Blog
The Trials and Tribulations of a Freelancer
Guest blogger Ryan Wachtl is an independant US-based web developer and runs the SilverStripe user group in Madison. Prior to this, Ryan wrote about SilverStripe PayPal Mini Cart Integration.
I recently celebrated my fifth year of freelancing as a web professional. This had me thinking about how I’ve grown over the years, both personally and professionally, and I’ve learned that, as a freelancer, the lines often blur between the two. Many of you may also freelance, either full-time, part-time, or on the side. You may have left a corporate or agency job in pursuit of greater control and more freedom, or maybe you’ve never freelanced, or like me, maybe you’ve always freelanced. Regardless of your current situation I hope you’ll find something useful to take away from this as I share my experience with you. At the end of this post I offer up my advice to any struggling freelancers out there.
The Magic of Community Work
Last week I realised that I am asking you guys quite a bit these days; more pull requests, themes, blog posts, hackfests and meetup presentations. And yeah, every once in a while there is yet another community member who is stuck and needs your help.
I can tell you are getting tired, you have a full time job where you do overtime already, a nagging wife or husband at home and the kids don’t let you sleep either. And then Schuman comes along and wants you to do yet another thing!
Theme Contest: The Game Changer
You should never move the goal post after the race has started, but this is an exception that should work to your advantage.
I figured that you might need more time to get a full theme up and running. I understand that you all have a lot of other stuff on your plate, and that it might be hard to find the time you would need to get it done.
The Hidden Caveats of Working in Your Second Language
Guest blogger Aaron Carlino is a web developer who is better known in the SilverStripe community by his whimsical pseudonym Uncle Cheese. This is his second time writing as guest blogger. Prior to this, Aaron wrote Why Design Comes First: True Confessions of a Guilty Coder.
A Disadvantageous Advantage
They say it’s an English-speaking world. I disagree.
Content is King: Documentation for SilverStripe
Guest blogger Philipp Krenn is one of SilverStripe's Google Summer of Code students from 2007. More recently, he has written the latest book on SilverStripe. For the upcoming 3.0 release, he will contribute to the official documentation — an area which can always do with some additional love. You can stay in touch by following @xeraa on Twitter.
I hope you all had some time off and enjoyed the holidays. I surely did - it was skiing time in the northern hemisphere as you can see from my photo. Now that the holidays are over, it is time time to get back to business. With all the heavy work on SilverStripe 3.0, an important part will be the documentation. Stating the obvious, I will try to elaborate a little further.
The SS Theme Contest: Your opportunity to design the default theme for SilverStripe 3.0
It's Friday the 13th, time for some excitingly scary stuff, like an #SS3 design competition!
SilverStripe 3.0 alpha 2 is here
The last step before beta; SilverStripe CMS 3.0 alpha 2 is ready to download and test.
We have come a long way and we are half way there!
Here is what’s new in alpha 2:
Merry Christmas and Frohe Weihnachten
My first calendar year with SilverStripe is almost over and I find it hard to believe that I've been living in New Zealand for 10 months now. This year was pretty adventurous and it was great to meet quite a few of you and to get the excitement and passion that you have about working with SilverStripe.
I learned a lot about what it means to be a developer or a designer and to work with the SilverStripe tools. I learned that good code is art and beautiful architecture is poetry. And I learned that an MVC is a Model-View-Controller and therefore has a sweet framework.
SilverSmith: Reshaping SilverStripe Development
If you frequent any of the usual promotional channels such as Twitter, Facebook, the SilverStripe Development mailing list, or LeftAndMain, you may have caught some buzz about SilverSmith; the elusive product from Uncle Cheese that promises to enhance development of SilverStripe projects. Though SilverSmith is not released yet, it is scheduled to be in early 2012. This post will discuss what to expect from the release and why you should care about SilverSmith.
What is SilverSmith?
SilverSmith is a visual project editor with a suite of tools that streamline SilverStripe development. Because the application is aware of the SilverStripe framework and understands SilverStripe design patterns, it can accomplish tasks much faster, more easily, and with less human error than a SilverStripe agnostic text editor.
Speeding up SilverStripe with the Configuration System
One of our focuses in SS3 has been to improve on performance. All frameworks have to maintain a balance between features and performance, and generally SilverStripe has done that pretty well. In SS3 we haven't looked to adjust that balance, but instead looked at the features that cause the biggest performance issues, and see what we can do to refactor them so that we provide the same functionality in a more efficient manner.
Since I'm working on the configuration system this week to do just that, I thought it would be appropriate to talk a bit about it, to give you an idea about how we tackle the task of keeping or improving the feature set while still improving performance. Hold on, because this is likely to get a little technical.
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...
Want to know more about the company that brought you SilverStripe? Then check out SilverStripe.com
Comments on this website? Please give feedback.