Bauhouse Design

Symphony 1.7

Twentyone Degrees released Symphony 1.7 back in March. I am posting this quite after the fact. This is yet another significant release, intended primarily to remove the in-browser updates feature in the Symphony admin. While it is sad to see this feature go, the upside is the benefit of freeing up the developers to work on features and bug fixes, rather than on preparing updates for delivery through automatic updates. This is resulting in more features and more frequent development releases. In my mind, this is well worth the trade off for convenience. For example, take a look at what Alistair will be dishing up in the next update, soon to be released.

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Building a Symphony Theme: Part 6

In Part 5, we integrated CSS into our XSLT templates so that we finally have something nice to look at for the front end of our site. The data from our Content is functioning within the CSS layout. Creating the Entries Section and Custom Fields and creating the Entries Data Source lays the groundwork for what comes next in the tutorial on Building a Symphony Theme: Displaying the Entries.

The paradigm for viewing content on the Internet has changed with the ability to create dynamic content with blogging software such as Moveable Type and Wordpress, and with content management systems, such as Textpattern, ExpressionEngine and now Symphony, not to mention Google and a plethora of search engines and content aggregators. While the address for a page of content may appear to be accessing a particular HTML page within a server directory hierarchy, it is likely that an application is responding to variables or parameters in the URL address that provides a view of the data stored in a database that is specific to the values passed by the page request.

What I mean to say is, we are no longer looking at files stored in a folder. We are looking at information that is displayed based on the ability of an application to match a word or combination of words and find the information the user is requesting. Symphony uses page URLs as page parameters to serve the content that meets the user’s request for information.

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The Book on Symphony

I finally discovered that I can have a pretty decent looking PDF file by printing directly from my website if I don’t specify my stylesheet for screen media only. After turning off all the cruft produced by the web browser for pagination, etc., I can get a layout that turns all my CSS elements into PostScript objects. The implications for the printing industry could be amazing if XML, XSLT and PDF could be combined into some sort of prepress workflow. I am sure that someone has thought of this before, or has already implemented it.

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Building a Symphony Theme: Part 5

Symphony is an application that is built on web standards: XML, XSLT, XHTML, and CSS. Symphony accomplishes this using open source scripting and database software: PHP and MySQL, respectively. Up to this point, we haven’t really touched on CSS or Cascading Style Sheets other than to apply some style to a link with a class of “current”. Primarily we have been concerned with content: using Symphony’s XSLT templating system to transform XML data, stored in the MySQL database, to HTML.

At this point, we should have a better understanding about how XSLT works and how we can use Symphony to build a basic HTML page structure. If we know anything about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), we understand how easily we can separate the presentation of a web page from the content of the page. We can create XSLT templates that output HTML pages that use inline styles, embedded style sheets and/or external CSS files. Before we try adding any additional functionality to our site, let’s add some style to our pages with CSS.

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Building a Symphony Theme: Part 4

The series on Building a Symphony Theme has touched briefly on several concepts to make sure we understand the basics before we get into the more complex areas of developing with Symphony. You may realize by now that building a theme in Symphony really means building an entire site from the ground up. But once we have built a theme, the same templates and database structures can be used to easily build other types of sites that may have an entirely different style with very different functionality.

Every site tends to have some basic similarities. There needs to be some way to manage the static content of your site. It may not change much, but it is good to have some way to update these areas, such as the About and Contact pages. Here is where we go beyond the default parameters and data sources to actually creating content. We will start by creating a Section and creating Custom Fields for entering content.

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Building a Symphony Theme: Part 3

Continuing on in the series on Building a Symphony Theme (see Part 1 and Part 2), I will start to introduce some dynamic elements.

Just to review, we have set up a virtual host, installed Symphony, set System Preferences and Author Settings, installed and enabled a Campfire Service, created a Page template and a Master template, and looked around the ?debug interface to view the XML data, XSLT templates and XHTML Output.

Before we start integrating our XHTML structure and CSS files, let’s get aquainted with the basics of working with Symphony and XSLT.

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Building a Symphony Theme: qwilm

Now, that we are developing the qwilm theme, I have created another virtual host, database and Symphony install for a local test site. I have a virtual host called sym.qwilm.site that uses a database called sym_qwilm and I installed a fresh version of Symphony.

