Silverstripe on PHP Boy Scout

Free Open Source Website for Scouts

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a Scout Leader for a few years now and the District I work within have very little by way of internet presence. As a bit of a pet project I started building a simple Scout based website for them to use.

Its nothing too fancy, I created a simple module and theme for the Silverstripe CMS and have now put it into a GitHub Repository to share with the wider scouting community.

I chose Silverstripe because of the speed with which I could develop something usable as well as providing a super simple management interface that can be handled by users of all skill levels.

The module itself extends some very common extensions available for the CMS and makes them scout focused. Features include.

Customisable theme
Multi tiered Event Calendars
Customisable Group/Section Pages
Dynamic Forms
A reliable News/Blog system

These are just a few of the most obvious features and hopefully I will continue to add more.

I’m also offering to help any Scout Groups/Districts/Counties if they are wanting to use these modules and get their sites built and up and running for them free of charge.

If you want to take a look at the code and have a play yourselves you can find it online at

If you want to get in touch or would like more information about having a website built for you please fill in the form below.

[contact-form to='matt@phpboyscout.uk’ subject=‘Request for Scouts Website’][contact-field label=‘Name’ type=‘name’ required=‘1’/][contact-field label=‘Email’ type=‘email’ required=‘1’/][contact-field label=‘Scout Group/District/County’ type=‘url’ required=‘1’/][/contact-form]

Creating Custom Routes in Silverstripe 3.1

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We wanted to create a Route to our custom Products Controller in our products module for SilverStripe 3.1, such as: “http://www.examplesite.com/products/”

However looking at the Controller Documentation it was not clear how to create a route without an Action being supplied. In our example above the action is not specified, as we just want to use ‘view’.

Solution:

Create a /_config/routes.yml file containing the following:

---
Name: productsroutes
After: 'framework/routes#coreroutes'
---
Director:
 rules:
 'product': 'Product_Controller'
---

The above will redirect any Url that starts with “/product” to our Product_Controller. Note that everything after the rule, so after “/product”, is used in the next bit for matching.

Now we need to add private static $url_handers to Product_Controller to match our path, so in this example we need to match “$Slug!” which will match “”. Note the ! means the slug is required. Of course we want to direct this to a specific action, in this case “view”, this gives us:

private static $url_handlers = array(
 '$Slug!' => 'view',
);

Now just add “view” to the $allow_actions and add the “view” function. This gives the final Product_Controller as follows:

class Product_Controller extends Page_Controller
{
 private static $url_handlers = array(
 '$Slug!' => 'view',
 );

 private static $allowed_actions = array('view');

 public function view(SS_HTTPRequest $request)
 {
 // Your action code goes here
 return $this->render();
 }
}

Handy note:

You can put ?debug_request=1 on the end of your URL to see how it determines which Controller to use.

Disabling Cache in Silverstripe 3.1

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

While working with Silverstripe we found ourselves having to run “?flush=1” a lot to clear the Cache. To switch it off, while you work, add the following to your mysite/_config.php:

SS_Cache::set_cache_lifetime('default', -1, 100);

Set up SilverStripe 3.1 using only Git (No Composer)

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We recently tried to use composer to set up SilverStripe 3.1, but ended up with a dependency nightmare. In order to work around this we decided to make use of Git submodules.

First set up your Git repository and run:

git init

Next set up a site directory for the code inside your Git repository. Then navigate to SilverStripe Installer in your browser and Download a copy. Extract files, and copy contents to site folder. Now we need to add the CMS and Framework. Navigate in a browser to the Git Hub repositories for CMS and Framework. Now copy the HTTPS clone URL for each project and run the following, to add these as Git sub modules.

git submodule add https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-framework.git site/framework
git submodule add https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-cms.git <path-to-site>site/cms

Now delete mysite/_config.php and load the site. Follow the normal install instructions displayed and you will have a running version of SilverStripe 3.1