Blog
SilverStripe into final of 2009 CMS Awards. Vote now!
We're excited to announce that SilverStripe is a finalist for the best Overall Open Source CMS in this year’s PacktPub CMS Awards.
Thanks to everyone who nominated us, we received enough votes to appear in the top five. This is a fantastic result, and one that we’re very proud of.
Join us at Software Freedom Day 09
On Sunday, 20 September, Wellington will play host to Software Freedom Day 09. SilverStripe is very proud to be one of the sponsors of this important event.
Software Freedom Day is an annual worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The principles that underpin FOSS are expressed in four essential freedoms: the users' freedom to run, study, distribute, and improve the software.
Keep Nominating!
Don't forget that the world's open source awards are running right now. As we explained at the start of last month, we'd love for you to nominate SilverStripe by September 11 in these two categories:
Auckland SilverStripe community forms monthly event
Thanks to the initiative of one of our community members, Aucklanders now have a monthly SilverStripe event. Hamish Campbell, a longtime member of our developer community has started a monthly SilverStripe Auckland meetup.
Hamish explains:
Recording from SilverStripe's OSCON
OSCON, the world's largest open source software conference, was held in July 2009, and SilverStripe was there.
O'Reilly's annual open source event allows open source projects like SilverStripe to host 'Birds of a Feather' sessions as part of conference proceedings. These are informal meetings where like-minded developers can learn about and discuss technology of interest to them.
SilverStripe 2.3.3 released
SilverStripe v2.3.3 has just been released! This is now the best version of our software to use. This version solves a number of bugs both at the code level for those working with Sapphire, and solves a few CMS interface bugs.
A big round of thanks go to community members who identified bugs and contributed fixes to them!
Help New Zealand Government be more open
Join us in innovating with government data! Later this month, a group of motivated individuals in technical, business, and policy roles are getting together for a single purpose: to collaborate on making government-held data more freely available for others to access and re-use.
200,000 downloads
Today we hit a really cool download milestone that illustrates the growing interest in SilverStripe! We'd like to thank everyone who has discovered SilverStripe and help spread the word — it is thanks to you that we've now reached the 200,000 mark!
(Statisticians note: The download figure was determined by counting downloads from the main SilverStripe website. It excludes downloads of daily builds, subversion, or from external websites like SourceForge. It also excludes the tens of thousands of copies that have been bundled on magazine cover discs and with the German SilverStripe book. And downloads of SilverStripe modules, themes, widgets, etc, are also excluded from this figure, as you should expect.)
User Forms 0.2 brings new ease to managing forms
We recently released a major update to the User Forms module. We mentioned the features earlier, but these features are now ready for production websites.
- Improved user interface for editing fields, with more descriptive labels and improved layout.
- You can now configure simple conditional logic. When someone answers a question in a form, that answer can be used to hide or show other fields on that form.
- Both the editor and the public-facing form now use jQuery. All of the prototype JavaScript library code has gone, more than halving the lines of JavaScript through a better architecture.
- The code at the PHP level has also been substantially rewritten. The model has been optimised and this drops the number of database tables from 12 to 3. We hope you like the speed and architecture improvements!
- The web-based report of form submissions is more powerful. The report is now paginated, and you can remove individual submissions or clear them all out.
- You can set custom messages for when fields are not filled out properly, overriding the SilverStripe defaults.
- Instead of sending a submission to a single email address, you can send to multiple email addresses. For each recipient you can customise the To, From, Subject, and Body content.
- Thanks to updates to the Mollom module and Recaptcha module last month, you can limit the amount of unwanted spam coming through your forms.
- Note: As yet there is no data migration strategy from forms built in the previous version to the new one. Also, this module currently has bugs when used on multiple-language websites.
Custom Fields open up a new form of SilverStripe extensions!
An exciting feature added to this version of the User Forms module is that it supports custom fields. These extensions are created by writing PHP code that can sit in their own folder, making them easy to share and reuse. Technically, you extend the EditableFormField PHP class; see the Google Maps Selection Field source code for an example. We're looking forward to seeing the community contribute useful types of fields, and we are also happy to know that the core module does not need to bloat with all sorts of rarely used field types.
London SilverStripe Community Meetup
Come to a SilverStripe event in London on Thursday 3rd September! SilverStripe Partner GPMD is hosting the after-work event from 6:45pm at The Worship — see the new SilverStripeUK meetup group that GMPD has created for further details. GPMD plans to make this a regular event in London.
Anyone interested in using—or currently using—the SilverStripe CMS is welcome, and it doesn't matter if you are technical or not. So if you're in London, we'd love for you to come to this informative and interesting evening.
On to “The news!” - News via the ModelAdmin
Simon 'Sphere' Erkelens is a freelance developer, fulltime employee of We::Code in the Netherlands with a tertiary background in applied physics. Before that, Simon worked for Squal Media. He started using SilverStripe at the end of 2009. Simon has given multiple presentations on implementing...
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