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!

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.

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.

TutorialsCustomising the WYSYWIG editor (TinyMCE)

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

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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.

TutorialsSorting on a related DataObject in ModelAdmin

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

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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

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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.

TutorialsAdding an Email Field to the Page Comment Form

4 February 2010 | Dan Rye | Forms, Comments | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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SilverStripes comment system is great when you don't need anything more than the standard feilds, but as soon as you need some extra functionality, things get a little complicated. In this tutorial we will be adding an Email field to the comment form.

TutorialsAutofill MetaDescription and MetaKeywords on page save

28 July 2009 | Martijn van Nieuwenhoven | CMS, Templates | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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Most of my customers don't want to add meta info manually, so I add an onBeforeWrite() function to update the Meta Description field and count the keyword density of the content with a separate function and add these keywords to the Meta Keywords fields when a page is saved.

In my humble SEO opinion every page needs an unique Meta Description. Keywords seems to be less important for search engines, but why not add them automatically anyway! The function counts how many times each word exist in the Content, order the words by occurrence and glues the words to a comma separated string. In this function only words with more then 4 characters are counted, but you can adjust that if you like.

TutorialsUsing a nested controller for generic URL handling

1 February 2011 | Marcus Dalgren | URLs, Controllers | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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In this tutorial we'll be taking a look at SilverStripes nested controller concept and how you can use it in your own projects. Keep in mind though that this tutorial is probably for the more advanced users and for those who whish to learn abit more about how SilverStripe works. I will be referencing Controllers Instead of Pages by Ty Barho and the nested controller we'll be building will be for handling his scenario.

I have also taken the liberty of including a zip file which contains all the code examples from Tys tutorial + the new controller and the new URL rule for it.

TutorialsCreating and deleting dataobjects from the front end

29 June 2012 | stallain | DataObjects, Relations | Supports v2.4

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One of my clients wanted a clear interface from which he could easily attach downloadable files to some pages of his site. Instead of using modelAdmin and granting him an access to Silverstripe admin panel, I chose to create a front-end page showing a simple upload form, a list of the files previously uploaded to the server, and a delete button for each of them.

TutorialsRotating and Greyscaling Images using GD and Decorators

8 December 2010 | Aram Balakjian | Images, Decorators | Supports v2.4

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Some of you might have noticed that SilverStripe's GD class has a couple of interesting looking functions, namely rotate($angle) and greyscale($Red, $Green, $Blue). However it was never quite clear how to use these functions (at least not to me anyway!). So after a bit of trial and error, it turns out it's pretty simple to achieve by decorating the image class and adding a couple of simple functions...

TutorialsEmbedding a contact form in a sidebar

28 October 2010 | Frank Mullenger | Templates, Forms, SiteConfig | Supports v2.4

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In this tutorial we are going to add a form to a sidebar that can be included on any page on a website. You will be able to set whether to show the Form on a particular page via checkbox in the CMS. The work is based on the Working with SiteConfig and Creating a Simple Contact Form tutorials.

TutorialsCreate a front end theme switcher

17 August 2009 | Martijn van Nieuwenhoven | Templates, Forms, Themes | Supports v2.3

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So you wanna make a demo site for your customers to show all your template skills in one site. A simple theme switcher can come in handy. It's quite easy to implement this. 

First add two new functions to your Page_Controller class: