I'm new to SilverStripe and I was immediately hooked. I've extensively tested practically all Open Source CMS (MODx, Joomla, Mambo, Textpattern, Typo3, TYPOlight, Drupal, Expression Engine, CMS Made Simple,...), and I must say that SilverStripe is hands the down the most user-friendly OS CMS out there. Most OS CMS only have the developer in mind, but seem to forget that it's the user who has to work with them. I love the way how the SS back-end is user-centric and very user-friendly, while the developer can configure and extend the CMS with nicely structured code.

Up until now I've worked with and developed for a custom built CMS. It's built around the concept of a page which can contain multiple items. Each item has a title, an intro text field, a text field, a start and end date, can have multiple media files (pictures, documents,...) linked,...

The page itself also has a title obviously, and can be configured by the developer. He or she can limit the number of media files that can be linked to an item, how images from the media files should be resized (width and/or height), how thumbnails of these images should be resized (width and/or height), how much items a specific page can contain,... Each page can also use a specific Smarty template for the front-end, and of course multiple pages can use the same template.

As you might see, this concept more or less resembles a blog page. Since SS already contains a blog module, I was wondering if this concept can be translated to SilverStripe too? So that a user can select an "Item page" as a page type, which can than have multiple items linked to it, just like the blog module. Each item can than have the same options as an default page (title, text field,...). An item can be called as a separate page in the website, or with all of it's sibling on the parent page.

Can someone put me on track as to how this can be implemented in SS?

So that a user can select an "Item page" as a page type, which can than have multiple items linked to it, just like the blog module. Each item can than have the same options as an default page (title, text field,...)

If I understand correctly thats exactly what SilverStripe does? Look at the second tutorial - you create a 'StaffPage' - you can define the fields for a staffpage - image field for photos, you could add more text fields etc etc.. Then you can define a StaffPage template which gives you total design flexibility over that page!

An item can be called as a separate page in the website, or with all of it's sibling on the parent page.

If you create a StaffPage page type in the CMS Site Tree it will be a page.. And by standard what we recommend is that if you have something like a StaffPage, you create a StaffHolder page type and then have StaffPages as the children of the StaffHolder.

So on the StaffHolder html template you can use

<% control Children %>
 $Title
 $Content
 $AnyOtherField on StaffPage you need
<% end_control %>

Which will generate a list of the StaffPages, Again tutorial 2 would probably be better to read then trying to understand it here