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SilverStripe - Easy to use open source CMS + Framework

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justice:
Just wanted to recommend SilverStripe CMS and the SilverStripe Framework (previously saphire).  I've tried to bend Wordpress to a CMS role, and have experience developing and maintaining a Drupal, Joomla CMS site and made some sites using CodeIgniter PHP framework (and rolled many from scratch). I tried Squarespace (if you want to spend money).

However SilverStripe is so easy to manage content with. Designers can take an existing template with stylesheets and get a basic working site going within the hour. Developers can use the extensive framework and feature set and expand from there, it's very elegant.

Negatives
At the moment the documentation is not yet up completely up to date with SS 3.0 (released end of june), and you will be googling the API and documentation sites quite a bit in order to piece the various components together. Also I've asked two questions on the forums without reply (although most questions seem to get good responses generally).

Positives
That said, it's used by it's commercial developer to create and maintain sites for major New Zealand's major companies and organisations.
You can drag and drop images into an image field. You can then use Image.SetWidth(300) in your template and it will generate appropriate derivatives. You install one module and it will generate a full REST webservice based on your data. You add a few lines and your list of news items are now also exposed as an RSS feed. etc.

You will see many more sites from me in the future based on this.  :Thmbsup: Is there anyone here that have used it for any projects?





silverstripe.org

mouser:
I don't have any experience with it but I look forward to hearing more about it from you as you get more experience using it.

nudone:
I had a quick look at Silverstripe a few months ago but I was already familiar with CMS Made Simple, so didn't give it much of my time. I find CMSMS easier and "simple"er to work with when compared with Joomla. But I also find WordPress just "nicer" to use overall because of the stuff you can make it do, though, I do think it is very lacking as a proper CMS (regardless of how many people try to convince themselves that it is, or can be with the right plugins).

Looking at the Silverstripe 3 backend, I'm quite impressed. It looks clean and easy to find your way around. So, I'm going to give it a try and forget about CMS Made Simple for a while.

CMS Made Simple uses the Smarty php tag system to do a lot of work, which I'm no master of but have found it preferable to trying to make things work with Joomla (which I can find my way around if there's no other option). I wonder how Silverstripe compares in this area; I mean, is it easy to customise - is it nicer than Joomla let's say, is it better than using WordPress with loads of plugins?

As mouser said, anything you learn, justice, and want to share will be very useful to hear.

nudone:
Okay, just going through the Silverstripe tutorial on how to create a site - not quite what I was expecting. Looks like there's plenty to learn before you even get a basic site set up. I'll have to see if it's simple to follow - haven't got time to spend days figuring stuff out.

edit:
Right, I'm going to shut-up for a bit as I've obviously missed a step during installation. I can't access the backend when logging in - which made me think I'd got to create everything from scratch before being able to do the most basic of tasks.

I'll come back when I've got something intelligent to say.

40hz:
@nudone - make things easy for yourself. Just download a copy of AMPPS to use as your development environment. You can install Silverstripe (and about 270 other web apps) from inside AMPPS. AMPPS has them all scripted. It's click, answer a few questions, and go for most of the webapps in its catalog.

It's all free too.

Check out the two demo videos here.

Cool tool!  8)

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