silverstripe dynamic backend for flexible frontend

Question

I'm searching for a while, but didn't find a practical answer for the following problem: An Articlepage in the Frontend can contain different types of sections. For example a block text section and than a text section with left photo an at the end an wallpaper photo. Now I want to implement this in my backend dynamically, so that I can choose, which type of section and -even more important- how many sections my article should contain.

In my recent project I've solved the problem as an Articlesection with a Dropdown, which contains the different section styles. And one article had xy Artilesections as childpages. In the frontend I included all Childpages of the Article - so to speak the Articlesections, where I've checked with if conditions, which sectionsystyle I have in this Section and here I styled the section as I want. For example Artilce1 has 2 Childpages: Articlesection1 and Artilcesection2. In AS1 I have choose in the dropdown: right text with left photo and check with if conditions, to style the section. The same with AS2, that is for example a wallpaper photo.

This semiprofessional solution worked, but there are some bugs with displaying the Article correct in the backend, because I have to declare the Articlesections as Includes and not native childpages. And in general this doesn't seem like the developers of silverstripe want the users to do it this way.

Are there better ways to implement a dynamically changing backend, so I can decide, which and how many sections I have in the frontend?

Answer 1

Thank you for your reply, but there is a problem, because I don't work a lot with the terminal and the composer. In principle I want to install sheadawsons silverstripe-block. I have installed the composer and run the command: "composer require sheadawson/silverstripe-blocks" it seems like it installed that correctly, because I became no errors, but what then? With dev/build -to refresh the database- happened nothing and the following instructions in the readmy chanced nothing. Should I copy any files in my Sivlerstripe web folder or what else..? I'm a bit desperate, because there is such a poor documentation.

Tank you

Answer 2

Take a look at https://github.com/sheadawson/silverstripe-blocks. There's quite a few addons that offer similar functionality as Blocks such as Elemental. The following blog post might also be useful too - https://www.silverstripe.org/blog/silverstripe-strips/.