Adding features to your project with recipes#

To achieve more complex use cases in Silverstripe CMS, you may need to combine many modules and add extra configuration to integrate these together. Silverstripe CMS Recipes streamline this process for common use cases.

What are Silverstripe CMS recipes?#

Recipes are used to implement common broad feature sets by shipping a collection of modules along with the relevant integration logic. They allow developers to quickly get started while retaining the ability to customise their integration to their specific needs.

Before each version of a supported CMS recipe is released, it is comprehensively regression tested and passed to a third party for a security-focused audit, making sure that projects have a secure starting point or a safe and secure upgrade with each recipe release.

What's the difference between a recipe and a module?#

Silverstripe CMS is powered by a system of components in the form of Composer packages. It consists of two types of package:

• Modules, which provide pieces of functionality (such as silverstripe/cms and silverstripe/framework)
• Recipes, which group related Modules together to make them easier to install and release.

By design, modules tend to be small and serve a specific function. You may need to combine many modules to achieve a wider goal.

For example, the silverstripe/blog module by itself simply allows you to create blog posts. It does not include all the features you could want in a blog, like a comment system or widgets to display related content.

The silverstripe/recipe-blog recipe installs silverstripe/blog module, but also:

• silverstripe/widgets and silverstripe/content-widget to display widgets
• silverstripe/comments and silverstripe/comment-notifications to allow the management of comments on blog post
• silverstripe/spamprotection and silverstripe/akismet to provide basic SPAM protection on comments.

Finding recipes for Silverstripe CMS#

The Silverstripe CMS project maintains a number of recipes. Some third parties also maintain recipes.

Search Packagist for all packages with the silverstripe-recipe type to find recipes you can install on your Silverstripe CMS project.

Releasing supported recipes#

When we announce a new release of Silverstripe CMS and publish a changelog for it, we refer to a new set of Recipe versions, which include new versions of some or all of their associated Modules. The easiest way to keep up to date with new Silverstripe CMS releases is to depend on one of the core Recipes:

• silverstripe/recipe-core: Contains only the base framework, without the admin UI or CMS features.
• silverstripe/recipe-cms: Includes recipe-core, and adds the admin UI and CMS features. We recommend specifying this recipe in your dependencies.
• silverstripe/installer: Includes recipe-cms, and adds a default theme for the front-end of your site. We recommend creating new projects based on this recipe ( via composer create-project silverstripe/installer myproject ^4).

When determining whether you are running the latest version of Silverstripe CMS, it is easier to refer to the Recipe version than the individual Module versions, which may not align with Recipe versions. You can use Packagist to find detailed information on what versions of individual modules are contained in each Recipe release.