5 Reasons to Use SilverStripe For Your Next CMS

Hi Andrew

Found this post via Calvin Lee (mayhemstudios) on Twitter.

I am definitely always looking for a CMS to try out and right now this looks good! Have toyed with Drupal before and currently use Joomla for bigger projects, and for simple websites, Etomite.org, but I’m not happy about the way they integrate the HTML/WYSIWYG editors, for my clients (who aren’t going to learn HTML)

Have you had experience with the HTML editors in this software? How would you rate them? I’m familiar with FCKeditor, TinyMCE, and Xinha. They all do not play as well with Etomite as I’d like.

Talk to you soon!

Bobbi Jo Woods´s last post was… Don’t be a jerk on Twitter

I stumbled upon Silverstripe accidentally and I gone through most of the tutorials. All I can say is that Silverstrip is extremely flexible comparing to other CMSs out there, and I love it. Definitely it will become my CMS of choice for all my future projects. I’m waiting for a better documentation and maybe an English book (a german version will be published soon).

My brother and I also stumbled upon SilverStripe the other day. We really, really were impressed initially and it led us to start a redo on an existing website of ours just to give the thing a go.

Probably the best thing we like about it so far is just how quickly it is to deploy a website. Compared to a Drupal (and even wordpress…) the speed in which you can actually get your website online is something rad. I really feel like this cms was built ‘humanable’. So far, our redo is just about there, we probably have another few hour session and we’re done with it.

Great cms so far it seems :)

I have a project coming up that will require the use of a CMS, and because of this, I think I am going to download it and give it a test run. Thanks Andrew!

AJ Troxell´s last post was… Hand Drawn Elements for WordPress Comments

Silverstripe is an incredible script, I tried it and love it. Another open source cms script I would strongly recommend you, to those of you which are familiar with (did you know that PHP is based on Perl?!) is webapp perl cms from: http://www.web-app.net

nice resource thank you for share..

joyoge designers’ bookmark´s last post was… Top 10 Freelance Blogs

I’m always looking at other CMS’s…I currently use Textpattern for most of my sites. I have to say, reading through the recommendations of Silver Stripe, its advantages sound similar to the ones I find with Textpattern: responsive community, super fast to get website from html/css to working site, quick and painless upgrades, good documentation, etc.

Definitely going to take a closer look at SilverStripe though.

How do people on this site feel about WordPress as a CMS for non-blog sites?

Interesting post, could be interesting to check this out, as design addict, I especially love their friendly design and great to see there are already tutorials for easy start.

Dainis Graveris´s last post was… 10 Ways How To Track Site Traffic, Popularity, Statistics

Give a try to Kentico CMS, that’s the nowadays rising star!

Hi Andrew,

Great to hear you’re such an avid fan of the SilverStripe CMS. We’ve been working very hard to produce such a great tool for web users and documentation to support it all – plenty more years and versions to come!

Very interesting. I wander if our development teams can be pulled away from FCK Editor. Can you (or Aaron, Silverstripe) provide some comments here which might help to instigate, inspire and then manage this change / migration within our various development teams?

Brilliant Blog, found you on Twitter and looks like I will be dedicating an hour of my night looking at all your posts. The onto the ten very interesting tweeple, all of which we are now following.

Thanks. http://twitter.com/myinfomatrix

have any one tried modx CMS, I am using it since last one year and developed around 10-15 websites, it it fits to all needs, and can be customized to almost any requirement.

Silverstipe is the absolute worst CMS I have ever used. The documentation is severely lacking and it’s overly complex. I spent over a month developing a site with this CMS and the output of generated pages (such as contact forms) were terribly inaccessible. I ended up re-developing it outside of Silverstripe in hours. Silverstripe sucks.

very nice article andrew, i am actually working on a project with silverstripe! i love the way we can handle it, it’s flexibility is awesome!
Thanks a lot to have made me aware of it!

