SilverStripe Open Source CMS

There are thousands of content management systems available today. So how do you choose the right CMS for your company? Well, here’s a quick overview of SilverStripe.

SilverStripe contains a flexible MVC development framework known as Sapphire. Much like Ruby on Rails, but written in PHP5, it ensures developers are capable of extending and enhancing the functionality of the CMS and the website. SilverStripe provides developers with complete control of the generated markup; allowing for higher, semantic standards of XHTML. As a consequence, building websites using SilverStripe requires technical website development competence, and is thus aimed at providing efficiency and power to experienced website developers.

The highly modular nature of SilverStripe has resulted in the creation of numerous pre-built modules that extend the core functionality of the CMS. Modules range from providing blog, ecommerce, and forum functionality, to LDAP and OpenID authentication. Modules are available from the SilverStripe modules repository.

SilverStripe Widgets are small pieces of useful functionality that can be instantly dragged and dropped into a website, for instance tag clouds, flickr photos, or word of the day.

Some key points:

• Open Source License (£free)
• Built in PHP using the Sapphire framework
• Simple content editing via WYSIWYG editor
• Complete control over the look and feel of the design
• Lots of custom modules and widgets to increase functionality

What we like about it:

• Shappire gives you the ability to easily add custom functionality to your project
• The admin interface is simple and intuitive as well as fast to load
• There is a huge developer community as well as professional services support direct from SilverStripe
• Design templates are easy to edit and modify

SilverStripe Example Websites:

The Peter Pan Club
http://www.peterpanvakantieclub.nl/

US 2008 Democratic National Convention
http://demconvention.com/

Merge Communications
http://mergecom.co.nz/

The Woman’s Conference
http://californiawomen.org/

British Potato Council
http://www.britishpotatoes.co.uk/

Season Magazine
http://www.seasonmagazine.co.uk/

The Open Source license

“It’s easy to understand why the BSD license is a great choice for our customers, but how is the BSD license good for our business? After all, we are basically giving away a huge chunk of our Intellectual Property (IP). A software company’s IP is usually held onto very tightly because traditionally, software companies believe that their IP is something to be protected and sold. We believe something different.”

“Simply put, it comes down to this: We’re not in the business of developing software; we’re in the business of helping our customers. The way we do this is by figuring out what our customers need and delivering well. What we deliver is usually a combination of business analysis, technology development, and tight working relationships with the customers.”

-The SilverStripe Team

Here’s the actual license

Visit the SIlverStripe community website here:
http://www.silverstripe.org

If you want to find out more about the people behind SIlverStripe visit:
http://www.silverstripe.com

We are using SilverStripe here at Masterpiece as a solid foundation for our online services. Along with SilverStripe we also use Drupal, WordPress and Magento, all open source and all great in their own ways. If you would like more information about selecting a CMS or you are lloing into building a website please feel free to get in touch.

SilverStripe Technical Requirements:

• Apache v1.3.19+ or Lighttpd with mod_rewrite support, or Microsoft IIS 7
• MySQL v4.1.X+
• PHP 5.2+ with MySQL, GD Graphics Library and Zlib support

Posted March 17th, 2009 by acansick | In category Online