This comment is based on my personal findings so may differ from your experiences.
Information in the Silverstripe documentation, other than in the tutorials, in view of what a cms covers, has to be very concise. As such it is usually insufficient for the purpose of equiping a developer, who is new to Silverstripe, to actually write code to extend functionality. If the information is not in a tutorial, the page in the Silverstripe topics is sometimes extremely brief. This can leave the reader wondering what is involved and what needs to be done in terms of implementation. For me I found the following was helpful.
- (a) Changing and chopping code in the tutorials and then seeing what happened helped me to see the significance of different code.
- (b) Books - there are currently 2 books - the complete guide based on Version 2.3 and the module extension/themes book based on 2.4. I found the latter book more suited to my way of learning and is of course more up to date.
- (c) The internet for forum comments and tutorials Googling often locates useful articles in the Silverstripe forums. Locating a particular forum comment this way obviously depends on the comment existing in the Google index. However I found the search facility in the forum itself to be quite lacking and, without the ability to search on phrases, throws up much material which is not relevant. Perhaps I am not using the facility correctly.
- (d) Comments in PHP class files added to the Sapphire and cms folders.
I am new to Silverstripe and have been learning Silverstripe on and off for the past 3 weeks. I first of all concentrated on the Silverstripe documentation and the tutorials in particular. I think tutorials 1 and 2 give a good grounding. I have yet to really get into the remaining tutorials. However I find I can only read so much before things stop sinking in. In order to augment the learning process, I then started to create a real site for a client where I had to work to a specification. As expected I found things which were not in the core code and was unable to locate exactly what I wanted in existing modules. I then supplemented reading the Silverstripe documentation with material found by googling and reading the books.
Today I discovered I could improve my understanding of how to extend code by spending more time reading comments in the PHP classes (see (d) above). Of course, browsing code and reading comments is a patently obvious way of learning how code works. However as a programmer who has so far avoided writing and extended classes and often finds following such code difficult, I have spent very little time browsing the code base during the time I have been looking at Silverstripe. Nevertheless I think my progress in getting things done would have been quicker if I had put more effort into doing this before today.