Tanaka13 – Créations du Net´s last post was… So Infinity goes beyond

Apart from the many other benefits of SilverStripe noted here, it has an editing interface I’m not embarrassed to put in front of non-technical clients. Drupal 6 is, as with most CMS tools, built by geeks for geeks, and has poor usability for people who might be editing content on a website. SS seems to be built by geeks for everybody, and I mean that as a high compliment.
We have been looking for a CMS to replace our own aging classic ASP tool that has a very simple interface. This is the first one I have found.
I think there is a world of difference between a Drupal that we hope may get a new module which bolts on a simpler editing interface, and a SilverStripe that has been clearly built from the start to have a simple interface. Which one would you trust to grow in the right direction? You may well need some aspect of the power or variety of modules Drupal offers, but if you can find the functionality you need in SS your site editors will thank you and you may be embarking on a long and fruitful relationship.

I like Silverstripe’s relatively simple interface. With most CMS solutions it would be quicker to teach your client how to create their own website using xhtml and css than use the CMS.

How about a little comparison of the CMS’s you mentioned: WP, Joomla. drupal, SS. I am especially interested in image gallery management. Does SS have any especially good photo galleries?

SilverStripe has got to be the lamest CMS around. All the posters who thinkg SS is good are retarded ragheads!

I’m not sure if I’d say that Drupal is built by geeks for geeks. Drupal is just a very configurable system, which adds a good deal of complexity in the out-of-the-box experience.

I’d say that SilverStripe is promising in it’s use of an MVC architecture. Drupal is still very procedural due to the slow process of PHP 5 adoption by webhosts.

I’ve still had problems getting SilverStripe to run on anything other than a linux platform (even when attempting to use that goofy Web PI thing). I think the community still has a lot of work to do in making the system more robust.

I wasn’t quite happy with the response I got on the SilverStripe forums concerning this issue… I was essentially told there was “something wrong with my configuration”, and was given this cheesy spin by one of their system architects about 40% of installs happening on Windows, but good grief… …just get the thing to work on a Windows platform without that Web PI nonsense.

I like SilverStripe, and where it seems to be headed. It’s just that other than for a very simplistic site, it’s just not there yet.

Drupal, I’ve found, once you get your head around it, is flexible enough to provide a reasonable base for a lot of web projects, beyond just simple sites. Unfortunately, it tends to be overkill for a simple site, though… I’m wondering if the d7ux (d7ux.org) project will actually result in a more user-friendly Drupal…

Our studio has tested various CMS’s for around 2 years and SilverStripe has been our favorite. It is easily extendable and the community is great. One of the most rewarding aspects our job is having happy clients and a lot of our clients rave about how easy it is to use.

The only downfall is their shopping cart — it doesn’t come with a lot of what I feel are standard features.

In a nutshell, it’s awesome CMS and once it develops its shopping cart SilverStripe will be a showstopper.

I would DISAGREE with this review & I work for a firm who hired the company last year to do some work.

Yes the CMS is based on some great ideas but:
* the community is puny in comparison to WordPress/Drupal
* there are almost no plugins
* plugins are porely maintained
* there are almost no templates
* the back-end is heavy on javascript and is impossible to operate over low bandwidth connections
* documentation is outdated/not there

Till this changes your better off sticking with WordPress as it makes live much easier…

We’ve been using SilverStripe for over a year now. We love developing with it and our clients enjoy the ease of use.

The good folks at SilverStripe are active on their forum and there are several community members who are quite helpful and knowledgeable about the inner workings if you’re needing to dig deep in the code.

I’ve been working with various CMS’s for over 5 years.

I’ve implemented dozens of WordPress installations. I currently operate, over 50 at last count, WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs; with several built as blog/site combos. I like WordPress and don’t plan to divert from it; as a major blog tool.

I’ve built several Joomla sites (30+) and like the CMS. But it’s not for the feint of heart. Once you ‘get it’, Joomla’s a workable CMS. But it’s not something you can develop and turn loose on a ‘non technical user base’.

