SilverStripe.org Blog

SilverStripe 2.4 beta release brings hierarchical URLs, SQL Server support, and much more

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:27:00 +1300

We're extremely excited to announce SilverStripe v2.4 is now at beta release stage!

This means it's ready for testing by our community. We've made a number of changes since the 2.4 alpha release in November, and we're continuing to polish the intended features in preparation for the stable version. We do not recommend using this version of SilverStripe for production sites yet unless extensive testing is done.

Regular readers of our blog may want to read the changelog for a full list of recent changes, the highlights of which are detailed below.

The SilverStripe 2.4 release is all about using SilverStripe in bigger and more complex production environments and it brings a wealth of great features.

Download SilverStripe-v2.4.0-beta1.tar.gz

Hierarchical URLs

If your website contains hundreds or thousands of pages, you may find the default way SilverStripe handles friendly URLs a little limiting. For instance:

http://website.com/new-york-staff-john-smith/

With hierarchical URLs, the address for such a page might be:

http://website.com/offices/new-york/staff/john-smith/

One of the principles of this feature is that it provides a logical "bread crumb" for a page. Each segment in the URL (as separated by a slash symbol) is a page in itself that can be visited. Hierarchical URLs also reduce the problem of "running out" of URLs, where you might be forced to have URLs like http://website.com/staff-2/. SilverStripe will allow you to run the website in either simple or hierarchical URL mode, so that for simple websites you can retain short, memorable website addresses.

Huge thanks go to Andrew Short, a member of our developer community based in Australia, who is responsible for writing most of this feature.

Microsoft SQL Server Database support

There is strong demand for SilverStripe to run on the Microsoft platform—in recent months there have been more than 36,000 downloads via the Microsoft.com web application gallery alone. We have therefore worked hard to allow SilverStripe to natively run on a SQL Server 2008 database, eliminating the requirement to run SilverStripe on MySQL (though, of course, it still runs great on MySQL). We're really happy with the results, and we have government websites like www.gw.govt.nz already running on this platform.

Running SilverStripe on SQL Server requires the installation of the SilverStripe SQL Server module.

PostgreSQL database support

SilverStripe 2.4 can also run on a PostgreSQL 8.3 or later database. Our testing of this is not as extensive as it has been for Microsoft SQL Server, so we'd love people to install this version of SilverStripe with the PostgreSQL Database Support module and let us know how it goes.

Performance and memory use optimisations

Memory use optimisations mean that the CMS back-end interface for the "Site Content" section easily scales to well over 10,000 pages.
Performance improvements around Object and ViewableData property access.
Improved unit test execution speed.
Decreased memory usage in "Files & Images" section.
Tested that SilverStripe is compatible with Microsoft's new WinCache PHP bytecode cache. Anecdotal tests show that WinCache provides a 50% speed improvement in generating SilverStripe webpages.
Ability to cache parts of templates, providing a middle ground between the speed of fully cached pages and the richness of fully dynamic database-driven pages.
Batch action handling handles larger tree structures, provides better visual feedback, and respects permissions on individual pages.

Introducing roles

SilverStripe has long had support for setting granular security permissions on pages. Users can be a member of one or more groups, and groups can be configured to have various system rights, and various view and edit permissions on a page-by-page basis. This provides a great deal of flexibility, but in complex organisations the task of setting up the permission structures can mean spending a lot of time creating security groups.

Managing more complex security configurations has been eased in SilverStripe 2.4 with the introduction of roles. Roles allow groupings of people to be:

Assigned the same system rights (e.g. access to create pages but not create users.)
Assigned those rights to different sections of a website (e.g. news section, product catalogue, corporate profile, etc.)

This simplifies maintenance of the rights and users for large organisations. It makes permissions less repetitive to set up. Roles may be overkill in simple situations, and therefore their use is optional.

