I've been looking for a CMS solution for our company for the last 3 - 4 days.

Apparently from what I can find SilverStripe is the only one that has

* Clean, clear, and focused content editor
* Full flexibility over output without added complexity.
* Working and simple multilingual support
* The ability to give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

All in the one package..

So what am I missing ?!! Does it give you cancer or something ?

Seriously, I was getting so frustrated when searching for a CMS. As a developer I like full control over what I'm doing, though the client wants it to be as simple and clear as possible, then if you try and throw multilingual support in it's a nightmare.

I was so disappointed looking at what is meant to be the big two 'Drupal' and 'Joomla'. Drupal's multilingual support is a joke, and it took me 30 minutes to turn off all the crap that Joomla has turned on by default.

What is seen as the main competitor to SilverStripe ? I honestly couldn't find anything that worked as well but yet heard so little about it..

Anyway, I guess my main point is good job guys! You've seemed to have created a CMS that makes sense and works well, so it looks like SilverStripe for us.

Glad you like what you see so far!

Sadly everything isnt that rosy all the time! SilverStripe def has a much nicer design (from designers + coders view) but The 'Working and simple multilingual support' just took up 2 hours of my time to fix this morning :P, people also tend to complain about the documentation and there is a few bugs that you find popping up again and we never have enough 'features' for some people..

But our documentation is only going to get better in the future, the codes getting more stable with such a great community helping out and as we use it more. And the more people hear about it / use SS, the more themes, modules, widgets and great features we will see!. There is defiantly some really cool improvements to everything coming in the next couple of months!

Yeah I know I might be a little over enthusiastic :)

As you've mentioned it I do have to ask, what issues were there with the Multilingual features ? Was this on a site implementation or on the core code ?

I always expect there to be a number of bugs etc, but from what I can see everything is pretty much 'working', though I've only touch the surface. Any things I should be aware of now that would cause headaches looking to implement SilverStripe in a production environment ?

If you are using 2.2.2 then you should encounter a fairly stable path. We have been using 2.2.2 for a few months so it is quite stable. But for modules I would recommend you use the daily builds @ dailybuilds.silverstripe.com or use SVN to manage your modules as most of the stable modules were released and tested with around 2.1. Eg for forum and blog we have fixed lots of issues without a new release but they are available on the dailybuilds service.

I can relate to your feelings on the CMS scene. I was once the same as you.

I found SS about a year ago, maybe a little more, and loved it, but there were a few too many bugs for my liking. With 2.2.2, things are pretty good and I'm now doing all my sites in SS and converting some old ones.

However, there are still some annoying bugs, and here are some off the top of my head:

- in IE, you can't insert a link with the editor. You highlight the text, go to insert link and the text loses focus.

- newsletters don't work from the admin panel. You can build a form, and everything looks like it works, but the user is never inserted into the database. Newsletters do work, but you have to custom build them. Fine for a developer, not so much for a client.

- newsletter borks on large lists a lot of the time. Takes up a lot of memory.

- Not really a bug, but admin backend a little slow. If you look at the html source, you'll see 50+ javascript files being included, plus a ton of other things - css etc.

- Memory issues. Fixed up a lot since I got here, but still not perfect. I remember if you had a lot of files/images, that section usually timed out and consumed a lot of memory. They may have fixed that a bit, can't remember. Don't really have any sites that large.

- Stats section is slow, and again, takes up a lot of memory. I'd suggest disabling it, search forums for how to. In 2.3 it will be removed from the core and made into a module.

- No real great way to sort/display the sitetree in the admin section, i.e your pages in the admin nav. This makes blogging or sites with a ton of pages a real pain to handle.

- No sub level URLs yet. There is a hack out there to get it, but it's not built in by default or fully supported yet. This is coming eventually.

- Home page has to be with the URL domain.com/home/ which redirects to domain.com. This isn't good for SEO as it creates duplicate content. There is a work around for the sitemap.xml file if you search the forums.

That's it off the top of my head. You can see them all in the bug tracker. SS is still great, but I feel it'll be very stable/solid with the 2.3 release. Nothing is perfect, but 2.2.2 is usable imo and has been great. The future looks very promising.