Blog5 Tips for working with a (SilverStripe) Project Manager

29 March 2011 | Kulsoom Kausher | CMS, SilverStripe

9 7

Here's something a little different, experienced SilverStripe project manager Kulsoom Kausher of digital agency Wandering Bear, tells us her top 5 tips for the SilverStripe developer to make their project managers life a little easier.

SnippetsAutomatically Redirect to the first Child Page without a Redirector Page

27 September 2011 | ekersten | URLs | Supports v2.4

6 7

This is a little snipped i've been using to redirect a custom page to it's first child. It extends the init method of the Controller. This has proven useful in cases where the client wants to re-sort the child pages and doesn't want to mess around the configuration of a redirector page.

TutorialsAdd a duplicate button to Model Admin

19 April 2011 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, DataObjects, Model Admin | Supports v2.4

13 7

Often you will want to add some extra features to your Model Admin interface. Luckily it's pretty straightforward when you know how! In this tutorial we are going to add a simple 'Duplicate' button for our managed Model.

SnippetsHighlighting Query Text in Search Results

12 July 2011 | Pete Bacon Darwin | Forms, Search | Supports v2.4

9 7

Most search results I have seen with Silverstripe just return the Summary of the page or the FirstSentence.  I have knocked up a quick way to show a sentence from the page that contains the search term and even highlights it for you.

TutorialsAdding Custom Filterable Reports to ReportAdmin

7 October 2011 | Craig Ballantyne | CMS, Reports | Supports v2.4

9 7

With only the standard Broken Links Report, the report admin area in Silverstripe's CMS can feel a bit underused.  In this tutorial I'm going to take a look at how you can add a custom report into the report admin section of the CMS which can make keeping track of a variety of statistics a little more straightforward.

To keep this simple I am going to give users the ability to assign a colour to each page on the site and then generate a report of any pages on the site that have been assigned a particular colour.

SnippetsPreventing malicious SQL injections

12 March 2010 | Daniel Hensby | Security, DataObjects, Database | Supports v2.4, v2.3

3 6

PHP has a very shallow learning curve, it's free and anyone can have a go at making a website by following a few tutorials and implementing their experience with other languages. However, coding for the web can be a risky business, especially with dynamic websites that take some kind of user (or external) input and use that to get data from a database.

SnippetsAdding a Thumbnail to a DataObjectManager

21 May 2009 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, Images | Supports v2.4, v2.3

7 6

This snippet lets you add a thumbnail to items in UncleCheese's Data Object Manager module or a regular Complex Table field. All you need to do is create a function that returns a thumbnail and refer to this function in your DOM or CTF definition.

TutorialsDynamically Generating Dropdown Lists

13 October 2010 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, DataObjects, Forms | Supports v2.4, v2.3

8 6

This post title may look familiar, but it has in fact been completely re-written with lots of new code! When using dropdown menus, you will often want to dynamically generate the options, usually to a list of DataObjects or Pages for the user to choose from. This tutorial explores the options at your disposal when it comes to creating dynamic dropdowns in the SilverStripe.

TutorialsCustomising the WYSYWIG editor (TinyMCE)

24 July 2009 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, CSS, WYSIWYG | Supports v2.4, v2.3

6 6

The  default install of SilverStripe contains an array of buttons for the TinyMCE HTML editor. However usually your client will need some extra functionality or you may want to keep things simple for them by removing some of the buttons. As of SilverStripe 2.3.2 this is very easy and can be achieved by adding some code to the _config.php file.

NewbiesCreating a Simple Contact Form

3 May 2009 | Aram Balakjian | Templates, Forms, Email | Supports v2.4, v2.3

68 6

In this tutorial we are going to create a very simple contact form, like those commonly seen on most contact-us pages. This is a great introduction to SilverStripe forms for those new to the Subject and should also provide enough functionality for most people to use straight out of the box.

SnippetsAdding Gravatars to your site

8 October 2010 | Aram Balakjian | Images, Member, Decorators | Supports v2.4, v2.3

6 6

Gravatar is a great service that allows you to pull in members profile photos directly from their Gravatar accounts. It's used right here on SSbits and it also part of the Forum module. It's also incredibly easy to integrate into your site! 

SnippetsInserting Javascript into a DOM Popup

11 September 2011 | Gordon Anderson | JavaScript, DataObjectManger | Supports v2.4, v2.3

5 6

I recently ran into the problem of how to insert my own Javascript into a DOM (DataObjectManager) popup window.  After much googling and getting nowhere I resorted to reading the code and discovered that it was in fact quite simple to do.

The problem I was trying to solve was for a dropdown select box to toggle fields in the form, depending on whether a link is internal or external to the site. 

TutorialsSorting on a related DataObject in ModelAdmin

2 August 2011 | Simon Erkelens | DataObjects, Model Admin | Supports v2.4

0 6

Sometimes, in ModelAdmin, we want to be able to have a different default sort.

Specifically, like in cases where a has_one is the preferred sorting. For example, we have a warehouse. In our DataObjects, we have the object "Lanes", has_many Products. And we have Products, has_one "Lanes". When we're browsing our Products in the admin, we want to have them default sorted by their Lane, not their name.

Just saying default_sort = 'Lanes'; sadly does not do the job. It'll give you reddish-screens and stuff. Which is not what we like.

Here's a (quite simple actually) solution.

TutorialsSetting and displaying custom messages in your site

31 October 2011 | Shea | Decorators, Controllers | Supports v2.4

5 6

There is a method on SilverStripe's Form class to set a success or error message when the form is submitted. That's cool... but sometimes you need to display a message that is not related to a form. I've created a couple of simple controller methods to enable setting and displaying of message banners anytime.