Left and Main

The Display Logic module allows you to create a very verbose set of logic that, when evaluated, determines whether the field should show or hide. And it $looks->absolutely(“Beautiful”)->thanksTo(“chainable methods”)!

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One of the wish-list features I hear a lot in the SilverStripe community is the inclusion of a dashboard view in the SilverStripe CMS. It’s easy to talk about, but when it comes down to actually collecting the requirements for such a view, things get complicated. Dashboards are very project-specific, and they are governed by immutable business logic and picky user preferences. It’s not an easy thing to ask the development team to just roll into the core.

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Rebuilding EventCalendar for 3.0 was actually a nourishing and cathartic experience. It felt good to have a reason to clean up and enhance a tool that has offered so much utility to so many users. Along the way, a lot of new features were added — some entirely new ideas, and others improvements on old functionality.

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Meta languages are becoming vastly more popular in web development, and can really give your code a boost. Languages such as LESS, SASS, and CoffeeScript add new features to CSS and JavaScript that aren’t available in their plain state. In fact, the SilverStripe 3 backend was written in SASS to create its rich stylesheets.

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Now that SilverStripe 3 allows custom templating of FormField objects, we can bring a CSS framework such as Twitter Bootstrap into SilverStripe. The Bootstrap Forms module takes advantage of one of the greatest features of the framework — its forms and buttons.

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I was doing work for one my my new clients last week  who needed to add translations to his ModelAdmin-managed DataObjects. The Translatable module was failing him. Enter TranslatableDataObject.

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KickAssets is designed to replace AssetAdmin in the CMS. Rather than offer a whole new LeftAndMain controller, asset management is done in a modal window and allows robust UI features to which we’re all accustomed when managing files including:

KickAssets is designed to replace AssetAdmin in the CMS. Rather than offer a whole new LeftAndMain controller, asset management is done in a modal window and allows robust UI features to which we’re all accustomed when managing files including group selection, drag-and-drop, one-click file renaming, and quick search.

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Whenever I’m working on a project that needs some sort of custom form field, I usually do my best to build it in a really modular way so that it can be reused. If it seems especially useful and I can imagine others enjoying it, I roll it into the great dumping ground we call DataObjectManager.

Today we’re welcoming to new members of the dropdown fields family — LiveDropdownField and FilteredDropdownSet.

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In these next two posts, we’ll take a break from the SilverSmith stuff and talk about what I’ve been doing in the time I haven’t been working on that major project. For those of you who are anxious, don’t worry — next week’s post will be a status update on SilverSmith, including some slick new UI designs that I’ll be sharing with you.

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I do quite a bit of work on multi-lingual sites, and as a polyglot myself, I love the i18n features of SilverStripe. One thing that comes up quite frequently is that a client wants to edit the translations for static text (i.e. the _t() function calls) on the website. While the Translatable module affords content editors the ability to edit dynamic text in the CMS, static text remains buried in cryptic PHP, left editable only by a PHP developer or a very well-instructed content editor.

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