Welcome to SSbits! Here you will find tutorials, code snippets and other web related goodies all geared towards the fantastic SilverStripe CMS. Our aim is to help people get up to speed with the great features of SilverStripe even quicker than we did and hopefully provide some inspiration along the way!

Tutorial: Building a Theme from a Static Template

In this tutorial we are going to create a SilverStripe theme from a static template. The template is exclusive to SSbits and is free to use as you please.

Blog: An Example CSS Framework

A CSS framework is a set of pre-prepared style sheets that can be used as a starting point for any project. Using a framework allows you to skip all the tedious parts of getting the basics right and lets you start working on what makes your site different from the beginning.

Snippet: Get Errors E-mailed to you

If your site is live it means you are probebly not getting errors reported in the view, so it's handy to have them emailed to you so you can still debug.

Add this line to your mysite/_config.php file and expect some mail!

mysite/_config.php
if(Director::isLive()) Debug::send_errors_to("your@email.com");

Tutorial: Create a Static, CMS editable sidebar

When making a site you will often want a block of content on multiple pages that remains the same (static) yet is also editable from the CMS. For example a 'Common Links' sidebar or a footer etc. In this tutorial we will create a sidebar block with various types of content that can easily be extended to fit with your needs.

Snippet: Dynamic Year Function

Using this function you can create a dynamic year in the footer of your site. Simply add the function to your Page_Controller class and use $Year in your footer template.
function Year(){ $StartDate = "2009"; if($StartDate == Date("Y")){ return $StartDate; } else{ return $StartDate . " - " . Date("Y"); } }

This will output "2009" for this year and then "2009-2010" next year etc.

Snippet: Resizing an image in a custom <img> tag

You can resize images from within the template quite easily. Using an image defined as $Image1 in the class this is how we would create a few different resizes of it.

<% control Image1 %> <% control CroppedImage(200,200) %> <img src="$URL" alt="A cropped image" /> <% end_control %> <% end_control %>