Other security features

A group can be limited to only edit a certain language in the CMS.
Team members can get permissions to see the draft version of a page in preview mode without requiring CMS access.
Pages of type "Virtual Page" have improved stability in regards to their permission control, translation and publication.
More fine-grained permission control for translators
Better XSS security of the autologin token by using HTTPOnly cookies
More secure against brute force login attempts

Other key improvements

A "SiteConfig" record stores site-wide settings and default permissions and author groups for pages. Such settings can be set differently for different languages used on your website. A example setting is the theme your site uses, although this still be set at the code level.
The CMS now searches for broken internal links to other pages and broken file references, and highlights them in the WYSIWYG editor. A report can be used to show broken links across the website.
Improved API to allow custom tags to be parsed within CMS content before being presented on webpages.
Improved reporting API to unify the CMS sidebar reports and full-page reports on their own section. It's easier to add custom filters to reports.
Added dropdown to choose from existing anchor links when inserting a link from the CMS sidebar.
Improved broken link detection
Removed the jsparty/ toplevel folder, and moved all its dependencies into sapphire/thirdparty and cms/thirdparty
More than 350 bugfix and enhancement commits, plus over 200 minor changes

Full changelog

See http://open.silverstripe.org/wiki/ChangeLog/2.4.0-beta1

Want to help out?

We'd love for you to download this release, test it, and raise articulate bug reports. In particular, we are interested in:

Testing that upgrades from older versions of SilverStripe go smoothly.
Testing the new features, like hierarchical URLs, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.
Manually testing that all CMS features work as intended.
Testing across various hosting environments, operating systems, PHP versions, and web browsers.

To raise a bug, log in at open.silverstripe.com and create a new ticket. When adding a ticket, be sure to specify the version as 2.4.0 beta.

250,000 downloads

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:00:00 +1300

2009 was a very positive year for our download statistics: we surpassed 250,000 downloads!

In 2010 we look forward to growing that number significantly.

Our work on SilverStripe v2.4 is almost complete and many of its new features are designed to make our software even more attractive in an even wider range of uses and environments. For instance, supporting SQL Server and Postgres databases significantly improves on SilverStripe's compatibility, and makes it an attractive option for customers who have not previously considered it. We look forward to maintaining our focus on the needs of our users and increasing market share accordingly.

(Statisticians note: The download figure of 250,000 was determined by counting downloads from the main SilverStripe website. It includes downloads of our software via Microsoft's Web Platform Installer, which has contributed over 40,000 downloads. However, 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. Downloads of SilverStripe modules, themes, widgets, etc, are also excluded from this figure, as you should expect.)

SilverStripe 2.3.5 released

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +1300

Yesterday we released an update to the SilverStripe CMS. As it fixes security vulnerabilities in our software, we recommend that production websites should upgrade to this version.

No API changes are generated in this release, so existing modules and websites should upgrade easily. Related to this release, we also issued a security update for the SilverStripe forum module.

Changelog
Download SilverStripe-v2.3.5.tar.gz
Post bug reports as usual at open.silverstripe.com
standard SilverStripe upgrade notes

On the topic of security, we recently updated developer documentation on security that we suggest SilverStripe developers read.

Join us at Linux.Conf.Au Open Day

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +1300

A free event for people interested in open source software will be held at the Wellington Town Hall this Saturday, 23 January. Running from 11am to 2pm, the open day is a rare opportunity to meet key people from around the world committed to the open source movement.

The day comprises exhibition booths showcasing open source software, a number of talks, and fun activities for kids as well as hardware and software hackers. The open day is the final event in the week-long Linux.Conf.Au conference, which has placed Wellington at the epicenter of the global open source movement. We hope to see you there - you'll find us at table number 15.

Learn more from the LCA2010 website.

SilverStripe recognised in global software award

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:48:00 +1300

Every year Packt Publishing, a tech book publisher, runs a global award for the best open source CMS. In 2009, SilverStripe had its best result yet.

The Packt CMS Award is a major award: many thousands of people around the world rate their favourite CMS, before judges thoroughly evaluate the most popularly voted software. There is no more significant worldwide competition that rates open source or proprietary content management platforms, so we're very proud of our year-on-year progress:

2007: Finalist (Top 5) in 'Most Promising' (Products under 2 years old) category
2008: Winner of 'Most Promising' category (USD2000 prize)
2009: Finalist (Top 3) in 'Best Overall CMS', a highly competitive category (USD2000 prize)

Judges of the award announced WordPress as the 2009 winner, rating SilverStripe second, tied with Modx. Damian Carville, Marketing Manager at Packt Publishing, said SilverStripe received 17% of the 23,000 public votes. This number is significant when you consider that there were 5 finalists, and some finalists such as WordPress and DotNetNuke have significantly older and thus larger communities who can vote. To be a finalist, SilverStripe had to gain public support in the form of nominations, and beat out dozens of other nominated products.

