http://tech.carsonsasser.com Article RSS Feed en-us Symphony (version 3.0.0beta) http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-display-next-and-previous-article-links-in-symphony-cms-2/ Sun, 27 Mar 2011 13:36 -0500 http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-display-next-and-previous-article-links-in-symphony-cms-2/ When a single content entry is displayed on a web page it is often desired that links be provided to the next and previous chronological entries. (This can apply to any content with a date field, not just articles.) This article attempts to explain how this can be done using a single custom data source. It is difficult (impossible?) to do this using only the backend data source creator. http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-display-static-content-within-the-symphony-cms/ Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:00 -0500 http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-display-static-content-within-the-symphony-cms/ There have been several inquiries in the Symphony Forum about displaying static content within the Symphony content management system. I will attempt to describe three basic approaches to accomplishing this. There are many more variations on these approaches than I cover here, but hopefully this will be enough to get Symphony beginners started. The three basic approaches are: http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-register-and-use-custom-php-functions-inside-xsl/ Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:48 -0500 http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-register-and-use-custom-php-functions-inside-xsl/ This article is not about justifying the use of PHP inside XSL. It is about how to do so if you need to or just want to. The case that I use as an example can be done easily in XSL without the use of a PHP function. http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-create-a-tag-cloud-using-a-custom-data-source/ Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:19 -0500 http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-create-a-tag-cloud-using-a-custom-data-source/ I promised to follow up a previous article with a few examples like this one. If you haven't already, and you are new to custom data sources, you should read that article before reading this one. This is provided as an example only; it is not necessarily the best way to implement a tag cloud. http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-create-a-custom-data-source-in-symphony-cms-2/ Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:49 -0500 http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-create-a-custom-data-source-in-symphony-cms-2/ In Symphony a data source is the conduit between your content, which is stored in a database, and the web page you display to site visitors. It allows you to extract data from specified tables and to filter, sort and group that data before displaying it. Although Symphony offers considerable flexibility in defining data sources in the Symphony backend, you most likely will encounter situations where you would like to do a little more than Symphony offers. http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-pre-enter-author-data-in-comment-form/ Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:30 -0500 http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/how-to-pre-enter-author-data-in-comment-form/ I wanted a new feature for my blog site that fills the Author, Email and Website fields of my comment form with data collected from a previous comment. That is, if a visitor has made a comment before, the visitor won't have to fill in those fields on the next comment (provided that the visitor is using the same computer). I accomplished this by placing a cookie on the visitor's computer which holds the visitor's name, email address and website URL, and then retrieving that information before a comment form is displayed. http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/sessions-and-cookies/ Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:12 -0500 http://tech.carsonsasser.com/article/sessions-and-cookies/ The purpose of this article is to describe how PHP Sessions and Cookies are used in Symphony CMS and how that affects the user of a website powered by Symphony. I won't get into great detail about the general usage of sessions and cookies because Googling those terms will turn up several good tutorials.