6 Jan 2007
Building a Symphony Theme: Part 5
Symphony is an application that is built on web standards: XML, XSLT, XHTML, and CSS. Symphony accomplishes this using open source scripting and database software: PHP and MySQL, respectively. Up to this point, we haven’t really touched on CSS or Cascading Style Sheets other than to apply some style to a link with a class of “current”. Primarily we have been concerned with content: using Symphony’s XSLT templating system to transform XML data, stored in the MySQL database, to HTML.
At this point, we should have a better understanding about how XSLT works and how we can use Symphony to build a basic HTML page structure. If we know anything about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), we understand how easily we can separate the presentation of a web page from the content of the page. We can create XSLT templates that output HTML pages that use inline styles, embedded style sheets and/or external CSS files. Before we try adding any additional functionality to our site, let’s add some style to our pages with CSS.