Over the past month I’ve been dabbling and playing with an extension for my fav CMS (Symphony-CMS). I love working with it and crafting sites from the ground up. Total control over markup is nobody’s responsibility but mine… (so if it’s ain’t right.. I’m to blame.)
The CMS itself is one of those rare breeds I actually enjoy working in the backend with.. sleek, streamlined and fast. After a few site builds I saw the need for simple static pages to be made for certain clients and found that this is rather a tricky thing for my head to get around. I love the dynamic nature of build your own datastructures but found a lack of control over simple static pages with a single textarea – sort of like what wordpress offers out of the box.
So I went to work on seeing if a simple textarea could be appended to the main page/template management area in Symphony… Turns out you can: http://symphony-cms.com/discuss/thread/82890/. So what I have now is the ability to allow my clients add static pages for campaigns and rudimentary bits of information without the need to call on me… Some might find this a bad thing.. I think, it allows me time to play with the nicer things the CMS has to offer, while knowing the client will grasp the concept of static and dynamic pieces of data much better now.
I’ve stored the git repo of the extension in it’s early beta state on http://github.com/andrewminton/blueprints_pages_textarea
The API for making extensions with Symphony was really helpful here and also the forum members invaluable to making this thing possible. Most of the code is re-factored snippets of info from extensions like : Documenter, Page Prototypes, and GlobalResourceLoader to name a few.. all amazing concepts that have helped shape what has become a really useful tool for me.. if only a minor addition to my workflow.