SilverStripe – Late to the party, but a stellar CMS
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A spin-off of the IndieNet Podcast, this Byte-sized episode explores the stronger points of SilverStripe, an open source content management system I’ve recently discovered. I compare and contrast SilverStripe to Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress as easy to use CMS solutions, weighing client ease-of-use as well as development convenience.
Out of the gate, this CMS seems like the perfect harmony between the bogged-down, confusing power of Joomla and Drupal with the intuitive layout and bloggy-feel of Wordpress.
If nothing else, check it out for yourself.
SilverStripe official site: http://www.silverstripe.org
This Week in Startups interview with Wordpress-founder Matt Mullenweg (referenced in the blip): http://thisweekinstartups.com/2009/11/twist-26-with-matt-mullenweg
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Hey Phil, enjoyed hearing you talk about SilverStripe here.
I thought I’d waffle on about my own experience.
I’ve been using it for a year or so now, developed a bunch of sites. Interesting to hear from someone with experience on Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress too. When I needed a CMS based on MySQL and PHP last year I looked at all those, along with CMSMadeSimple. Drupal had an awful geeky reputation (the fact that URLs have the word “node” in is a bad start), and seemed aimed at sites with a strong emphasis on social networking. One look at the Joomla schema and I ran a mile. The whole thing seemed just bonkers and I kept hearing people say “avoid Joomla!”. And as you say, WordPress makes everything bloggy. CMSMadeSimple seemed just right, until I realised the code was pretty shoddy; not particularly OO.
Then I discovered SilverStripe, tried the back-end and loved it. Looked at the code and loved that too: the developers know even PHP5 sucks for serious OO development but they’ve worked around this by throwing a lot of clever stuff into sapphire/core/Object.php. One look at the source for that class and I was convinced: these folk know what they’re doing. I heard “design patterns” thrown around near SilverStripe and I liked that too. Not just MVC, but more. As a professional developer steeped in refactoring, unit tests, design patterns and so on, the code plus the AJAXy, hugely usable CMS UI was very attractive.
A friend has just asked me to help with Drupal and I refused. I’ve just downloaded the code. So it’s all functions and no classes, and all SQL with no ORM that I can see. It looks like Drupal folk are working on an ORM, but the thing about SilverStripe is that, as long as you don’t mind the lack of modules or many decent themes, it’s “modern”. It’s also, like Drupal, a web application framework, not just a CMS. Django and Rails are too, and there are nice CMSes built on top of them, but I needed PHP and MySQL because that’s the sort of server my main clients have.
Well, I’m sure I’m showing my ignorance about everything but SilverStripe here, and perhaps even some aspects of SilverStripe, but I thought I’d waffle. Meanwhile, I’m busy learning to use the unit testing stuff SilverStripe comes with, and playing around with RSS feeds and writing a snippet for http://www.ssbits.com/, which you and your listeners should check out.
Toby, near Seattle, WA
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Great insight, Toby – especially on the object-oriented bits, comparing and contrasting the clean, “light” code of Silverstripe with the bloat of Drupal and Joomla. I’m guessing a lot of their swelling is from being around for so long, and bolting on top of building on top of bolting, etc.
I hadn’t come across CMSMadeSimple, so thanks for the pointer on that one; I’ll check it out and play around with it a bit just to stay up on things … but man, I’m really loving the SS framework. Anything’s gonna have an up-hill battle, as far as I’m concerned at this point.
SSBits.com looks like a nice resource, as well. Thanks again for the perspective and recommendations,
/phil
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