Building My Laboratory
In an effort to try something new, but still be able to build quickly, I've simply installed the Piano Sonata Symphony Ensemble designed by Rodrigo Galindez and built by Fazal Khan.
However, I see that there are several missing features. I'd like to have a list of links that I can maintain on the site. Maybe that should be maintained within the content of each blog post. I'm just wondering what Fazal did to ensure that the images appear at the top of the post, but not at the bottom of the post. Perhaps the XSLT is looking for the first two paragraphs, then inserting the image after the second paragraph. Clever.
As mentioned by Nick Dunn, the messages section is not being used by the ensemble, so that could be hooked in as well. I'm still not sure about the Calendar Overlay extension. It requires a wide window to keep the Date panel from floating down and to the left.
There are some very nice touches in this ensemble. I was able to change the Twitter data source to point to my account and the ensemble just automatically pulled my Twitter XML feed, cached it and displayed my latest tweet on the site.
I especially like the feature that allows the ability to let Symphony format images. With the click of a checkbox, an uploaded image will be resized to fit in the layout using the Just-In-Time Image Manipulation extension.