So I have been a little lax recently, with work and family and warcraft I just havent been keeping up top date with my posts. I intend to rectify that now.

The title of this post however doesnt relate to my being lax in posting but in that I have now found a new Opensource CMS system that I have fallen in love with and has made me more inclined to leave trying to code my own and just use that.

Its called Silverstripe, made by a company of the same name from New Zealand. I have been using it for about 3 weeks now and it has proven totally invaluable. Its quick and easy to set up with a one page installation screen. Aimed at editors rather than administrators it contains almost no settings control in the admin area as that is al handled by the framework that it is built upon. This makes it extremely clean and easy to use.

I have used it on a number of sites now and it has been the quickest turn around time for setting up a CMS for clients. Its been so good that I have even migrated some of my existing clients sites over to it.

The main cause for my excellent review is all down to two things.

  1. Extending the Site
  2. Template System

Extending the Site

The data Management layer built into the applications framework allows you to extend the site so easily. There is already a tutorial on the silverstripe website so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. Suffice to say that I strongly recommend you give it a once over.

The basic premise of my point is that in order to extend a page all you need do is create a new “page” file with associated classes extending the “Page” class and controller class. beyong this its a case of defining a few fields and where they will be accessed in the admin.

After that all you need is to rebuild the database (see the tutorial it explains everything). From then on in the fied will be accessible in the front end template. That brings me onto the next item

Template System

The Silverstripe team have built their own templateing system to work alongside the cms. It only takes a few minutes to get a grasp on and is rediculously easy to use (again I’l point you to the tutorial). It uses a combination of ASP tags to enclose logic statements and Casted variables to populate the templates.

Extensions

There are also a number of freely available extensions (both supported and unsupported) that allow you to make the most of the system. My top five are

  1. User defined forms
  2. Embargo/Expiry
  3. Blog
  4. Forum
  5. Newsletter

9 times out of ten all you need to do is copy the extension folder into the base of the CMS and rebuild the database. Its so simple and easy ridiculous.

License

The LIcense for the CMS is a BSD license. allowing full modification and redistribution. This is he first and only CMS I have seen of this quality that is willing to release the code for an application of this calibre with so little restriction.

I would strongly recommend that you all give it a try. It may not be your cup of tea but its well worth trying it to find out.