We asked the judges to offer feedback on what they rated as the strengths of our software and what their overall view of our software was. We also asked, if they were in the position of managing our software, what they would focus on adding or improving. Bryan Ruby from CMS Report.com responded to our request in a public blog post, and said the following about SilverStripe:

I mentioned at the start of this review that you can't choose a CMS solely on the criteria but also on how well it meets your project requirements. For the CMS projects that I'm routinely involved with, SilverStripe would likely be my first choice of the five CMS finalists in this category. My placement of SilverStripe in the number three spot is likely more a reflection that both WordPress and DotNetNuke are more mature applications and SilverStripe is still needing some room to grow as a full featured application.

Although SilverStripe is one of the youngest open source projects among the finalists, the availability of relevant documentation on its website scored high with me. The SilverStripe community has done a great job in mixing text, videos, and graphics to provide quality documentation that can't be matched by many of the open source projects I visit on a regular basis. If you take a deeper look into SilverStripe, you'll also find that SilverStripe also scores well in ease of installation, customization, and usability.

The one area where I thought SilverStripe could improve was in the availability of themes and perhaps even the quantity of available modules. Again though, SilverStripe's project community is still relatively young and with time there should be no doubt we'll be seeing a continued increase of themes and modules made available for SilverStripe.

Ease of Installation 4

Ease of Use (Usability) 4

Documentation on project's website 5

Scalability (extension/plugins) 4

Availability of themes 3

Security measures
4

Performance 4

Ease of Customization 4

Total Points
31

We'd like to thank the judges for their time and Packt Publishing for running the awards. We're also grateful to Packt for the $2000 prize - this will be spent on furthering our open source software. Lastly, and importantly, we'd like to thank our user and developer community for voting for us!

Microsoft WinCache benchmarks show 2x performance boost

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:56:00 +1300

Running SilverStripe on your Windows environments has just become faster!

Benchmarking done by our European partner iBuildings shows some dramatic performance improvements with Microsoft's new WinCache 1.0 PHP bytecode cache. The release of WinCache means that the past performance disadvantage of running SilverStripe on the Windows IIS web server (as opposed to Apache on Linux) has been largely eliminated. Microsoft describes the tool as containing three caches:

an opcode file cache, just like the one that APC provides to cache compiled PHP code;
a file cache to help when your PHP scripts run on remote servers; and
a relative file cache to cache relative file paths when you are running PHP scripts on remote servers.

WinCache therefore makes SilverStripe webpages and the CMS load much faster. iBuildings' benchmarks showed that WinCache roughly doubles the performance:

The exact performance improvement you might see will vary but you can rest assured that your website will run much quicker. We'd love to know the level of performance increase you find using WinCache.

SilverStripe 2.3.4 released

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:52:00 +1300

SilverStripe v2.3.4 has just been released! This is now the best version of our software to use. This version solves a number of bugs, some of which relate to security vulnerabilities. Thanks go to community members who identified bugs and contributed fixes to them!

Download SilverStripe-v2.3.4.tar.gz

English SilverStripe book now in Wellington libraries

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:31:00 +1300

The English edition of the SilverStripe book is now in libraries in Wellington, the home of SilverStripe.

Due to popular demand the books are already on loan, but you can reserve the book online through both the Hutt City Libraries and Wellington City Libraries websites, as seen below:

Don't forget: the English SilverStripe book is also available to buy on Amazon.com

SilverStripe 2.4 alpha release brings hierachical URLs, SQL Server support, and much more

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:27:00 +1300

We're extremely excited to announce SilverStripe v2.4 is now at alpha release stage!

This means it's ready for testing by our community while we continue to complete the intended features for the stable version, and complete our own testing. We do not recommend using this version of SilverStripe for production sites yet, unless you perform extensive testing on your own site first.

The SilverStripe 2.4 release is all about using SilverStripe in bigger and more complex production environments and it brings a wealth of great features.

