Symphony.

Hello,

I stumbled over Symphony after hours of looking for my second CMS system of choice - after Wordpress.

My first impression of Symphony is great, and I really hope that this might be the system where I could create the more advanced web sites, for clients whos demands Wordpress can’t meet. Feel free to confirm these hopes for me ;)

Now for the question:

Can someone please tell me how my clients are suppose to edit an ordinary page without digging into the Xslt- and html-code?

I don’t give end users access to the actual “Pages” area with the xsl and whatnot. Generally I make them think that a “Section” is a page, and let them edit those. Different Symphony installations can vary, but for a typical website, I generally make a section called “Pages”. This can have fields like “Headline” “Menu Name” “Body Copy” “Sidebar”, whatever…

Then, I use a page to display this section using a {$param} filter on the datasource. Like by going to http://www.yoursite.com/pages/thecontentname/ where “pages” would be the name of the Page that displays the content. The Leadership Development Group site was mostly built this way, using a few specific Pages that display content differently.

Ok, thanks for a quick and good answer. I’ll try to experiment with the Page’s parameter values.

What is the upsides of Symphony? And what are the downsides?

My first impression is - as I said - good. But I also get the impression that it are limited in it’s form - but maybe I’m wrong.

A hands-on example:

How would you for example create a field for the end-user to add images to a section? Let’s say they should be able to add unlimited numbers of images, with a description to each image.

Is this possible?

How would you for example create a field for the end-user to add images to a section? Let’s say they should be able to add unlimited numbers of images, with a description to each image.

You could use the Mediathek extension to link entries from an image section to another section.

Can someone please tell me how my clients are suppose to edit an ordinary page without digging into the Xslt- and html-code?

What is the upsides of Symphony? And what are the downsides?

Upsides? Many ;-)

Symphony is an object-based CMS and not a page-based CMS. So think of your content not as pages, but in their most elemental chunks — the components of which a page comprises. So rather than thinking how your client is going to edit a page, think about the type of content you are showing on that page (a news article, a list of categories, a personal profile etc.) and model that content in Symphony as an “object” (a section).

This is both a massive advantage and a small disadvantage. It means we can model almost any website content. You’re not limited to blog posts. So while Symphony comes with a blog structure by default, it’s capable of so much more. The same principles apply for building a portfolio/brochureware site, a social network, a real estate site or a community forum.

There are many benefits described in the Explore section:

• model almost any data type
• embrace web standards
• places no constraints over your designs
• flexible URL structure
• powerful templating (XSLT)

And downsides, if you’re expecting a Wordpress:

• things like attaching images to content (as you’re asking for) aren’t “out of the box” — Symphony is so flexible that it doesn’t make assumptions about what you need, but provides you with tools to implement it yourself
• XSLT can take some getting used to, but it’s really quite easy

If you don’t fancy Mediathek, take a look at the standard “ensemble” that comes with the Symphony Zip file you download. It’s a basic blog which contains sections for Articles, Images and Comments. Seeing how these are structured and how they are related to each other should go some way to explaining how to build what you’re after.

Ok, thanks for the replies, and especially the last one.

By the way - what is the point of having a hidden section? A section that isn’t visible in the menu?

By the way - what is the point of having a hidden section? A section that isn’t visible in the menu?

For example if you want to send emails via a form. This can only be done if the messages are being saved in a section (otherwise the event wouldn’t have a section to attach to). In the end you’re getting an email and a new entry in said section.

You could of course attach the event to any section and edit it (your Events are all PHP files in /workspace/events/) so it sends out an email and doesn’t save anything.

Oh and when I started learning Symphony I thought editing Events was core-hacking. But it’s not, Events and Datasources are meant to be edited if your requirements can’t be met by the Event/DS-Generators.

By the way - what is the point of having a hidden section? A section that isn’t visible in the menu?

Also, if you are linking two sections together you may only want one available in the main navigation, preventing the other being visible out of context.

For example if you had a section Articles and a section Images (which has a Select Box Link pointing back to Articles). You’d want authors to see Articles in the navigation, but you wouldn’t want them to view Images outside of the context of Articles. Therefore you’d hide Images, so it can only be reached through the column count on each Articles row.

And as phoque says, any sort of “system” sections such as form submissions. On one site we logged the “play” event from a Flash audio player (IP address, date and time) so we could extract statistics. We wanted to query the section with a Data Source, but there was no point cluttering the backend with its existence.