If you haven’t seen Symphony CMS yet, be sure to check it out! It’s not a Content Management System in the traditional way. It is more like a Content Management Framework, that let’s you decide, how to shape your content, instead of forcing you into adapting their scheme. You can build anything you want, from small personal blog, to huge social network. Not even the sky is the limit.
Sounds great, you might say. The only thing, that is not perfect about Symphony is, that it’s not easy for beginners to wrap their head around Symphony’s concept. We felt the same, when building our first site using the Framework. But now, we’ve become seasoned “symphonists” and want to share some of our knowledge. So let’s jump right in.
To get started with Symphony, just download it, upload it to your server and let the installation magic happen. If you’re more into Git, they also have a git-reposority that you can clone.
When logging in for the first time, you might find yourself a little confused. Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through the basic concepts of the CMS in just a second. If you’re hovering the Blueprints rider, you’ll see a drop-down menu with different links. Let’s take a look at these three: Pages, Components, Sections.
Sections - That’s right, let’s start with seconds. I know it’s the last navigation entry, but let’s follow the way your data has to go rather than just the order of some programmer designing an interface. Sections are basically like the heart of your site. You can model whatever type of content you would like to have. If you plan to build a blog, you can add a section for posts, one for comments … Sections are basically just like the models of a MVP-development approach (Guess you’re somewhat familiar with webdevelopment, otherwise Symphony CMS isn’t that much a great idea for you). To add a section, simply click “Create New”. Now you can name your section, decide which navigation category it belongs to and add data fields. When we saw this for the first time, it somehow reminded us of SQL Interfaces like phpmyadmin.
Components - Sections being like the MVP-model, you can talk of components as controllers. This is where the raw data, delivered by the model (section) gets filtered, for whatever purpose you need it. If you need to display a list of all your posts, you would create a component and set it up to load all your posts from the posts-section. If you just need to display one post, you would set up another component, just fetching one post, specified by whatever parameter you want. This kind of reminded us of building MySQL-queries. If you’re familiar with that, using Symphony’s components will be easy.
Pages - Pages, this one is pretty self-explanatory. Pages are the views. On the page’s setting page you can decide which components shall deliver their content to this page. You can then use this delivered content in your templates. We’ll cover how to do that in next week’s episode.
If you would like more in-depth information on Symphony’s concept, make sure to read the official user guide. That’s it for now, stay tuned.
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