Hi,

We're recommending SS to one of our clients, but they would like confirmation that it can handle a few basic requirements. I'm pretty hopeful all the answers are going to be 'yes' - especially as we have PHP developers on hand, but not having much (any!) SS experience, I wondered if anyone can help? These are the requirements I've been asked to confirm:

1. Content pages can have three column layout
2. Can have dynamically-driven on-page subnavigation with control over whether sibling pages, child pages or both are displayed
2. System supports creation of re-usable components that can be dropped into selected pages
3. Can create more than one editable region per page
4. Clients can generate their own forms (with sufficient training)

Many thanks

Hi KT,

1. Thats up to your HTML and CSS. There are no layout layout limitations with SS.

2. Yep. Out of the box.

3. Widgets are your friend here I think. http://doc.silverstripe.org/widgets

4. Yep - http://doc.silverstripe.org/getcmsfields?s[]=content&s[]=area

5. There is a user forms module. http://silverstripe.org/user-forms-module/

Exactly the answer I was hoping for! That's great, much obliged Taffy.

Regarding the re-usable components: Usually a Widgets holds its own content. So if you have a Widget where you can enter some text, then this text will be unique for every Widget instance (i.e. not reusable).
But there's an easy workaround for this:
1) Create a custom DataObject that represents a content-component (could be composed of a Title, Text and an Image).
2) Manage your content-components at a central location (has_many content-components). The HomePage or SiteConfig is probably a good place for that. Use the DataObjectManager module for content-component CRUD. Here's a good tutorial that will help you getting started using SiteConfig: http://ssbits.com/2-4-working-with-siteconfig/
3) In the widget, simply allow the users to select the desired content-component from a dropdown (has_one content-component).

This will effectively allow your users to place the same content-component on multiple pages. Changing the component itself will change all "instances" of this component as well.

thanks banal!

Actually for more than one content field, if you are lazy, there is a page elements module @ http://www.page-elements.com/