TutorialsControllers Instead of Pages

25 January 2011 | Ty Barho | Templates, URLs, Controllers | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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SilverStripe is great for working with Pages in the CMS.  But what if you need functionality without the need for content or all the "data fluff," like in Aram's tutorial about user registration and profile editing.  Well, believe it or not, SilverStripe is a pretty solid MVC platform, even if you're working outside of the page data objects.  It took me a while to understand how to implement true-ish MVC in SilverStripe, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share.

TutorialsRegistering Users and allowing them to edit their details

20 December 2010 | Aram Balakjian | Security, Templates, Forms, Member, Decorators

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These days many sites require users to register to get full functionality (SSbits included!). This is something that although not avaiable out of the box in SilverStripe is quite strait forward and a great way to gain a better understanding of both the Member and Form systems. In this tutorial we are going to create a simple registration form and a page for users to then edit their details.

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.

TutorialsPaginating a filtered DataObjectSet

25 October 2010 | Marcus Dalgren | DataObjects, Templates | Supports v2.4

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If you have ever tried to paginate a DataObjectSet that has been customised since fetching it from the database you will have descovered that it simply doesn't work. This short tutorial provides some great code to resolve this problem and paginate to your hearts content!

TutorialsDataObjects as Pages - Part 1: Keeping it Simple

4 October 2010 | Aram Balakjian | Site Tree, DataObjects, Templates, URLs | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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In this two part tutorial, I am going to show you how to display DataObjects as if they were pages. This is often very useful for times when you have lots of items that don't warrant full site tree objects, but do need to be displayed on their own on the site. In this first part displaying Staff Members we are going to keep it simple, using a Data Object Manager to manage our Staff Members and referring to their ID in the URL. Later in part 2, we will see how to use ModelAdmin to manage a Search Engine friendly product catalogue.

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.

TutorialsEmbed flash content using SWFObject

3 December 2009 | Roman Schmid | CMS, Templates, JavaScript | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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There are numerous ways to embed flash content into your SilverStripe Website. A commonly used and very flexible method to embed flash is provided by the SWFObject script. In this snippet I'll show you how to create a custom FlashPage that will contain flash content, embedded using SWFObject.

TutorialsUsing jQuery for form validation

13 November 2009 | Aram Balakjian | Templates, Forms, JavaScript

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As you may have noticed, SilverStripes built in form validation is based on Prototype and is pretty limited. It also means that even though you might be using jQuery for other things on your site, you will still need to load prototype.js and all the associated files that SilverStripe requires for it's built in JavaScript form validation.

TutorialsMaking a hierarchy aware templating system

21 September 2009 | Marcus Dalgren | Site Tree, Templates

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Something that has been bothering me when building larger sites with SilverStripe is that I often find myself creating new classes not to add functionality, but to just get a new template.

You can set separate templates for different actions manually but that's not what I want in this case, I want different templates for the same action on the same class.

After thinking about this for awhile I came up with a two part solution and the first part is to make the template choosing aware of the Sitetree hierarchy.

TutorialsUsing a Thickbox Modal Window with AJAX

11 September 2009 | dalesaurus | Templates, JavaScript | Supports v2.3

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Thickbox is a great javascript plugin to jQuery that you can use to create modal windows within SilverStripe pages.  You can de-clutter your interfaces and re-use small snippets of common functions when you add in AJAX.  Before we begin there is a little homework:

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:

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.

TutorialsWorking with banners

13 July 2009 | Nick Jacobs | Images, Templates | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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Most of the sites I work on are for corporate/business clients and there is not typically a lot of fancy motion graphics going on. I do like to ensure there is some dynamic element going on, just to provide a bit of interest and one of the simplest ways to achieve this is by some variation of the random/rotating banners scenario. Of course this could equally apply to other parts of the page, not just banner graphics.