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With the recent launch of Web Platform Docs—a collaborative effort involving a lot of standards bodies and internet giants—it could be a good idea for Symphony users to share their knowledge and expertise on XML and XSLT. It's a good opportunity to build a central resource for learning these technologies, promoting awareness and their benefits as official web standards, along with encouraging a wider audience to give Symphony a try.

I know a lot of new comers can be put off by the learning curve involved with XSLT and I've seen people on theses forums linking to scattered resources on the web. It could be useful to everyone to have learning resources all in a central location alongside the more fashionable web technologies of the moment.

With any luck it could trigger a rise in awareness of XSLT enough to encourage browser manufacturers to keep up and start implementing XSLT 2.0. It may be more in hope than expectation but it's all about demand and demand starts with awareness.

There is a plan for some of our more tenured community members to build something similar (as far as I recall) as a resource for our community and others interested in xslt, which will be based on the upcoming Factory plan.

The official Symphony docs site will be good and the Factory design is looking very nice but having generalised XML/XSLT info in with the Web Platform docs will still be of benefit to help keep XSLT on the radar and raise general awareness. If people can learn the core templating skills before even becoming aware of Symphony then they have directly transferrable skills to apply and Symphony would be an easier sell. Factory can then provide the specifics to Symphony application.

For a CMS that relies entirely on those skills it's in the common interest to see them promoted on the platforms made available to help bridge the gap.

I agree that it would be great to have a general reference for XML and XSLT.

Perhaps we can pitch in as a community to build this resource.

Looks like you beat me to it! :) I'll certainly pitch in where I can on the docs and I think the Symphony community as a whole would have a lot to contribute and a vested interested at the same time. If this is to be a go-to resource for web technologies then getting in there first will help a lot, especially in encouraging those who are already familiar with HTML and CSS to take the next logical step to working with outside data and manipulating it.

Craig Zheng has graciously donated his work on the Symphony book to the community. I am in the process of refactoring the content for the Symphony docs and for the Web Platform Docs.

The XSLT Chapter is a great introduction to XML, XPath and XSLT.

Note that this book chapter references the experimental Symphony 3.0 beta, which has been the model for many of the features that have been ported to Symphony 2.3. However, there are significant differences in code which do not apply to the stable release versions of Symphony. The code will need to be adjusted to be relevant for the latest versions of Symphony, but the basic principles remain the same.

Feel free to fork the official Working Groups repo to help update this resource. Until my pull request is integrated, my fork contains the chapter reformatted as Markdown.

There are several more chapters waiting to be added to this resource.

I think there was another recent discussion mentioning the need of working on some XSLT tutorials. This symphony start to finish looked very compelling as well.

I think it would be good if there's a community workforce to provide some XSLT documentation as well as some other basic Symphony guides so we can get developers started quicker

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Symphony • Open Source XSLT CMS

Server Requirements

  • PHP 5.3-5.6 or 7.0-7.3
  • PHP's LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled (--with-xsl)
  • MySQL 5.5 or above
  • An Apache or Litespeed webserver
  • Apache's mod_rewrite module or equivalent

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