Download SilverStripe-v2.4.0-alpha1.tar.gz

Hierachical URLs

If your website contains hundreds or thousands of pages, you may find the default way SilverStripe handles friendly URLs a little limiting. For instance:

http://website.com/new-york-staff-john-smith/

With hierachical URLs, the address for such a page might be:

http://website.com/offices/new-york/staff/john-smith/

One of the principles of this feature is that it provides a logical "bread crumb" for a page. Each segment in the URL (as separated by a slash symbol) is a page in itself that can be visited. Hierachical URLs also reduce the problem of "running out" of URLs, where you might be forced to have URLs like http://website.com/staff-2/. SilverStripe will allow you to run the website in either simple or hierachical URL mode, so that for simple websites you can retain short, memorable website addresses.

Huge thanks go to Andrew Short, a member of our developer community based in Australia, who is responsible for writing most of this feature.

Microsoft SQL Server Database support

There is strong demand for SilverStripe to run on the Microsoft platform—in recent months there have been more than 36,000 downloads via the Microsoft.com web application gallery alone. We have therefore worked hard to allow SilverStripe to natively run on a SQL Server 2008 database, eliminating the requirement to run SilverStripe on MySQL (of course it still runs great on MySQL, though). We're really happy with the results, and we have government websites like www.gw.govt.nz already running on this platform.

Running SilverStripe on SQL Server requires the installation of the SilverStripe SQL Server module.

Experimental support for PostgreSQL

SilverStripe 2.4 can also run on a PostgreSQL 8.3 or later database. Our testing of this is not as extensive as it has been for Microsoft SQL Server, so we're being cautious at this stage and labelling it experimental. We'd love people to install this version of SilverStripe with the PostgreSQL Database Support module and raise issues.

Performance and memory use optimisations

Memory use optimsations mean that the CMS back-end interface for Site Content easily scales to well over 10,000 pages.
Performance improvements around Object and ViewableData property access.
Improved unit test execution speed.
Decreased memory usage in "Files & Images" section.
Tested that SilverStripe is compatible with Microsoft's new WinCache PHP bytecode cache. Anecdotal tests show that WinCache provides a 50% speed improvement in generating SilverStripe webpages.

Introducing roles

SilverStripe has long had support for setting granular security permissions on pages. Users can be a member of one or more groups, and groups can be configured to have various system rights, and various view and edit permissions to a page by page basis. This provides a great deal of flexibility, but in complex organisation stuctures, it means the task of setting up the permission structures means spending a lot of time creating security groups.

Managing more complex security configurations has been eased in SilverStripe 2.4 with the introduction of roles. Roles allow groupings of people to be:

Assigned the same system rights (e.g. access to create pages but not create users.)
Assigned those rights to different sections of a website (e.g. news section, product catalogue, corporate profile, etc.)

This simplifies maintainance of the rights and users for large organisations. It makes permissions less repetitive to set up. Roles are overkill in simple situations, and therefore their use is optional.

Other key improvements

A "SiteConfig" record stores site-wide settings and default permissions and author groups for pages
The CMS now searches for broken internal links to other pages and broken file references, and highlights them in the WYSIWYG editor. A report can be used to show broken links across the website.
Improved API to allow custom tags to be parsed within CMS content before being presented on webpages.
More fine-grained permission control for translators
Better XSS security of the autologin token by using HTTPOnly cookies
More secure against brute force login attempts

Full changelog

See http://open.silverstripe.org/wiki/ChangeLog/2.4.0

Want to help out?

We'd love for you to download this release, test it, and raise articlate bug reports. In particular we are interested in:

Testing that upgrades from older versions of SilverStripe go smoothly.
Testing the new features, like hierachical URLs, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.
Manual testing of all CMS features work as intended.
Testing across various hosting environments, operating systems, PHP versions, and web browsers.

To raise a bug, login at open.silverstripe.com and create a new ticket. When adding a ticket, be sure to specify the version as 2.4.0 alpha.

SilverStripe book available in UK

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:33:00 +1300

If you're a developer based in the UK or Europe, you now have much quicker and cheaper access to our fantastic developer resource, SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development.

This is because Amazon.co.uk and other UK booksellers now show the 456 page book as being in stock, meaning you no longer need to purchase via the US-based amazon.com store.

You're invited to the Wellington Web Meetup!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:53:00 +1300

Wellington web designers and frontend coders have recently formed a monthly post-work event, the Wellington Web Meetup.

SilverStripe is supporting this month's meetup, which will be held at 6pm on Thursday, 12 November at our offices on Level 4, 97-99 Courtenay Place.

