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General Questions /

General questions about getting started with SilverStripe that don't fit in any of the categories above.

Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo, swaiba

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unkleE

Community Member, 3 Posts

27 October 2011 at 11:38pm

Edited: 28/10/2011 12:14am

Hi everyone. I have some familiarity with HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL, etc, but I've never used a CMS before, apart from a Wordpress blog. I have been researching family history, and I want to put the information up on a website for family members to see. The main components of the site would be the details of ancestors - dates of significant events, spouse & children, occupation, etc - which could then be viewed in different pages (e.g. a tree listing, a life chronology, etc). If it wasn't going on the web, I could put it in a simple database.

I could easily do all this in HTML, but some data would need to be entered several times, and additions would have to be done on several pages. So I was wondering if a CMS would do the trick, decided to give it a try and at least learn to use a CMS, and chose SilverStripe to try it.

So I need to be able to set up additional fields in the MYSQL database, which I can do in phpMyAdmin, insert the data, and then be able to draw the data out as I need it on each page. I just want to ask for some guidance on where to start please, specifically:

1. Is SilverStripe suitable to do this?
2. Where would I start looking to get the information I need on how to do it?

Thanks very much.

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swaiba

Forum Moderator, 1899 Posts

28 October 2011 at 4:16am

Hi unkleE,

Welcome to the Forums!

I would yes yes it is possible, I strongly recoemend silverstipes ORM and ModelAdmin a great place to get an example of what can be done very quickly and easiliy can be seen here... http://www.silverstripe.org/making-a-crm-with-modeladmin-in-silverstripe-230/.

then seraching the docs (via google i.e. "silverstipe xxx doc or api") for DataOBject and DataObjectset is then a good move along with the tutorials.

Barry

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unkleE

Community Member, 3 Posts

28 October 2011 at 9:39am

Thanks for the reply.

So, just to confirm, I would have to do some javascript programming to achieve this? I think I had (perhaps naively) thought that since a CMS was (like a blog or forum) based on drawing data from a database to construct pages, this could be done without further scripting. Clearly if I am to set this up I will have to do a lot more reading.

Thanks again.

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Howard

Community Member, 215 Posts

29 October 2011 at 10:56am

Nah you wont need any javascript (unless you want to do fancy things such as AJAX loading or animations etc...)

You would setup your datamodel in SilverStripe then most likely use ModelAdmin to add and edit all your database entries. Then to display them you would need to create the template code which is pretty similar to HTML.

To get your head around how SilverStripe works I would recommend the tutorials particularly for you tutorial 5 as that goes through a similar situation to what you want.

Hope this helps,
Howard

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unkleE

Community Member, 3 Posts

29 October 2011 at 4:11pm

Thanks Howard and Barry, I feel a little relieved - javascript is not one of my strengths, to say the least! I'll have a look at the tutorials. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.