BlogAn interview with Felipe Skroski: Designing SilverStripe 3, UI development and the future of content management

4 March 2011 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, interview, SilverStripe 3

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This year looks like it's going to be an important milestone for SilverStripe. For not only does it mark the 10th anniversary of the company that brought us the CMS, SilverStripe Limited, but it's also the year in which work has begun on the first major release of the system since it's launch in 2007. SilverStripe 3.0 is still very early in its development but it's already looking very promising, potentially offering huge improvements such as versioned assets, a reworked templating system and better separation between the CMS and the underlying framework Sapphire among other things. However probably the most exciting improvement will be a completely new HTML5/jQueryUI admin interface.

The man in charge of designing the new UI is Felipe Skroski, creative director at SilverStripe Limited. With nearly 15 years of experience designing, marketing and project managing for the web, Felipe is well placed to lead the process, so I caught up with him to talk about SilverStripe 3, UI design and the future of content management.

TutorialsUsing Short Codes to embed a YouTube video

28 April 2010 | Daniel Hensby | CMS, Templates, WYSIWYG | Supports v2.4

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SilverStripe 2.4 has introduced shortcodes to the CMS editor. Simply, the CMS user can now add short BBCode style code to the editor area and it can then be replaced using a predefined function. For example [link id=23] could be replaced by the link to Page with an ID of 23. In fact that is exactly how internal links created in the links sidebar work in 2.4, preventing them from breaking when URLs change.

TutorialsUsing Translatable to create a Simple Multilingual Site

9 April 2011 | Darren-Lee | CMS, Site Tree, Translations | Supports v2.4

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I recently had a request to build a multilingual site for an accountant who wanted to enter content in English, Romanian and Russian, and wanted their site visitors to be able to switch languages by clicking on the image of the country flag - and I was pleasantly surprised to learn how quick and easy it is to implement using Silverstripe's Translatable class.

TutorialsWorking with Site Config

19 April 2010 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, Decorators, SiteConfig | Supports v2.4

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One of the great new features of 2.4 is the introduction of a Site Config page. This allows you to put all of those fields which are not page related, such as The sites title, root access permissions and even the current theme. The SiteConfig class is simply a dataobject and so can easily be extended to include fields, relationships and functions which you can then access from anywhere in your site.

TutorialsAdding an image to a blog post using Decorators and the SilverStripe Blog Module

31 May 2011 | Matt Clegg | CMS, Images, Decorators | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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The Silverstripe blog module is great and its made its way into many of my Silverstripe sites. However, for most designers it is missing one vital aspect; an image field for each post. In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to quickly add an image to the blog module without editing any of it's files, allowing hassle free upgrading in future.

TutorialsCustom Login Form with Group Based Redirection

7 April 2009 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, Security, Forms, Member | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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In this tutorial we are going to create a system that allows the Admin to decide which (front-end) page a group of users are redirected to after login. This will be defined via a TreeDropdown for each group in the security section, and can also be set to send them to the admin area via a checkbox.

TutorialsAdd flexible MetaTags control to Pages

15 January 2011 | Martijn van Nieuwenhoven | CMS, DataObjects | Supports v2.4

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When you display DataObjects as if they are a single Page or use a Page Action to display a different view of the same Page, by default your MetaTags are the same as the tags you entered in the CMS.

One way to change the MetaTags dynamicly is to add a lot of template controls to display different MetaTags for each view, but you can get a lot more flexibility by overriding the SiteTree MetaTags function in your Page_Controller.

TutorialsCustom sorting in the CMS SiteTree

14 February 2011 | Marcus Dalgren | CMS, Site Tree, Database | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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Ever wanted to sort some parts of the SiteTree? Well now you can!

SnippetsMaking the Tree Tools sticky for easier editing on large sites

22 March 2011 | Aram Balakjian | CMS, Site Tree, CSS | Supports v2.4

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If you have ever had to edit content on a SilverStripe site with lots of pages, you will have noticed how furstrating it is to have to keep scrolling back up the tree panel to create a page or enable drag and drop re-ordering. Well, here is a handy bit of CSS you can add to keep the tools static, even as you scroll down the tree.

Blog5 Tips for working with a (SilverStripe) Project Manager

29 March 2011 | Kulsoom Kausher | CMS, SilverStripe

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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.

TutorialsAdd a duplicate button to Model Admin

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

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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.

TutorialsAdding Custom Filterable Reports to ReportAdmin

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

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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.

SnippetsAdding a Thumbnail to a DataObjectManager

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

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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

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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.