During the past week I have been developing a website for my school's photography club. It's a blog-like photo gallery thats supports multiple authors, I also implemented author registration for the sake of convenience.
After looking at MovableType (and its plugins), TYPO3 (and its extensions), ExpressionEngine, and WordPress, I decided to go with Symphony. The main reason I chose Symphony is because of its extremely user-friendly and minimalistic backend interface. So people who are not-so-good-at-computers won't get totally confused. Believe me, there are people who don't know how to post a photo in WordPress; user-friendliness is important.
However, I have never had any experience with XSL or XSLT, so I spent half of the development time learnig XSLT. But it is easy to learn since it doesn't really have complicated functions and whatnot. BTW, I know Symphony beta 2.0 is out but since I don't have the time to constantly maintain the website I used 1.7.
Here is a list of functions I added/modified, in addition to the default ones.
- Homepage as an index of photos
- Categories of photos
- Featured photo
- Pagination
- Author Registration
Started by off by adding Custom Fields(CF) and pages. I was a bit confused with Data Sources and Utilities at the beginning and wasted some time (didn't read any documentation but who reads them anyway?). Applied my limited knowledge of XSLT when editing pages and utilities. Eventually I added new controllers to work with pages. It took me some time to realize that Utilities must associate with Data Source to work, and Controllers pull data from Elements, which you can choose which ones to include.
This page is extremely helpful, and also search in the overture forum when you have problems, searching in Google is not really helpful.
