SilverStripe Content Management System - Thoughts from a User

There are many Content Management Systems in the world and I have used a lot of them such as Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, CMS Made Simple? Recently, I discovered SilverStripe when I was reading an article about the finalists of the 2008 Open Source CMS Awards held by Packt Publishing. I went to the SilverStripe website and saw a demo of the CMS at demo.silverstripe.com. I was attracted by the admin interface which is very simple and intuitive. But I didn?t start using the CMS immediately.

At that time, I was very busy with my web design jobs. I was mostly using Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress but I was looking for something different. Unfortunately, I didn?t have the time to learn the API of another CMS so I continued using Drupal and Joomla to build websites and Wordpress to build blogs and I forgot about SilverStripe. But my need was always present: a tool which will allow me to design quickly any kind of website. Drupal was close to this but I wasn?t satisfied because I think that it is a little heavy when it comes to design tiny websites (it?s my opinion).

In December 2008, when I had more spare time, I decided to search for the tool I needed and started testing some frameworks (I thought that no CMS could satisfy me). So I found CakePHP and start using it. I even decided to develop my own CMS with this framework. In fact, I started developing a CMS with CakePHP. 28th January, I remembered the existence of SilverStripe (I should have remembered it sooner and save time). So I started learning SilverStripe. It was exactly the tool I was looking for and the learning curve is very straightforward. We launched two website with SilverStripe 2.2.3: a multilingual product catalog and a web and mobile directory. The last one (www.erecherche.net) is now upgraded to the SilverStripe 2.3 and we recently redesigned my company website (www.takitiz.com) with this last version of SilverStripe.

The new features of SilverStripe bring the CMS to a higher level. The administration interface is easier to customize thanks to the new ModelAdmin class. With this feature, SilverStripe has reached the level of customization and simplicity I was looking for a long time ago. Datasets are now easier to manage within the administration interface and it saves us much development time. Also, I was wondering whether SilverStripe was sufficiently powerful to support high traffic websites. Now, with the Static Publisher feature, my doubts are cleared because this feature powered U.S. Democratic Party?s convention site.

The transition to jQuery for javascript work inside the CMS was also a good choice made by the developers of SilverStripe because it simplifies javascript work and we, at TAKITIZ, are used to work with this lightweight and powerful javascript framework.

However the new version of SilverStripe is not ready for multilingual content and this issue doesn?t allow us to use it for multilingual websites. We hope that this will be quickly implemented in a minor release.

In short, the new version of SilverStripe is, in my opinion, more easy to use and customize and sufficiently scalable to power high traffic website.