We like the idea of web fanatics from different companies getting together into the same room and, based on the quality of the presentations at previous events, this event is well worth attending.

These monthly events are run by Wellington web designer Dave Keyes, with this month's line-up featuring:

Hamish Friedlander from SilverStripe.
"JavaScript lover Hamish presents his new baby, the Concrete library for jQuery... and shows us the tidy code & visual results!"
Alastair Bruerton from Provoke
"Renown Dux-er (or Dux-ist?) Al is keen to give a visual design presentation which leads into a open chat on visual processes."
Bob Medcalf from Simplar
"UX martial artist Bob will take us through 'How to karate chop a marketing executive and other useful tips for web creatives.'"
TEDx Movie Film

There is no cost to attend, and some food and drink will be provided. However, you will need to RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/wellingtonweb/members/10568475/

Have you voted for SilverStripe?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:26:00 +1300

Friday 30 October is the last day that you can vote for SilverStripe CMS in the PacktPub Open Source CMS Awards.

We'd love to get your support, because winning will raise awareness about SilverStripe CMS, and will provide a monetary prize to fund product development work!

If you voted for us in the earlier, nominations stage—thank you! Please vote for us again in the finalist stage.

The form (pictured) is super simple, and voting puts you in a draw for an iPod Touch.

SilverStripe CMS on Windows 7

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:00:00 +1300

With the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system released last week, we thought we'd take SilverStripe CMS for a test drive on it. We used Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install SilverStripe. This approach has now been used about 36,000 times by the world to install SilverStripe.

We found the installation to be quick and easy. A dramatic improvement is that Microsoft's installer now installs MySQL for you, which it didn't when first released back in April. The CMS and public-facing website ran straight away and worked robustly in Internet Explorer 8. The installer automatically enabled Microsoft's new wincache bytecode cache which, despite being new, provided SilverStripe with a dramatic speed boost and didn't appear to cause any problems. All of this demonstrates Microsoft's recent work to streamline installing PHP applications on the native Windows stack.

We're confident that SilverStripe will install and run smoothly for you—but if you identify a problem please raise a detailed bug report at open.silverstripe.com so that we can squash it quick! For this test we used MySQL to act as the database, because the current stable version of SilverStripe (2.3.3) doesn't yet support SQL Server. (We do have SQL Server 2008 support as a module that works with our dailybuilds, and this support is used to run production websites powered by SQL Server. Once the SQL Server support is included in a stable release, we will bring this into the Web Platform Installer.)

Announcing the release of Concrete, SilverStripe 2.4's jQuery webapp library

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:03:00 +1300

Update (3 December 2009): Concrete has now been renamed Entwine.

We'd like to announce the release of the Entwine and Selector libraries for jQuery.

Developed by Hamish Friedlander, and partially sponsored by SilverStripe, this library will provide the architectural underpinnings for JavaScript in SilverStripe v2.4.

Although initially developed for use with client sites, the library has proven so useful that it's been spun off into an independent project. It lets developers write frontend web-application code in a clean and extendable manner—which is important in SilverStripe to ensure that, when the system needs extending for a particular site, the architecture doesn't get in the way.

For the techies in the room:

Entwine provides a brand new model of JavaScript code organisation; a replacement for object oriented programming that is focused on adding functions to DOM elements based on their structure and content. It’s a merging of the model and view layer that initially seems weird, but can give very powerful results.

We’re taking ideas from Prototype’s Behavior and Low Pro libraries and jQuery’s Effen and Live Query libraries. However, we're extending the concepts of those libraries to provide a complete alternative to traditional OO design; self-aware methods, inheritance, polymorphism, constructors and destructors, namespacing, and getter/setter style properties, all without a single class definition.

Compared to jQuery.plugins and jQuery.UI widgets, Entwine provides:

code clarity — the code structure leads to more readable code
extensibility — specificity-based method selection allows the injection of logic almost anywhere without monkey patching
greater organisational capabilities — syntax promotes modularity
reduced name clashes — powerful refactoring-free namespacing eliminates name pollution

A key component of Entwine is Selector - a CSS selector engine developed in conjunction with Entwine to give it maximum performance. For the use patterns it is designed for, it can out-perform jQuery's native Sizzle selector engine by an order of magnitude.

