Symphony.

I plan to create a website of 10 static pages which can be simply created with XHTML/CSS in couple of weeks and my goals will be achieved. Thinking ahead, I want to customise the site according to mobile, print and other media which again can be done by changing the style sheets. It sounds good, however, the whole process doesn’t separates the content from presentation in true sense which raises my need for using XML. I want to store the website content in XML format which needs to be parsed with XSLT to generate an XHTML file on frontend.

There was no end to excitement when I saw this CMS. I installed it right away, tested and really liked it. The only issue I see is that the data in stored inside XSL files and I wanted it to be XML for customisation purposes. Can someone please suggest if my concerns are meaningful and if its worth to spend extra time and effort to create a XML based static website.

Thanks in advance.

I’m no expert on Symphony but I can see that you are a bit confused about the XML versus the XSL. Symphony does not store data in XSL files. A Data Source defines what data is to be extracted from the database and stored internally as XML. Then an XSL template file defines how the XML is to be displayed on a web page.

For your application it seems to me that you could use what Symphony calls custom static XML. You create a custom static XML data source using the data source interface. The data is stored in a file rather than a database. Then you develop the XSL needed to display the custom static XML on a web page. I suggest that you read this page as a start.

The first thing I had to learn when working with Symphony was to stop thinking in “I need 10 pages of XHTML”. In Symphony, you design your content in Sections, like tables in a database or in spreadsheets. Once you’ve managed to map your content to those Sections you can start designing your Views (Symphony calls this Pages) and the markup your visitor will see. In order to give you a rough guidance to a working Section layout you should elaborate what kind of content you want to have.

On the other hand, regarding your concern that that your content and presentation will not be properly separated: If you know how to use CSS properly, it will. Same goes for the mobile view, it’s just another stylesheet. The content will reside in a tidy semantic XHTML document and all the presentation in your stylesheets. Adding XML and XSLT would only add another separation: content from meaningful semantic markup.

There are websites that fit perfectly to Symphony and others simply don’t. I would say in this case it all boils down to what exactly your content will be.

I’d say it’s as simple as this:

Are you going to make a site that has content that changes regularly and requires a higher degree of customization and flexibility? Use Symphony.

Are you going to make a site that has content that only changes every so often and is pretty standard stuff? Try something like Perch or one of the other micro-CMS.

I use Symphony for just about everything that needs dynamically created pages. If all the pages are static but every once and a while some of the content will change on that page, then Symphony is over-kill.

I’d say that you can use symphony for simple sites that only have occasional updates. I have been testing 2.08RC1 by building myself a simple personal site with articles (blogging) functionality but also a simple page section so you could easily add individual pages by using markdown for the core part of the page, including the page heading, with a template that is the outer part of the page (banner, navbar, footer etc).

I use my own URL router extension to add rules that direct /work to /pages/work for example, add an item to a simple static nav XML DataSource, and you have a simple system that can accommodate a few pages or a more complex site with tagged articles and an archive. The nav could be automated to make things even simpler.

I think with a little thought symphony can fit many different tasks, you just need to detach your thinking from the 95% of CMS’ that are page-based.

I may try to simplify the idea even further and upload an ensemble if it will be useful, or perhaps just do a tutorial.

I agree that Symphony can fit many different tasks. To be honest, I doubt there’s much that Symphony couldn’t be made to do if you were willing to write custom events yourself. It’s an extremely flexible system.

I guess one thing to consider is that even if you only have a tiny site that doesn’t necessarily require something as powerful as Symphony to start, if you build it with a CMS from the beginning it’ll be less work should you choose to expand it out.

So I revise. Use Symphony.