WordPress is wonderful for its core functionality – blogging. And it’s pretty good for other stuff too, but sometimes it takes a little shoe-horning to get it working like a real CMS. I recently used the Advanced Custom Fields plugin and it’s excellent. As a developer I can set up fields that only apply to specific pages, and then use those fields in the themes I develop. My clients then have a simple, easy to use interface for entering single lines of text, or selecting images, or… basically anything you can think of. To make it really powerful, you need …
Dynamic Font/Image Replacement in Silverstripe
I’ve recently started creating sites with SilverStripe CMS, and I’m loving it. My client wants nicely rendered non-standard font titles that fade in and out, without using javascript. Here’s how I’m going to accomplish it: In Silverstripe’s mysite/code/Page.php I overload the onBeforeWrite() call in my Page class. This intercepts the data before it is written to the database. I can get the title of the updated page from $this->Title I will then use PHP’s GD (graphics) library to create a PNG with a transparent background. I’ll use imagettftext() to load a font from a TTF file and write it to …