First off - generally very impressed with Silverstripe, one of very few "true" CMS that actually have data modelling and a clean separation from template layer, so congrats to the developers.

Basically we are considering rebuilding a site which has a huge and complex database, and I'm not convinced it's a realistic proposition to try to migrate the whole thing to Silverstripe data model. However, if I could utilise the excellent Silverstripe API to essentially create CRUD interface to an external database that would be great.

Is this a realistic idea? For example, create a page that lists thousands of records from external DB in a grid in the same format as would be displayed with ModelAdmin? And then allow editing of individual records in style of Silverstripe but with data going back and forth to external DB.

Many thanks in advance.

Thanks for the CVS import link, might be an option even though our DB is very big and complex.

However, what I'm really interested in is the general idea of having custom CMS pages, how to have forms, list data, how to go about getting a form to post to the back-end, process, and then return some data back to the page etc.

I suppose it's as much about understanding the MVC and executionj pipeline so I can learn how to add these custom pages. We would need to add a lot of custom pages to match up to the functionality of current homebrew CMS.

Are there good tutorials that cover custom CMS pages that aren't jsut about plain model CRUD? Something to show how to create a form, post the data to a controller etc?