Modulator is an extendable system for creating sub-page components. It achieves this by attaching DataObjects to the page in place of the traditional Content body.

• Draft and publish control on a per-module level
• Drag-and-drop re-ordering of modules
• An extendable system for creating your own modules
• CMS previewing
• Filtering of available modules per page type

Modulator can be installed via Composer;

composer require touchcast/modulator

After installing, run a /dev/build to generate the database tables.

Create a ModularPage page within your Site Tree. Add new modules to the page and populate them as required.

Each module consists of a PHP class and a template file.

Start by extending PageModule

class HeroModule extends PageModule {

  // Give the module a name for use within the CMS
  public static $label = "Hero module";

  // Give it a description
  public static $description = "A large title section at the top of the page";

  // Optionally group your modules by type, for easy reference in the CMS
  public static $category = "Headers";

  // Add any fields required for the module
  private static $db = array(
    "Heading" => "Varchar(128)"
  );

  // Provide custom summary content for the gridfield
  public function getSummaryContent() {
    return $this->Heading;
  }

  // Provide text content from the module to be included in the pages's search index
  public function getSearchBody() {
    return $this->Heading;
  }
}

Next create a template file. It should have the same name as your module class.

<header>
  <h1>$Heading</h1>
</header>

If you want to extend the ModularPage template, you can render the modules by hand using the $ActiveModules loop.

<% loop $ActiveModules %>
<section class="$ClassName.Lowercase <% if $Odd %>odd<% else %>even<% end_if %> order-$Order">
  $Content
</section>
<% end_loop %>

For each page class you extend from ModularPage you can specify a list of modules which are allowed to be attached to that page. e.g;

class CustomPage extends ModularPage {

  public static $allowed_modules = array(
    'HeroModule',
    'TextModule'
  );
}

If you want to create a custom base class for page modules to contain any common fields, you can specifiy this in a config file;

ModularPage:
  base_class: CustomModuleBase

You can take this a step further and specify a different base class for each page type (as an alternative to using $allowed_modules);

ModularPage:
  base_class: CustomModuleBase

BlogPage:
  base_class: BlogModuleBase

The default behaviour is to populate the SiteTree Content field with the contents of all the page's modules, so that it can be indexed by Silverstripe's built-in search functionality. If you don't want this behaviour you can disable it on a per-class basis;

ModularPage:
  write_content: true

BlogPage:
  write_content: false

Run phpunit from within the module folder, or /dev/tests from the browser.