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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