Just to make sure we are on the same page, now that I have switched to developing qwilm instead of Pink for October, Here are the steps that you can take before jumping back into the tutorial on Building a Symphony Theme to add a virtual host specifically for this theme: sym.qwilm.site. If you would rather jump right into learning Symphony, head to the entries:

• Building a Symphony Theme: Part 1
• Building a Symphony Theme: Part 2

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Building a Symphony Theme: Part 2

As we discovered in Part 1 of this series, a valid XSLT template and stylesheet must be available to transform XML data into HTML Output. (Note that I will be using the latest update, Symphony 1.5.06, for this tutorial.) At this point, though, we have no data to transform. Next, we need to create an XML Data Source. But, before we get there, let’s discover what is possible in Symphony even without a Data Source. The power of Symphony comes in the ability to build HTML pages by assembling pieces of reusable HTML code and XSLT templates into modular page structures through Masters, Pages and Utilities.

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Updating Symphony

This weekend, the Symphony Team has released an update to the official Symphony 1.5 Public Release (version 1.5.05) that was released on September 21, 2006. Symphony 1.5.06 provides several user requested improvements and bug fixes. Much credit must be given to the Symphony development team for their responsiveness and their fast-paced development.

The 1.5.06 update provides many additional possibilities for the development of a Symphony theme, so you may enjoy a short intermission in our series on Building a Symphony Theme as we update the application. It should take merely a moment to update.

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Building a Symphony Theme: Part 1

This is part one in a series of articles on Creating a Theme for Symphony. Building a site in Symphony will require some knowledge about XML, XPath and XSLT, as well as HTML and CSS. All of these technologies are standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium as the basic building blocks that make the web work. Many of us have come around to the idea of developing standards compliant sites using XHTML and CSS. XML is a standard means of storing and retrieving data and media. However, XPath and XSLT are neglected siblings that could use some attention, and Symphony can help us out in this area. They are, in fact, the heart and soul of Symphony.

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Creating a Theme for Symphony

I have decided to build a theme for Symphony using the Pink for October WordPress theme. I will be describing the process step by step to help others who are wondering about the lack of documentation for developing sites using Symphony. I have found the best way to learn is by playing with the application to see what it can do. Learning about XML, XSLT and XPath are part of the process. Symphony provides a wonderful tool for learning the ins and outs of XSLT templating. So, here goes…

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Pink for October

Yes, October is running out. But while it is still October, and seeing as I haven't made any entries for the month of October, there is still time to act. I wanted to find a theme that would be worthy of inclusion in the list of themes available for Symphony, as theme development seems to be a little slow.

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Textile in Symphony

Testing Symphony's Textile Text Formatter Campfire Service. If all is working as it should, the body of this article will contain XSLT code from one of my page templates. According to Allen, the text input fields should be validated so as not to break the front end of a Symphony site.

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Symphony: Setting a New Standard

Symphony is a web publishing system based on web standards. By using standards, you are investing in technologies that work now and will be sure to work in the future. Web development has often relied on proprietary technologies that work only with particular applications. There was a time when websites recommended that the website was best viewed with the latest version of Internet Explorer. Many more browsers are being used.

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Symphony: Then and Now

This following excerpt regarding the default templates came with the default template for the Symphony 1.5 beta, but I saw no reason to dispense with it. It helps me remember the process that the Symphony Team has gone through to arrive at this state of Symphony's development. I consider it to be a privilege to be able to work with such a powerful and flexible application. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Symphony Team and the Overture forum contributors for their work, tutorials, tips and suggestions, as well as for introducing me to another web standard: XSLT. For myself, it did not take very long to learn the basics.

Let's look back at the progression of Symphony's default templates...

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Font Licensing

Stop stealing sheep, as Erik Spiekermann put it. Fonts represent a significant investment of time to create them and money to license them. Yet, because they are everywhere, few recognize their value and inadvertently break the law by distributing them to others.

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Web Standards

To what does the term web standards refer? Since the publication of the first website in 1991, the World Wide Web has grown from a means of sharing information among the scientific community to become the primary means for operating businesses in the information age and for social interaction around the world.

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