Symphony Sections

In Symphony, creating Sections is a way of dynamically creating the database structure for your site and the navigation system of the Symphony admin area. This tutorial assumes that you have installed the integration branch of Symphony 2.0.2 from Github (although, this is not essential).

Don’t worry if you don’t have the integration branch installed. This simply means you won’t be able to organize sections into different menus in the Symphony admin area.

For this site, I have created 5 sections. Two sections deal with metadata. Three sections deal with content.

Metadata Sections

First, let’s create the metadata sections:

Types Section

Navigate to Blueprints : Sections and create a new section with the following settings:

Essentials
Fields
Categories Section

Next, create the “Categories” section with the following settings:

Essentials
Fields
Symphony Admin Navigation

If you are working with a clean install of Symphony, you will notice that once you have created the first section, a new menu item will be added to the Symphony admin menu. If you are using the version 2.0.2 integration branch, the name of the menu will be labelled with the name you designated as the Navigation Group. For earlier versions, all sections will appear in the Publish menu. To re-order the menu, navigate to Blueprints : Sections and drag the row for each section to a different position.

Content Sections

Now, let’s create the content sections:

Sections Section

Create a new section with the following settings. (Note: for the Parent Section select box link field, select Types:Title, save the section, then select Sections:Title. It is possible for a Select Box Link to select itself to be able to create hierarchies of sections, but the section must first be saved to make the section available in the list of options.)

Essentials
Fields
Entries Section

Next, create the “Entries” section with the following settings:

Essentials
Fields
Items Section

Finally, create the “Items” section with the following settings:

Essentials
Fields
Data Structure and Backup System

This is the data structure of this site as of this writing. Feel free to keep the data structure of your site as simple or as complex as you like. You can always add or remove fields and sections as you like. But, be aware that removing sections and fields will also remove the associated data from the database. So, be careful.

As a simple backup system, it is a good idea to install the Export Ensemble extension. This extension will create a ZIP archive that contains everything needed to reproduce your entire site, except for your author settings and server/database configuration settings. You would install an ensemble in the same way you would install Symphony. The Symphony install file is itself an Ensemble. The Ensemble can be used to share site files, build themes or migrate sites from one server to another, or from a local test server to a production server.

Of course, if you have several Authors, it would be far better to maintain a backup of the files and database that could be used to restore the entire site, including Authors, .htaccess files and configuration settings.

Tutorials
Technology symphony cms 2009-05-20 Yes