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Interested in helping us usability test our sites?
In order for websites to remain relevant and useful, we believe it's important to usability test them on a regular basis. We don't only recommend this to our clients, but we practice it too.
It's been just over a year since we redesigned silverstripe.com and the best way to check whether it's meeting the goals of our users is to usability test it. We're planning to do this over the next couple of months, initially via a short questionnaire and then with face-to-face interviews in Wellington.
In late July we'll be asking interested users the reasons why they visit both silverstripe.com and silverstripe.org and for details of what they're looking for when they're there. In August we'll be inviting test users to come into the SilverStripe office in Wellington, where we'll run through a series of scenarios to test how they navigate through our sites, and we'll then explore areas that could be improved.
After collating and reviewing all the results we're hoping to better understand exactly what our users (you guys!) want from our sites and how they should be structured to make them as user-friendly as possible.
We're interested in talking with a range of users, including developers, designers and clients. If you're keen on participating then please contact Julian (J) