Hi fellow symfonians,
I want to speak a little bit about a plugin that I currently work on
and get some feedback about it from you.
I was always rather unhappy with prebuilt CMS, as customization or the
integration of modules with lots of business logic is mostly rather
hard. Additionally, many of the CMS don't offer the functionality to
develop custom modules as symfony does.
Now there is a plugin for symfony that achieves some of the typical
CMS functionality: sfSimpleCMSPlugin. It is very easy to modify the
texts of a website, even for not so web-affine users. Again it is
rather hard to integrate custom symfony modules in the CMS. And if you
do so, you loose all the features like inline editing, comfortable
website translation and so on.
In this plugin I turned the whole approach around. Instead of trying
to build your custom modules into a prebuilt CMS, you can equip the
modules themselves with CMS functionality. You can declare "slots" in
a template that you can edit directly in the frontend, if you are
logged in. These slots are extendable and can contain headings, rich
text, images or whatever you can think of.
<h1><?php sf_manager_slot('heading') ?></h1>
<div><?php sf_manager_slot('image', 'image') ?></div> // custom slot types
As soon as you declare these slots, they are immediately editable in
the frontend. Translators can internationalize these slots directly
without having to enter some administration interface. Apart from
that, you can edit the title of the page and the position of the page
in the site tree comfortably in a sidebar. This website structure can
be used to automatically display navigations and breadcrumbs in your
layout.
Another feature I want to integrate is the translation of XLIFF
interface texts of the current page in the sidebar. I think this is
more comfortable for translators since they see the texts directly in
the website context while being able to edit them.
What's the big deal, you might say. Just another CMS. But I don't
think so. You retain the full flexibility of symfony while being able
to pour some CMS on it :-)
I will post more information about this plugin as soon as it's
available. I do also plan to post tutorials about possible uses of it.
And now I would love to hear some feedback from you, whether you like
it or hate it, whether you'd like to see any specific features... you
know the deal. :-)
Bernhard
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