I created a theme in Silverstripe 4 which is aimed at small businesses who want to convert their online traffic to leads. It is available for download so carry on reading for those details. I created it when I was traveling around South America trading websites for free accommodation and surf boards in various places I wanted to go.

Who is this theme suitable for?

This theme was designed for tourism accommodation providers. As such the two main concepts behind this theme are a Blog and ‘Calls to Action' (CTA's).

The Blog is so that you can create useful content for Google Search Users and the CTA’s are to convert this traffic to leads. It also has the ability to have a

• - contact form,
• - a location map,
• - a Simple Gallery or
• - Complex Galleries (with titles and text descriptions) on any given page.

As such any page can be turned into a gallery page to show off services or perhaps a contact page with a map and contact form very easily. Indeed these features can also be used just to house simple text and image content for your users without forms, maps or galleries.

What functionality does this theme have?

You are able to choose between two types of galleries on each page. The difference between a Simple Gallery and a Complex Gallery is that the former is a group of images only printed out at the top of a page. After the title (h1 heading) but before the main text content.

• - Here is an example of a Complex Gallery on lascabanasdeneto.pe which uses this theme. A Complex Gallery has the ability to be associated with a Title and a Text Description of the images. You can also create multiple Complex Galleries. It could also potentially be used to create product galleries and descriptions.
• - Each page can house a contact form and a location map in addition to a pages standard ability to have content, title and meta descriptions etc. For example, lascabanasdeneto.pe contact form
• - The Contact Form has 3 simple fields being the name, email, and message. This could easily be extended to add or remove forms as you need. The address to send the form too is also able to be edited in the Settings tab of the CMS so that you can always have control over who is receiving the emails.
• - The location map is a Google Map embed. You can set the particular location of the map and pin by accessing the Settings tab within the CMS and adding the link ** to the Google Maps custom field. For example, lascabanasdeneto.pe.
• ** NOTE: This is the link that is in the href attribute inside of the script tag used to embed a google map. It is NOT the script code itself.
• - The theme also has the ability to add a background image, a logo, and Google Analytics Tracking Code. See the Settings tab of the CMS for the fields to set these values.
• - The ability to add ‘Calls to Action’ or CTA’s. On the home page, you can go to the ‘Call to Action Buttons’ tab and create up to 2 buttons. These will have the ability to change the text displayed in the button and the link to where a button will take the user once they have been clicked on.
• - They will be displayed in two different places. On a laptop or desktop sized screen they will be displayed to the left of the page prominently so they are always able to be clicked by a user. On mobile, they will be shown just below the menu in a fixed position so they are always visible as well.

What things might you want to add/change yourself?

While I’ve been using it I have noticed two things which you might want to change if you desire.

1. The CTA’s at the moment can only accept a written text field as the link which they will send a user to. This is less than optimal in some cases but could be changed if you desired. It was made this way so that these buttons could link to external websites as well as internal ones in the case a site wanted to link to a booking engine.
2. The background image at mobile could be altered too as it doesn't always show a great frame at both mobile and laptop. Possible solution might be to have two images - one that shows at mobile and one at larger sizes.

What does the download contain?

The download contains all of the Silverstripe files you need to make this theme work. This includes all of the controllers, objects, models, and templates needed to do this. It also contains all of the CSS, HTML, and JS in order to achieve the aesthetic of the site. I have organized the files in a similar fashion to the way they would be organized in a Silverstripe 4 folder structure. As such,

• - the models, controllers, and objects are in the ‘/app/src' folder.
• - The public CSS and JS is in the 'public/resources/themes/Lobitos/‘.
• - And the actual template files are in ‘/themes/Lobitos/‘.

You should be able to take these files and paste or otherwise create them inside of your own Silverstripe 4 installation. If you don’t know how to do this you can check here for installation instructions from Silverstripe themselves.

Theme download location:

You can download the theme here.

Want to play with a demo version of this theme?

I created a demo site with this theme on it which you can log in to and play around with before you download it if you like. You can learn how to use and log in to this demo site here.

Want to build your own Silverstripe 4 Theme?

To do this you will need to understand how to use Silverstripe and its MVC pattern. Silverstripe has a lot of guides and tutorials which are great. You can check them out here.  If you have used PHP frameworks before and are comfortable with intermediate to advanced levels of coding them you might find the Silverstripe documentation and tutorials very useful. 

If you are brand new to Silverstripe and not that experienced in development then I suggest you take a look at my own instructions here as I find that for the newbie Silverstripe and its concepts can be difficult to understand.

Do you need help with a Silverstripe site your working with?

I am a Silverstripe developer with over 5 years of experience with this particular software. Use the onscreen buttons to contact me or learn more about my skills. You can also view my portfolio here which describes some of my previous projects with Silverstripe.