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SilverStrap

A SilverStripe theme based on the Bootstrap front-end framework. It should work out of the box on basic sites, so you can drop it into your themes folder, enable it (either programmatically by using SSViewer::set_theme('silverstrap') or by switching it in the CMS) and check how your new site look.

The master-1.0 branch is in maintenance mode and it is based on the deprecated (and no longer officially supported) Bootstrap version 2. The master and dev branches, released as silverstrap-2.x.x, are based on Bootstrap 3.

Installation

With composer:

composer require entidi/silverstrap

Without composer, download the tarball and unpack it under the themes directory.

Features

  • Composer ready.
  • No dependency on SASS/LESS/whatever. This is a plain SilverStripe theme: just unpack the tarball under themes/ or install via composer and enable it.
  • Out of the box support for silverstripe blog and comments module.
  • Out of the box support for dynamically generated tables of contents. If you install the silverstripe-autotoc module, silverstrap will generate on the fly the table of contents of the current page (if possible) and it will present it in a .navlist on the right side. Your site will gain table of contents for free.
  • Proper support for pages nested at arbitrary levels.
  • Quite extensible and customizable. This can be done by overriding the default implementation instead of editing it: check the section Overriding silverstrap for further details.
  • Different components inclusion methods. By default external components (such as JQuery and Bootstrap) are fetched from the jsdelivr CDN network but a couple of alternate methods are provided. See the section External dependencies for details.

External dependencies

Silverstrap depends on some external project:

  • Bootstrap, the main dependency;
  • JQuery, needed by Bootstrap;
  • Colorbox, for zooming images;
  • Fotorama, for photo galleries.

Colorbox and Fotorama are not strictly required but are useful when silverstrap is used in conjunction with other modules. In any case, all those components are included out of the box by the base templates.

By default the resources are fetched from the jsdelivr CDN network (see the SilverstrapJsdelivr.ss template) but a couple of alternatives are included:

  • SilverstrapOffline.ss fetches the resources directly from the filesystem, making the site usable when disconnected from internet;
  • SilverstrapModular.ss fetches the resources from jsdelivr too but it is modular, e.g. every dependency has its own template.

Depending on your requirements, you can prefer one of these methods instead of the default one. If this is the case, just override Silverstrap.ss to include the offline or the modular version. Consult the next session to know how to override templates.

Overriding silverstrap

Let's say you want to work off-line so you need to not depend on a CDN, as required out of the box by silverstrap. You can just modify silverstrap/templates/Includes/Silverstrap.ss and change the code to include SilverstrapOffline instead of SilverstrapJsdelivr. Although this works, it will change the silverstrap directory tree... and this is very bad: you'll loose the possibility to update silverstrap with a git pull or by leveraging composer.

Instead you can use the SilverStripe template trick used by the silverstripe-treeish project, i.e. override any template without touching a single byte of the original folder:

  1. install silverstrap under themes (as usual): composer will do this for you;
  2. create a silverstrap_Page directory at the same level of the silverstrap directory: any page of type Page (hence the whole site) will look for templates in this directory first;
  3. copy any template you want to override from silverstrap to silverstrap_Page, retaining its relative path;
  4. modify in any way you like whatever under silverstrap_Page;
  5. flush and test.

In the case outlined by this section, you can copy Silverstrap.ss into silverstrap_Page/templates/Includes/Silverstrap.ss and change its content to:

   <% include SilverstrapOffline %>

This trick can be used to override pretty much everything, such as to enhance the default page template, to set the favicon, to add or remove a feature or to put a watermark on every page. The templates in silverstrap are quite fragmented to make the overriding easier. For example, silverstripe-cerulean is an extension to Silverstrap that uses this very same approach to override the default plain Bootstrap theme with the Cerulean one.

Accessing parent pages

The default implementation provides support for custom nested levels in .navbar but does not provide a way to access the parent pages, as commonly provided by vanilla SilverStripe. In other words, if you have subpages under yoursite/contacts/ you can access them but there is no easy way to access yoursite/contacts/ (apart from directly write the URL).

To alleviate the problems a Sitemap of the first two levels is put by default before the footer. This does not resolve the problem for further levels though.

To be able to access the parent pages directly from the .navbar you can override NavbarSubmenu.ss and add a fixed item at the beginning of the <ul> list, right before looping on $Children. The NavbarSubmenuAccessible.ss file does exactly that, so you should use it instead of the original template. By leveraging the override trick explained in the previous section, you can accomplish this by creating themes/silverstrap_Page/templates/Includes/NavbarItem.ss under your website directory with the following content:

<% if $Children %><% if $Parent %>
    <% include NavbarSubmenuAccessible %><% else %>
    <% include NavbarMenu %><% end_if %>
<% else %>
    <% include NavbarLink %>
<% end_if %>

Support

For bug reports or feature requests, please use the dedicated development tracker.