installing the Symfony plugin sfSimpleCMS

I was recently asked if I’d sucessfully got the Symfony plugin sfSimpleCMS working and I’m afraid my answer was no. I had tried briefly when preparing for my talk, but something didn’t work and I carried on with other things.

Being reminded of it and having an hour to kill before I head off to the pub I thought I’d give it a stab, here we go…

My environment is PHP 5.2.3 on Debian Woody.

Upgrade to latest stable version (as root):
pear upgrade symfony/symfony

Stop being root and create test sandbox:
cd ~/www/TEST/
mkdir sfSimpleCMS && cd sfSimpleCMS

…obviously your paths can be different.

Create project and app
symfony init-project cms
symfony init-app frontend

Set-up the Apache Virtual Host:

ServerName sfSimpleCMS.bealers
DocumentRoot "/home/bealers/www/TEST/sfSimpleCMS/web"
DirectoryIndex index.php
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
php_flag register_globals off
Alias /sf /usr/share/php/data/symfony/web/sf
<Directory /home/bealers/www/TEST/sfSimpleCMS/web>
AllowOverride All
Allow from All

LogFormat “%h %l %u %t “%r” %s %b “%{Referer}i” “%{User-agent}i””
TransferLog /var/log/apache/sfSimpleCMS.log
ErrorLog /var/log/apache/sfSimpleCMS.log

…your paths should match the location of your sandbox

Restart apache (as root, or use sudo)
apachectl reload

Make sure that your hostname resolves to the IP of the server and then try it in your browser in my case http://sfSimpleCMS.bealers

Do some simple config
mysql> create database cms;
mysql> grant all on cms.* to cms@localhost identified by 'cms';

Edit config/propel.ini so that:
propel.database.createUrl = mysql://cms:cms@localhost/
propel.database.url = mysql://cms:cms@localhost/cms

Edit config/databases.yml so that:
all:
propel:
class: sfPropelDatabase
param:
dsn: mysql://cms:cms@localhost/cms

Install the re-prequisites
symfony plugin-install http://plugins.symfony-project.com/sfGuardPlugin
symfony cc

symfony plugin-install http://plugins.symfony-project.com/sfPropelActAsNestedSetBehaviorPlugin

Edit config/propel.ini so that:
propel.builder.addBehaviors = true

Install tiny MCE
cd /tmp
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tinymce/tinymce_2_1_1_1.tgz?download
tar -zxvf tinymce_2_1_1_1.tgz

Move the actual useful bit to our Symfony project (obviously change this to contain the right path for you)
mv tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/ ~/www/TEST/sfSimpleCMS/web/js

Tidy up
rm -Rf tinymce*

Get back to our project
cd ~/www/TEST/sfSimpleCMS

Install sfSimpleCMS
symfony plugin-install http://plugins.symfony-project.com/sfSimpleCMSPlugin

Build everything
symfony propel-build-all

Our database now looks like this:

Edit apps/frontend/config/settings.yml so that:

all:
.settings:
enabled_modules: [default, sfSimpleCMS, sfSimpleCMSAdmin]
sfSimpleCMS:
default_text: '[add text here]' # Default text for page editable parts
routes_register: on # Use the plugin's routes
rich_editing: on # Use TinyMCE for rich text editing
default_page: home # Slug (=path) of the default root page
home_link: My swell site # what is displayed on the top right corner of the pages (can be HTML code)
use_l10n: false # Enable multiple versions for a single page
localizations: [en, fr, es] # If l10n is enabled, list of cultures in which pages are available
default_culture: en # If l10n is not enabled, default culture for pages
editor_credential: # Name of the credential required for page editing (leave blank for free editing)
publisher_credential: # Name of the credential required for page publishing (leave blank for free publishing)
templates: # Available templates
simplePage: Simple Page # the key is the name of a template which must be present in modules/sfSimpleCMS/templates/
home: Home # the value is the name under which the template is presented in lists
slot_types: # Available slot types
Text: Simple text
RichText: Rich text
Php: PHP code
Image: Image
Modular: List of components

Import some data. I was unable to get the fixtures to load by running:
symfony propel-load-data frontend pluginssfSimpleCMSPlugindatafixtures (actually I’ve never had much luck with loading data from fixtures, but that’s another story) so with a bit of trial and error I came up with this simple query which’ll give us our first page (if we don’t do this things go a bit weird and the top element has no template assigned so the view barfs).

mysql> insert into sf_simple_cms_page set id=1, slug="home", template="home", tree_left=1, tree_right=2, is_published=1, created_at=NOW();

Visiting http://sfsimplecms.bealers/frontend_dev.php/sfSimpleCMSAdmin/ should give you the site!

Double clicking on the content areas opens an editing window. I’ve been unable to get rich text editing working with tinyMCE but I guess it’s in the wrong place in the directory tree. I notice that theres a sfSimpleCMSPlugin folder under web that has its own js folder. Maybe it needs to go in there but I’ll leave that as an excersise for the reader whilst I head off to the pub.

Here’s the official plugin page for further reference.

Note: It see that WordPress has munged the tabs which are important for the yml files. I suggest you look at the official plugin page above should you be unsure of the tab order. I’ll attempt to tidy it up some time soon.