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SilverStripe - Easy to use open source CMS + Framework

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nudone:
Well, I did exaggerate (of course). I'd use Joomla again if it seemed right - I don't have many other experienced options to choose from if I'm honest.

phpNuke sounds interesting. I'd give it a go but you've, cleverly, managed to put me off already. WordPress isn't going away so we all may as well just learn how to navigate the bad bits - using it makes my life easier without a doubt regardless of the hurdles involved.

On another note: I've just installed the latest beta for CMS Made Simple - they've finally gone and updated the backend interface. Looks better, not sure how much, just definitely better. I'm going to mess about that for a bit - though, recent client expecations (as I mentioned) means I'll probably never use CMS Made Simple ever again.

40hz:
phpNuke sounds interesting. I'd give it a go but you've, cleverly, managed to put me off already.
-nudone (July 21, 2012, 09:59 AM)
--- End quote ---

Oh, don't take my word for it. phpNuke is fun. But it feels (to me) more like a science faire project. It was "totally Rad" when it first came out. The problem is it's a very loose ship the Nuke crowd is running. You've got professional brilliance rubbing shoulders with rank amateurism when it comes to plug-ins. YMMV.

Of course if you did use AMPPS it would be very easy to try things out. Even if you didn't use it for your production environment. Hmm...hmm...hmm.tra-lala-la! :P

BTW, AMPPS doesn't hide anything from you. Once it's installed you can open the control panel:



Select any part of the installed stack:



And review or edit the configuration file for that component:



And if you screw something up ditzing around, you can always restore the original default config with the click of a button.



Lovely! Butterscotch lovely. :-*

Looking in the AMPPS installation directory (which you can specify when you install it) you'll see a structure virtually identical to what you'll find on many hosting services or standard web servers. On my machine, I put all my web stuff on the D drive under a directory called wdev. So my home directory for AMPPS is D:/wdev/Ampps/

SilverStripe - Easy to use open source CMS + Framework

All webapps are installed in the www directory under /Ampps. Depending on the app, you may be able to specify the name of the directory for it. Below you'll see a directory for a Wordpress site (wpuwg) for a project I'm currently working on. (Note: Wordpress does let you spec the directory. Some webapps don't.)



Again, nothing mysterious. Most host sites do the same although they may use another directory rather than /www.

And while AMPPS may risk throwing out the baby's rubber duckie with the bath water if somebody chooses to do so, it's by no means a black box. Everything is out in the open. There's even instructions on their wiki that will allow you to customize or create your own webapp installation script if you want. True, it may not let you experience all the technical intricacies of bringing up a W/L/AMP stack from scratch. (Been there. Done that. Worth doing once or twice just to see what's involved.) But if your goal is to get a development environment up and running quickly, and make a webapp installation virtually bulletproof, it can't be beat IMO.

And that's about all I have to say about AMPPS.  :Thmbsup:

justice:
Yeah so SilverStripe is not for everyone. If you like your features already available in your CMS, you will want to use another product, and loathe it for it. However this thing is great when you want a 90% there CMS with extensibility and make it so easy to add the rest. This is great when:

- You are setting up a CMS for a client and will need to deal with specific requirements anyway.
- You have a specific requirement for yourself and have php programming knowledge.
- You find that all the functionality you require is already available in SilverStripe modules. Many things are, but not as much as drupal modules haha (I remember having to download up to 22 modules to setup HTML email templates for system mails - with drupal).

However when you create your own page types, silverstripe rebuilds the data base schema for you. You can create a new administration section for your products in several dozen lines of php, without having to write UI code (take that wordpress plugin authors). When you can leverage functionality already built in to create a static version of your site, and boost the performance of your site, or ssh it automatically to remote servers.

However if that paragraph doesn't make much sense then you are probably better off with a blogger account or Website Baker :)

BTW insteaod of using a WAMP stack I am now using a virutal machine with ubuntu which works very well (tutorials elsewhere on this site).

Things I would now use it for:
- replace my dcmembers site with something that looks 21st century and unifies news, software, blog and other features.
SilverStripe - Easy to use open source CMS + FrameworkSilverStripe - Easy to use open source CMS + FrameworkSilverStripe - Easy to use open source CMS + Framework
- build the getbard.com website and make it trivial to maintain
- a personal portfolio so that you can enter a gallery of screenshots, description, urls of projects. I tried to make a WordPress plugin to make it easier to make custom content types by making it a single line of code to add an image field etc. Well Silverstripe already allows this way more flexible.
-a cv builder website (keep my cv versioned in a database, and integrate some kind of PDF export option. Quick to build when adding fields is so easy.

Carol Haynes:
Said it before (and say it again) I like Joomla - but maybe that's because I now use it for all my projects and have things pretty well sorted out for most of my needs.

I am not doing anything complicated so I suppose that makes a difference.

AMPPS looks interesting - I will check it out.

nudone:
I've bookmarked your ubuntu server setup, justice. Had it there a while. I'm tempted to go through all your steps with the intention of then setting something up on Linode, as that seems like a good way of getting to grips with hosting beyond the comforts of cPanel. It's just having the time to spare.

I think you are spot on with Silverstripe. I'm not too hot with php so I can't start thinking in terms of modifying a cms in that way. Wish I could but time doesn't allow that either. Having said that I must waste days trying to force a set of plugins to do what a client needs, so I'm talking rubbish really.

As for AMPPS, I see what you mean, 40, but it's still actually more long winded to use amps than it is wamps, in my case, at least. I did go through all of the config panels and menus with ampps and they aren't as convenient as the wamp system tray and a couple of desktop shortcuts, well, again, not for me. Anything that reduces the number of times I have to click tends to win for me, and that's wamp. I've got a system that I can fault find with, moving to amps might mean I'll miss something... maybe. I tend to swap the virtual servers around a lot, changing the domains and databases so quickly editing a text file is all I need - I wasn't sure if ampps would follow what I was doing so didn't give it much thought after that.

Edit:
Just thought I'd quickly mention another thing about wamp. You can use different versions of php, apache and mysql with it, all accessible via the system tray. I've not seen this available elsewhere. I admit you probably would never need it but I've a few sites that I have to keep swapping versions around, this is all done with just a few clicks with wamp.

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