Content Slots

Introduction

In this chapter we'll talk a little more about Content Slots. We already talked a little bit about them in the previous Content Templates chapter. To recap, a content slot is an arbitrary editable piece of content related to a Sympal content record. Each content slot has a type which determines the form used to edit the value of that slot, and also the class used to render the value of that slot. This means content slots are extremely flexible and can be used to edit and store simple or very complex values. They can store a serialized PHP value, HTML, Markdown, etc. or whatever it is you prefer.

Using Content Slots

Using a content slots are pretty simple, it just requires that you use the get_sympal_content_slot() helper method. This method will create the slot if it does not exist, allow you to edit the value inline, and will render the value of the slot when not in edit mode.

In order to use a content slot all you need is an instance of the sfSympalContent record to create the slot for. This isn't anything special to Sympal, you can just retrieve the instance of the content record with a normal Doctrine_Query:

<?php
 
$content = Doctrine_Core::getTable('sfSympalContent')
  ->getBaseQuery('c')
  ->where('c.slug = ?', 'my_content')
  ->fetchOne();
 
?>

Now you can use the $content instance to render slots for:

<?php
 
echo get_sympal_content_slot($content, 'name_of_slot', 'Markdown');
 
?>

This allows you to easily use slots in your own hand written modules where you manually retrieve the content record.