A taste:

$('div').concrete({
    highlight: function(){ 
        this.effect('bounce');
    }
});
$('div.important').concrete({
    highlight: function(){
        this._super();
        this.animate({background: 'white'});
    }
});
$('#namediv').highlight();

As well as the source and a tutorial, there is an 18-minute screencast available to help introduce the new concepts:

Book sells out on Amazon.com; restocked now.

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:06:00 +1300

Copies of the SilverStripe book are selling like hotcakes! It took just four days for Amazon.com to sell all of their initial stock of SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development.

The screenshot below shows Amazon down to their final copy, and was snapped during the weekend. Amazon.com has since restocked the book—so head off and buy a copy!

Guitar Hero website relaunched using SilverStripe CMS

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +1300

We're proud to announce that SilverStripe is the engine behind the very cool and recently relaunched Guitar Hero website.

The site is filled to the brim with video and social functions, and is a community-focussed base for fans of the popular console game. The website integrates with the game itself, publishing a global leaderboard and facilitating online tournaments.

BLITZ is the company behind the design and development of the site. Noah Gedrich, Director of Technology at BLITZ, tells us about their experience building the website:

“With only a six week production cycle for the new guitarhero.com, we needed a CMS that would give us control over our content and let us localize it, without getting in the way of our creative. SilverStripe was the perfect fit, giving us not only that control and localization support, but because of the Sapphire framework underpinning the whole thing, it also provided us with a development structure for all of the additional programming required by the many social functions of this very complex site.”

You can learn more about the website in a blog post by BLITZ—but really, you should go and visit the website!

Amazon.com now selling SilverStripe book

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:56:00 +1300

Amazon.com has the SilverStripe book in stock!

As of a few hours ago, SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development is ready for shipping from Amazon.com, and priced at USD31.49. To purchase the book, visit Amazon (and feel free to share this link with your colleagues and friends):

http://www.amazon.com/SilverStripe-Complete-Guide-CMS-Development/dp/0470681837/

There is a permanent page with information about the book at silverstripe.org/silverstripe-book.

Amazon.com appears to be the first place our book has become available. If you want the book soon, we suggest buying from there. We expect to hear news that bookstores and other online stores have the book in stock as October progresses.

A big shout out goes to those who have already supported us by pre-ordering the book off Amazon—you should have a copy of the book within a few days!

The English SilverStripe book is now in print

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:05:00 +1300

Two advance copies of the English SilverStripe book have just arrived at our office. This is exciting stuff—months of effort have gone into writing this book so it's wonderful to finally see it in print!

Our publisher, Wiley, informs us that shipments of the book are already on their way to stores around the world, so if you pre-order it on Amazon.com you might have some bedtime reading later this week.

Pictured: translator Julian Seidenberg and co-author Ingo Schommer, the SilverStripe staff responsible for the English version of the SilverStripe book.

SilverStripe into final of 2009 CMS Awards. Vote now!

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:51:00 +1200

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.

With over 12,000 nominations, the vote was a lot closer than expected.

We now need you to vote for SilverStripe again as a finalist. If we get into the top three, we'll get a monetary prize that will be used to make our product even better! Voting ends on October 26th.

Join us at Software Freedom Day 09

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:34:00 +1200

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.

Software Freedom Day in Wellington has lots of events for you to participate in — there will be a barcamp, tech talks, an installfest, a hackfest, and a makerfest. So whether you want to talk, listen, or play, there will be heaps going on throughout the day.

As part of the installfest, SilverStripe's Will Rossiter will be demonstrating how to set up a SilverStripe site, and Rainer Spittel will be participating in a panel discussion.

You're welcome to bring your kids along: Children and students will have the opportunity to participate in a variety of activities including programming, testing OLPC laptops, brainstorming, games, and a treasure hunt. (Please remember that children will need to be accompanied by a parent or guardian.)

There will be free WiFi courtesy of cafeNET, and lunch and afternoon tea will also be provided. Please register if you would like to attend — be quick to avoid disappointment!

You can follow Software Freedom Day 09 on twitter @WLGSFD. Tag your tweets #sfdwlg09.

This is going to be a fantastic day for all, and we look forward to seeing you there!

Ease of Installation	4
Ease of Use (Usability)	4
Documentation on project's website	5
Scalability (extension/plugins)	4
Availability of themes	3
Security measures	4
Performance	4
Ease of Customization	4
Total Points	31