kelpdesign » SilverStripe

Housemart

William — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:45:17 +0000

Housemart is a new Queenstown business providing property rental services to long and short term tenants. We built them a system that manages all their properties online so that they can keep up with the growing demand of people coming to Queenstown looking for accommodation.

We integrated the 3rd party REST Property Management system by Rockend to supply the website with the latest properties.

Our main focus on this website was, apart from a clean user interface

seemless integration with REST

super fast loading

modular design

standards compliance and highest level of accessiblity

We based this project on Silverstripe Opensource CMS using Page Elements and hosting it on our Server at RimuHosting

Page Elements to make websites manageable

tim — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:45:15 +0000

Its been a while since I started writing a plugin for Silverstripe CMS: “Page Elements“.

I felt myself running into the same problems every time when we build websites, no matter which CMS we chose:

Multiple columns and content areas on websites are difficult to manage

WYSIWYG editors leave little room anything else other than formatted text and images, such as flash elements, forms etc

So what I wanted was:

An interface that is fun to use when dealing with complex layouts
No more limitation for layouts
Straight forward extendability
Re-usability of code and components
Seamless integration in existing CMS Interface an Workflow.

These were my key requirements to start with.

So I started putting these Ideas into code during quiet times in the office and sleepless nights.

Even though, as some of you might know, most parts of the Silverstripe back end system are using prototype as native javascript framework, I decided to use jQuery and the jQuery UI to power this interface.

In a nutshell it lets you define areas in the page template (“Slot”) where blocks with certain content & functionality (“Element”) can be inserted and rearranged.

Elements typically have two main interfaces:

Input – what the webmaster accesses
Output – what is shown on the website

My aim was to optimize both:

Provide the webmaster with a clean and simple, but powerful interface.

Based on rules of accessibility, w3c guidelines etc – generate the html output that is, how it should be: clean.

Check it out! http://www.page-elements.com/

LWB site goes live in time for their 200th issue!

William — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:34:29 +0000

We have just completed the first stage of the new LWB website. The site has been developed on the SilverStripe Open Source CMS framework. This is a standards compliant CMS made in New Zealand. The site gives you a chance to get involved in public discussion; comments can be made on Editorials, The Truth and the Whinges, you can also leave a comment on the new site if you want too.

Keep an eye on the site as we make further improvements over the forthcoming weeks.