Symphony.

Just a thought from someone who finds the idea of creating a new section for each page a bit annoying..

i almost exclusively use this method in conjunction with the beloved static section extension and publish tabs for pages with several unique pieces of content. i can see your point in that it is repetitious and probably frustrating to create a section and a datasource for every page - i finished one project in december that had ~50 unique pages.

however, i have won clients' hearts with this approach because not only is it easy for me to quickly adjust the structure of the content at the client's whim (think of turning a static page into a blog-style, picture gallery, or file repo) but i can easily leverage symphony's main menu to almost exactly mimic the front end's navigation, which is what the client is most familiar with.

combine that with some well-named fields and a simple wysiwyg and you've got a pretty solid simple site that makes even the least literate client feel like they have complete control over their content.

@fawx, thanks for your comments. How does your 50+ entries look in the section on the backend? If each PAge is a section entry.. doesn't the backend become a nit unmanageable with regards to editing the static page content?

@moonoo2 quite the contrary. at first it may sound overwhelming because the size of the menu is larger than what most people might consider an orthodox symphony setup, but for the user it's extremely convenient because they'll find the section they need to edit in the same place (structurally) as the front end of the site, rather than having to read through a list of a) pages or b) entries in a large "page content" section.

edit: example

Ahh Gotcha! that's a neat way of doing it! thanks for sharing.

@brendo, oooh I'd be interested in knowing if it is possible to inject new fields in the Blueprints Pages entry... would this be a core hack though? or would I need an extension to perform this? Refering to your post

@fawx

I'm using the same idea with 1 section / static page. If you are kind enough to enlighten me regarding the image with menu:

1. If all your pages reside in menus, what's the point of All Pages tab?

2. Is "About our school" a static page or only a container for other pages?

@vladg:

"all pages" is content that spans the entire site. in this instance, there is a small image slider in the footer as well as some footer links to documents that may be updated by the client.

"about our school" is a top level navigation item which in itself does not have any content. it's simply a container. should the user click on that rather than selecting a submenu item (since semantically, it is a link), i use huib's amazing redirect to subpage extension.

Thanks for making it clear, fawx.

no problem! i love finally feeling like i have something to offer, and building the simplest, low-budget websites with symphony is most certainly my expertise ;)

@fawx, I have not used my redirect to subpage extension in a while, would you say it is still compatible with the latest versions? If so I will update the extension page.

the last version i used it with was 2.2 and it worked just fine.