Although Drupal is very extensible, I personally never got into it. It took too much effort and Joomla was frankly easier. So it got my attention. I know a number of developers (my son being one) who love it. In my assessment – based on my limited experience, it is not an easy system to actually ‘work with’. And when I say ‘work with’, I’m not referring to the population of ‘gear-heads’ that work in the site setup. I’m talking about – how easy is it to ‘work with’, for the people who will need to populate the content and – as needed – add a module, maniuplate a theme function, etc. This is where the ‘trouble’ starts and controversy begins on any CMS tool.

Too many people fail to make the distinction between the two (2) major populations of people who will likely be involved in the use of a site based on CMS.

Population 1 -The Developers. These are the tech-savvy folks who are commonly used to dealing with the quirks and intricacies of PHP, CSS, XML, XHTML, HTML, MySQL, Javascript, etc. This population – of course will not see the ‘same problems’ that Poplation 2 will see.

Population 2 – The Actual ‘User-Base’ , those who will be charged with adding content, maintaining the site and adding additional new plug-ins or updating existing elements of the extensible framework. The are the people who will have to USE the property when the developers release it. This population might be made up of tech-savvy people; have a tech-savvy person around … but it’s not likely. Thus, when they are faced with any involvement with ‘code’ or site technology, they are stuck and the results wil NOT be pretty.

I am in or have been in – all the areas mentioned above. So, I see the needs. I feel the limitations. I understand the strengths and weaknesses of a CMS from all major points of interest. They ALL have their problems, limitations and short-coming. None of them are perfect. We need to keep this in mind when discussing new products.

From what I see of Silver Stripe the developers are answering a number of the ongoing requests and common sense needs of developing on a CMS platform.

I get a real chuckle from the range of comments made here. They follow much the same patterns likely seen in typical comment venues like this.

Andrew’s article was well done. I appreciated reading his comments. I’m interested in giving SS a go. I have one installation under development. I’ve found some hitches, but they have more to do with my lack of familiarity with the SS layout. A bit more time and I know the problems will dissolve.

But when you have the mix of comments here ranging from “SS is the greatest thing since sliced bread’, to “SS is shit-on-a-stick’, it’s really difficult to sort usable comments and worthless BS. Especailly when the reader is already confused.

By and large, the comments have been quite favorable and for the most part helpful.

I see comments made with good thought and the understanding that there are people reading this article who really want a solid, factual report. Not just someones BS. It’s also obvious some of the comments, from those who, if asked, would consider themselves as pros in development, are obviously, not made by pros.

You may be building sites, charging for the service and product, and accepting compensation. Businesswise that will put one in ‘pro’ status; meaning you’re operating as a professional. But in no way does it necessarily indicate a professional level of proficiency in the products used, the business conducted, or at a pro level of comment valuel

Good luck to those venturing into CMS tools; into using Silver Stripe; and to us all as we work our way though the changing landscape in front of us.

I’ll let you into a little secret. I write .NET apps and content managed site for clients. But all my own web sites are done with SilverStripe. Why?

Well, I enjoy using it. It works out of the box, you can add blogs, news, spam protection, complex file management, galleries, forums and other useful things almost immediately.

You can build a really useful web site, really quickly, that has plenty of ‘flavour’, really usable admin tools (for them pesky users) and most of the expected functionality (like blogs and stuff) readily available.

If you are ok with CSS, it’s pretty easy to turn a default black-candy install into something so different without doing anything to the code/sapphire core and almost nothing to templates.

When you get jiggy with it, it’s pretty easy to override the core components, like option buttons and other form controls, to get the look and formatting you need.

Ok, what isn’t so good about it?

Well, I’ve never really had an issue with the community, because I’ve either found an [already available] easy answer to my dumb question or I’ve read the source code. But I can see why people get all uptight when they want to be spoon fed a solution.

I’d like to see a few ‘crib sheets’ for template options and a bit more uniformity in the documentation.

I’m not intending to try and convince anyone who doesn’t like it, how great SilverStripe is, but it works for me and I’m happy to recommend it.