SilverStripe is a free and open source programming framework and content management system (CMS) for creating and maintaining websites. The CMS provides an intuitive web-based administration panel, allowing any person to maintain their website without knowledge of markup or programming languages.
SilverStripe offers a flexible MVC development framework known as Sapphire. Much like Ruby on Rails, but for PHP, it ensures developers are capable of extending and enhancing the functionality of the CMS and the website. More importantly, SilverStripe provides developers with complete control of the generated markup; allowing for higher, semantic standards of XHTML.
SilverStripe is released under the terms of the BSD Licence. An abundance of documentation is available from the SilverStripe help website and wiki. An online demonstration of the CMS is located at the SilverStripe demo website.
History
Prior to SilverStripe 2.x, the CMS was commercially available under a proprietary license. Development efforts for SilverStripe 2.X started in late 2005, as a complete overhaul to take advantage of object orientation and new features in PHP5. On 3 February 2007, SilverStripe 2.0.0 was released publicly as free and open source software.
Motivations and reasoning for moving towards an open source development model were the anticipated results of greater exposure, higher quality code and community contributions.
In March 2007, SilverStripe was selected for the Google Summer of Code programme. The contributions of the students who participated in the programme ultimately resulted in the 2.2 release of SilverStripe.
On 29 November 2007, SilverStripe announced they would be participating in the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest. This let to a proliferation of themes, translations and widgets that broadened the system.
Features and Add-ons
Notable features include multiple methods of organising navigation through folksonomy, a flexible data object model, multiple templates per page, a separate "Draft site" and "Published site" through staging content, asset management, image resizing, versioning control, search engine friendly URLS with meta-data, automatic sitemap generation, full text search and RSS feeds. SilverStripe supports UTF-8 and the internationalisation of character sets; the CMS is currently available in French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese.
Modules
The highly modular nature of SilverStripe has resulted in the creation of numerous pre-build modules that extend the core functionality of the CMS. A list of available modules is viewable below:
- Blog
- E-commerce
- Embargo/expiry
- External Authentication (LDAP, AD, etc)
- Flickr Gallery
- Forum
- Gallery
- Maps
- Technorati
- Youtube Gallery
Widgets
Widgets are small pieces of useful functionality that can be instantly dragged and dropped into a website. A list of available modules is viewable below:
- Built-in widgets for the blog module
- Countdown
- Del.icio.us
- Digg
- Featured Video
- Feedburner
- Feedburner Email Subscription
- Google Adsense
- Google Custom Search
- IMStatus
- LanguageChooser
- last.fm
- Links
- NASA image of the day
- New Users
- Ohloh contribution
- PayPal donation
- Popular Blog Posts
- Recent Page Comments
- Time
- TwitterStatus
- WoW Character
Themes
The SilverStripe themes directory provides a number of community-contributed, freely available themes; providing developers and website owners with the capability to instantly modify the aesthetics of their SilverStripe website.
Software Requirements
SilverStripe is a web application, requiring a compatible HTTP server and SQL database. As of version 2.2.0 (28 November 2007), the requirements for SilverStripe are as follows:
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