SilverStripe

PC World SilverStripe tutorial online

Posted by Sigurd on 4 August 2008

The July issue of New Zealand PC World featured a several page tutorial titled Build your own website with SilverStripe. The tutorial demonstrated how to install our software and some basic customisations appropriate for first-time users. For those unable to grab a real magazine, as of today you can read the tutorial online.

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New Windows Installation Screencast

Posted by Sigurd on 26 June 2008

Over 80% of visitors to SilverStripe.com reportedly use Microsoft Windows, so we expect many try to get SilverStripe running on a webserver running locally on your  PC. It's now easier to do this thanks to a new instructional screencast. It explains installing SilverStripe on Windows with the free Windows webserver package, WampServer, much like our written instructions.

The video was produced by Jep Casteline, a SilverStripe developer community member based in the U.S.

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Screencast Tutorials Contributed

Posted by Sigurd on 4 March 2008

One of the tasks offered to high school students earlier this year was to produce screencast tutorials on some of the major things you do with SilverStripe; such as:

Although these tutorials are little more than following our existing text instructions or following common sense, by being a movie, you can sit back and relax to appreciate how easy it is to perform these tasks with SilverStripe. Thanks to Gadulix, David Mestel and Simon Welsh for producing these tutorials.

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1 Comments Tags: documentation, tutorials, ghop

Making free tutorials and demos with Wink

Posted by Sigurd on 16 July 2007

In response to being asked how we created the animated Flash demonstrations showing some off the work done by our Google Summer of Code projects (e.g. Usability work and Google Maps), we thought we'd pass on the knowledge to everyone reading the SilverStripe blog. They've been made using a free program called Wink. It takes lots of screenshots a second then lets you edit the footage, including adding sound and text boxes.

10 tips on using Wink

1. Think through--story card--the basic idea of what you want to do. Keep it simple... if you're trying to convey how cool/flexible/simple something is then every decision and frame in the animation should emphasise that.
2. Capture a rough bash first, review it, then capture your final one. Just like watching a rehersal of yourself doing a presentation, you'll instantly notice where you paused too long, went too quick, missed a step, etc. While you can insert, delete, speed up and slow down the work quite flexibly in Wink, you save a lot of time by having the footage you edit roughly right.
3. Wink lets you delete frames. Delete everything and anything that's a distraction from what you want to convey.
4. Capture a small window.
   1. For "fullscreen", keep it around 800-1000 pixels wide, so that it fits when embedded into webpages, or is legible for projector presentations (reading text of a full-screen screenshot is often hard unless its an intimate crowd). It also keeps the movie full of action.
   2. If you are focused only a certain toolbar or element of an application, chances are you just crop the rest of the application right out, unless it prevents you understand the context of what you're doing. Just keep thinking: simplicity!
5. When capturing work done inside a webbrowser, include the whole window, not just the webpage, so it feels like you're really browsing. This will disclose the address you are visiting, so ensure you don't disclose anything secret through this!
6. The choice of webbrowser and operating system that is shown inside the presentation (e.g. Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Windows vs Mac) is important to certain audiences. You may find it hard to impress web developers by using Internet Explorer!
7. If you have lots of frames that are the same (e.g. where you stop to have the person read a message), set a delay on the first one, and delete the rest. This reduces the animation's file size.
8. Save work often!
9. Save smaller copies off, for your webpages by using  "Project -> Resize". This resizes the  whole project to a small resolution. You can reduce a "full screen" image to almost 50% of the original and still make perfect sense. (Example)
10. By default, Wink captures at 4 frames a second, and plays back at 20. If this is too quick for your viewers to follow what you're doing, reduce the play rate in Project -> Settings.

Watch for a preview of how Wink works and what the results can be...

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Updated tutorials

Posted by Sigurd on 26 February 2007

Andrew has recently finished writing the developer tutorial on building forms and adding a search to your site. We want your feedback on what to write the next tutorials about...

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Holiday reading material

Posted by Ingo on 22 December 2006

Andrew, one of our awesome new interns who joined us with the "Summer of Code"-programme, just finished some tutorials targeted at SilverStripe-beginners. They should give you an insight on creating a basic site and custom pages, and keep you busy learning SilverStripe over the holidays.

We'll have more tutorials available early next year, covering more advanced topics like building and processing forms, architecting complex data-structures, adding search-functionality and customizing the backend.

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3 Comments Tags: tutorial, documentation