Thanks, Johnny!

FYI, the scenario you're describing only happens with a HasMany or ManyMany ComplexTableField (or a DataObjectManager, for that matter). It's designed to give the user the ability to syndicate content to an unlimited number of areas on the site without having to duplicate anything. We use it all the time for sidebar items, for instance. On a given page, one can choose from the world of all sidebar content which ones will display.

For most cases, though, a plain CTF or DOM does fine.

But let us never speak of ComplexTableFields again! :)

@aram, unclecheese
yep, me too, I've found all sorts of uses for DataObjectManager, and it seems to find it's way into every project in some form or other. I'll certainly participate in the forum 'petition' :)

@unclecheese - Hi, did you ever get to post your CustomSearchForm snippet?

Woo-hoo! Alright! Bring it on, guys!

That's right! I forgot to post that. I've put up the tutorial in this forum here:

http://www.silverstripe.org/all-other-modules/show/259512#post259512

email feedback from silverstripe staff arrived today, assuring the need for a very own dataobjectmanager forum will be raised in the next team meeting early next week.

i'd also like to mention that as enhancement for complex table fields is a major issue for 2.3.4 (see http://open.silverstripe.org/ticket/3476), so dataobjectmanager might be the solution to this.

@UncleCheese
I encountered a little bug today: after searching on a phrase including double quotation marks, the searchbox doesn't function anymore. Clicking 'refresh' on the filter after that leads me to my site's homepage. Tested on multiple browsers. Might it be that $_REQUEST items are not properly sanitized? (I was thingking about the pagesize as well...)

Couple of questions for UC, or anyone else with experience:

1. I have a page that uses the SimpleHTMLEditorField and am having issues with users who copy and paste in content. This issue also applies to the CMS, but the CMS has a 'paste as plain text' option. Is it possible to add this option to the SHEF. Or is there a way to create new DataObjects using a more standard CMS view rather than one of the popups?

2. Is there a possibility that future versions of ImageDataObjectManager could support other image types than JPG out of the box. I saw a forum post with a fix, but I'd like to make as few changes to the core module as I can, so that on future updates I don't have to chase down all the fixes I did in previous versions. For the time on my custom page types I'm using the FileDataObjectManager as it is more than good enough for our current needs. Perhaps a nice way to do this would be to use setAllowedFileTypes, or can one already do that?

I'd like to throw another big Thank You out to Uncle Cheese. The DOM and related modules make the end user experience using our sites thousands of times better than they could be. And the coding is pretty darn easy too. We took a very complicated Wordpress site with a ton of customizations, and no end user controls in the admin panel, and converted it to SS using DOM, and I, by myself, was able to do all the coding and templates in under 2 days, all while working on other projects as well. Just about everything is now controllable from the backend in some hacked together javascripts running on the site. Every time I figure out how to do something new in SS it usually floors the rest of the team I'm on, and it almost always involves something UC has made possible.