hello,

i am attempting to take an existing website and recreate it using silverstripe. i'm relatively new to the programming side of it so this may be a simple problem that im completely overlooking the simple solution to.

i have a StaffPage (same as EmployeePage) which contains a the following:

------
Employee Name
Email: employee_email@whatever.com
<several paragraphs of bio text>
------

my StaffPage has input fields for the "Content" (bio text), "Name" and "Email". some of the employees do not have an email address and i would like to make that part of the html conditional based on whether information is in the field

the code for my StaffPage template is:

------------------------

<% if Menu(2) %>
<% include Menu3 %>
<% end_if %>
	<div id="StaffPhoto">
		$Photo.SetWidth(340)
	</div>
	<h1 id="pagetitle">$Title</h1>
	<a href="mailto:$Email">Email: $Email</a>
	$Content

-----------------------

i have tried adding:

-----------------------

<% if $Email %>
	<a href="mailto:$Email">Email: $Email</a>
<% end_if %>

-----------------------
but the syntax there is incorrect and gives an error

can anyone tell me how to correctly do this? or point me in the right direction? i have tried searching for more help on conditions but couldnt seem to find any in-depth documentation

thanks in advance!

what you have to do is define a function in your pagetype.php file that returns true or false if the email exists for example

function hasEmail() {
if ($this->Email == "") then return false;
else
return true;
}

then in the template you call the function <% if hasEmail %>

There might be another way but I have done a similar thing this way and it works.

Regards

Trevor

that worked! thanks very much trevor