SSbits - The one-stop SilverStripe learning resource

Site of the Month Winner - January 2012

Aram Balakjian — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Votes are in! And the winner of January's SSbits Site Of The Month is.....

DataObject as Pages: The Module

Aram Balakjian — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a while since we published the DataObject as Pages series of tutorials, which have proved to be particularly popular. At Aab Web we use those techniques regularly as a way to allow our clients to mange large amounts of flat content or content that is distributed in multiple places throughout a site. Although the final implementations in each project are often varied and bespoke, they all start with the basics outlined in those tutorials, so it made sense for us to build a starting point to work from (and include some more complex features at the same time). That starting point is this module, catchily entitled: DataObject as Pages.

Site of the Month - Vote Now!

Aram Balakjian — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a while, but Site of the month is finally back and there are some great sites to choose from!

Setting and displaying custom messages in your site

Shea — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

October Site of the Month Winner!

Aram Balakjian — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The Votes are in! And the winner of October's SSbits Site Of The Month is.....

October Site of the Month - Vote Now!

Aram Balakjian — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100

It's time to vote on your favourite of this months 5 SilverStripe website nominations!

Adding Custom Filterable Reports to ReportAdmin

Craig Ballantyne — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Enter now! - October Site of the Month

Aram Balakjian — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Enter your site for a chance to be in the final 5 vote off! Voting will begin on the 12th of October.

Enter Your Site >

Automatically Redirect to the first Child Page without a Redirector Page

ekersten — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Inserting Javascript into a DOM Popup

Gordon Anderson — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

August Site of the Month Winner!

Aram Balakjian — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The Votes are (finally) in! And the winner of September's SSbits Site Of The Month is.....

Vote Now! - August Site of the Month

Aram Balakjian — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Here they are, 5 great SilverStripe sites for you to vote for your favourite!

Sorting on a related DataObject in ModelAdmin

Simon Erkelens — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Highlighting Query Text in Search Results

Pete Bacon Darwin — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

June Site of the Month Winner

Aram Balakjian — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The Votes are in! And the winner of July's SSbits Site Of The Month is.....

June Site of the Month - Vote Now!

Aram Balakjian — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Some fantastic and innovative sites this month, but which one is your favourite?

An alternative to _ss_environment Files for easy 'Per Environment' Configuration

Pete Bacon Darwin — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Although Silverstripe has a mechanism for alternative configuration per environment, using the ConfigureFromEnv() method in your mysite/_config.php file, it has its limitations and I have often read people complaining about it. Here is a simple yet powerful alternative to using SilverStripe environment files.

Book Review: SilverStripe 2.4 - Module Extension, Themes and Widgets

Aram Balakjian — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0100

For a while now the only printed documentation available for SilverStripe has been the official book which, although excellent if you are willing to put the time into completing it, is now slightly outdated having been written for SilverStripe v2.3. Enter a new book written by Phillip Krenn and published by Packt; SilverStripe 2.4 - Module Extension, Themes and Widgets. Despite the slightly misleading title, the book takes you through the entire process of building a relatively complex site for a local bar by extending the core functionality as well as using various Modules and Widgets along the way.

May Site of The Month Winner!

Aram Balakjian — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The Votes are in! And the winner of June's SSbits Site Of The Month is.....

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

Matt Clegg — Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.