SilverStripe News Module

SilverStripe News Module is a module we made to simplify managing news and blogs for a website. Also we wanted to solve many issues we had to solve for our clients when making news sections. We have tried to solve a few problems we see with the other modules in actions. A few of them are 

• Speed with processing tags and archives
• Proper Categorisation of articles 
• Types of contents like Blog, Events, News, Images, SlideShows etc 
• Hard to manage news with the site tree 
• Friendly urls for tags and categories
• To build a robust search functionality for news items in the CMS

We started with extending page objects to create two page types called NewsIndex and NewsPost, and made extensions for SiteTree to return tags, categories, to be used on any site. 

One of the main features is that all the news items has to be added via a model admin. Model admin is a powerful admin interface in SilverStripe which allow managing data. We extended the site tree and provides a user with a link to open model admin to make news for a holder page. Check the screenshot below.

Below is another screenshot of the News Admin. 

The news admin provides a search form to filter through the news articles and gives a lot of options to search with. This is very helpful when working with sites which has loads of pages to manage. Articles can be categorised using a new data object called News Category, apart from this articles supports tags as well. 

The module is added onto packagist to use via composer, and check the git repo for more details on how to use the module.

https://github.com/SilverStripers/silverstripe-news