looking for a good CMS/framework to use.

However could someone please take a few minutes to confirm a few points for me? :)

1)Is it possible to build a custom control panel for me editors to use? Where they can upload news items+images to a post? I don’t want people logging to the symphony admin panel.

2)Are there custom fields to uploading an image to a post?

3)Are there image resizers for symphony?

4)Are there plugins for adding an article to your favorites? Or a rate this article plugin?

Thanks for anyone in advance whos able to help me :)

Regards, Hanna

Welcome Hanna!

My take on your questions:

1. Yes you can create a front-end admin interface, but that is a less-common approach.
2. Yes, all fields in Symphony are custom fields, and one of the field types is a file upload (there are also extensions that add more features to the file upload field).
3. There is a resizing utility in Symphony, though I’m not sure it has an actively supported interface (ie a GUI like wordpress). There was at one point, so check the extensions library. edit Here it is I think.
4. In Symphony, a ‘favorites’ or ‘rate this article’ functionality can be achieved without a plugin.

This is going to be insufficiently vague, but developing a site for Symphony generally involves less hunting for plug-ins or extensions (even though there are a decent number of useful extensions) and more shaping the site for your needs using Symphony’s admin as well as writing XST templates. IMHO the advantage to selecting Symphony is directly related to your capability/comfort/interest in using XSLT.

Hope that helps!

Thanks a lot ashooner for the reply, I am new to XSLT as well but think I can learn it.

Regarding point one, what would you say is the best approach for creating a front end site for editors?

Thanks again :) Hanna

The Forum Ensemble demonstrates that it is possible to develop a custom admin interface with the ability to upload images and add/edit entries. However, this particular implementation involves using a modified core and an unofficially released Members extension. It also includes a Forum extension that enables administrative functions for managing posts. So it is definitely possible, but for the time being, these specific features require some customization. These customizations wouldn’t necessarily be required for what you are trying to accomplish.

Regarding point one, what would you say is the best approach for creating a front end site for editors?

The first thing you’ll want to do is familiarize yourself with how Events work. Events are how you’ll submit data from your front-end admin area. Unfortunately, our documentation of Events is still a little bare, but please ask away here on the forum.

Also, you’ll need to utilize Page Types to keep your front-end admin area off-limits to regular users.

When I get the chance, I’ll compile and post some instructions for whipping up a custom login page that bypasses the back end.

wow thanks a lot guys for all the help! I will read up on Events and install the forum ensemble.

Thanks again