Left and Main

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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Today I’m writing you from 30,000 feet, somewhere over upstate New York, in all likelihood, comforted by the nourishing memories of my experience in Chicago with the SilverStripe team. I’m a little out of breath, and quite sweaty, to be honest. I milked my stay so long that I made my flight by literally one [...]

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Yesterday was the day that featured the least SilverStripe focused sessions, so I took the opportunity to wander around and learn about some other products. After my lunch with Dries Buytaert from Drupal on Monday, my interest was piqued about the state of his widely popular CMS in its new form, Drupal 7, or “D7″ in the Drupal community.

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The day kicked off with some opening ceremonies over breakfast in a large function hall in the hotel. Sigurd joined a panel of the founders of the other four CMS’s featured at the conference, including Dries Buytaert from Drupal and Andrew Eddie from Joomla, and the guys from DotNetNuke and Umbraco. I usually enjoy panels for the entertainment value they provide through antagonization and combative barbs, albeit a contrived format, but this one didn’t have any of that. The guys were pretty straight in their answers to questions, and Sig specifically stood out as well-composed and grounded.

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Things have gotten off to a great start here in Chicago. I couldn’t be more excited about the next few days. I got in around 7:00 PM local time and got a text from Sig saying we should meet up after he got back from dinner. I went out and grabbed some dinner myself, and [...]

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I will be attending the CMS Expo in Chicago next week with some of the key players from the SilverStripe team in NZ. This is the first time SilverStripe has had a presence at the CMS Expo, and as one of their most recognized community members, they have elected to give me one of their tickets. I can’t wait!

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I’ve been quite taken with the stir that has been created off my recent preview of the SilverSmith framework for SilverStripe. Naturally, a lot of you have questions, many of which I have answers to, while others are still not known. As you may have noticed, it isn’t often that I comment on my own blog posts, so I thought I would take this opportunity to address some of the most commonly asked questions I have received.

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I’m very happy today to release a preview of a project I have been working on for several months under the working title “SilverSmith.” SilverSmith is a framework for building SilverStripe sites that provides code, template, and content generation tools using a YAML configuration file. I have been using this tool on several projects and it has saved me volumes of production time by cutting out all of the repetitive tasks involved in building a SilverStripe. I’m really excited to share it with the community and get some feedback.

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