This morning, I received an email that was forwarded from a colleague at Domain7, where I used to work as Senior Designer. I have been forwarding a reasonable amount of traffic to Domain7 from a project I had experimented with on my own time: 960 Fluid Grid System, based on Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System.
The request went something like this:
@kanduvisla opened an issue about the possibility of rendering the Symphony admin pages with XSLT.
Symphony 3 had been developed to make this possible.
The Symphony book project was cancelled.
Project Cancelled
After nine months and ten chapters, Wrox decided to cancel this book project in June 2011. Symphony Start to Finish was to be the first comprehensive guide to building websites and web applications with Symphony. It was meant to cover the next major version of the platform, but after Symphony lost its only full-time developer, progress on that version was delayed significantly, and in the end Wrox was unable to accommodate the extended timeline.
What Now?
The considerable work put into the manuscript will be incorporated into Symphony’s free online documentation.
CSS preprocessors are all the rage these days. Chris Coyier is musing about them. Stephen Hay uses them in his Responsive Design Workflow. The very popular front end design frameworks, Twitter’s Bootstrap and Zurb’s Foundation, use LESS and SASS, respectively.
The Symphony CMS 2012 Boston Symposium is being held this weekend, a two-day event starting today. The Symphony discussion forum event thread announces the event details.
I have been using the Piano Sonata ensemble for my personal blog. It needs updating: the site is still running on Symphony 2.0.6 and the content hasn’t been updated for quite a while.
There are times when people will use a tool with a graphical user interface (GUI) such as OmniGraffle that provides an easy way to create an illustration of a complex structure such as a site map for a website. The output can be a file such as a PDF. It turns out that this PDF file does not contain text that can be selected, copied and pasted. For anyone wanting to reuse this data, this might mean having to recreate the structure by retyping it.
Thankfully, OmniGraffle includes the ability to export an XML file. The structure that is described by the diagram is exactly what one would want to recreate it in HTML.
The Advocacy Working Group will be focused on advocating Symphony and its core approaches and technologies.
As mentioned previously, I am building this site on the Piano Sonata Symphony Ensemble designed by Rodrigo Galindez and adapted for Symphony by Fazal Khan.
I also mentioned that there were some items that I felt were missing. Here’s what I have done so far to add some missing features.
XSL Transformations (XSLT) is a markup language for transforming XML into other forms of output, such as XML documents, HTML and many other text-based formats. The World Wide Web Consortium maintains the XSLT standard.
Apple, Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera have joined the W3C to launch a new website called WebPlatform with the goal of document the technology standards that form the foundation of the web. Patterned after Wikipedia, the new site is hoping to become a single, developer community-driven resource for documentation, specification and API references, tutorials and discussions about web technologies.
We are an open community of developers building resources for a better web, regardless of brand, browser or platform. Anyone can contribute and each person who does makes us stronger. Together we can continue to drive innovation on the Web to serve the greater good. It starts here, with you.
For a project where our agency was contracted to design and deliver HTML, CSS and JavaScript to the client, I created a static site generator as a means of quickly prototyping web page layouts as static HTML files, while still being able to maintain all the features of the layout that we intended to deliver to the client, such as current classes on selected navigation items.
The best way to deliver quality code to the client was to rely on a W3C standard for templating: XSLT. Rather than have to manually edit pages across the entire set of layouts, I was able to run a series of commands on the command line to generate the pages for the site. Because these commands rely on xsltproc, which is already available out of the box in any UNIX-based system, including Mac and Linux, it was a great way to use HTML preprocessing in our front end development process.