About the Book
Create smashing SilverStripe applications by extending modules, creating themes, and adding widgets
Key Features
The first and only book that focuses on extending SilverStripe sites
Step-by-step instructions covering everything you need to know for getting started with making the most of the core functionality, developing modules, creating themes, and adding widgets
Build a fun, real-world example application without breaking a sweat
Reviewed by Sigurd Magnusson, co-founder of SilverStripe, and Ingo Schommer, development manager at SilverStripe
For more recent updates to the code, please visit the author's own repository at Updated Code
Book DescriptionHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, databases, frameworks, CMS, and many other fast-evolving technologies make up modern web-development. How can you effectively create stunning results without being limited by the ease of your tools? That's where SilverStripe CMS comes into play.
SilverStripe, with its simple and intuitive design, is easy to work with and offers numerous customization opportunities. But understanding the options available and getting hands-on with the development techniques is not a piece of cake and certainly not a delightful experience if you're relying on tutorials and documentation available online.
Silverstripe 2.4 Module Extension, Themes, and Widgets: Beginner's Guide takes you through designing catchy and flexible templates, adding powerful features effortlessly, integrating everything into an intuitive backend for easy administration in a simple way, and implementing nifty features with minimal effort. From the most basic to complex forms, from simple to sophisticated pages, you'll learn how to get the most out of your SilverStripe application. SilverStripe keeps everything nice and simple, but if you need to, you can extend and customize every part of it. Graphic examples illustrate the general principle of operation, gradually introducing the finer details needed to get professional results. Common requirements such as image galleries, site search, and more can be reused or extended to fulfill your needs.
The author's experience in designing and developing SilverStripe projects enables him to share insights on creating professional web applications in a clear and friendly way.
You will start off with creating your own templates – covering the general layout, while also taking search engine optimization into consideration. Next, you will look at the logic driving your web application, and the database. Using these basic concepts, you will start building more advanced features. These include the integration of Google Maps, Twitter and Facebook, image galleries, the handling of user-supplied information, your own full-text search, and more. Finally, you'll even translate and internationalize your project. All of this can be easily achieved with SilverStripe.
All of this and quite a bit more is covered by Silverstripe 2.4 Module Extension, Themes and Widgets: Beginner's Guide. Besides general principles, the focus is on reusable code – getting your project started in no time.What you will learn
Convert general HTML and CSS files into SilverStripe templates to create magnificent themes
Create and extend different page types, both in terms of look and functionality
Enable your content editor to efficiently interact with your system, for instance, adding new images to the image gallery
Store user input in the database or send it via e-mail
Translate your page and internationalize it – think about the various date formats, for instance
Implement common tasks, including search functionality, integration of Google Maps or Facebook, and much more
Set up a toolset for common tasks (search functionality, Google Maps, and Facebook)
Develop powerful server-side scripts while catering for security and performance
Who this book is forIf you are a SilverStripe developer and want to learn the nooks and crannies of developing fully-featured SilverStripe web applications with module extensions, themes, and widgets, then this book is for you. Building upon your knowledge of PHP, HTML, and CSS, this book will take you to the next level of SilverStripe development. The book assumes you have basic experience with SilverStripe.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
About the Author :
Philipp Krenn lives in Vienna, Austria and studies software engineering. Besides being a student, he also works as a freelance IT trainer and web developer (mostly using SilverStripe, but also some Drupal, CakePHP, and Smarty). Philipp started using SilverStripe in 2007 while he was one of the students at the Google Summer of Code improving the project. While kicking off the effort to support multiple databases (besides MySQL), he got a good insight into the inner workings of the project. Building on top of that, he became an expert in developing web applications with SilverStripe.
