28 April 2007
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.
Displaying the Entries
To display entries on our pages, we can use the same XSLT code that we used for the Content Section to display static content to each individual page. That works fine when there is a single entry to display for each page. If you have several entries that you would like to associate with a particular page, you could have several entries displayed one after another in a single page. But there are likely going to be instances where we might like to have a section for our site that contains subsections and several pages that can be viewed within each of these sections. Or we might like to organize weblog entries by dates, by categories, or by tags.
Each page we create in Symphony can use a different URL Schema which represent the parameters that can be used to filter the data to display on the page depending on the parameters that are used in the URL for the page. Symphony turns what we normally recognize as resource locators that find directories and files into into parameters for calling data.
URL Schemas and Parameters
Filed Under: Applications
Total Number of Words: 431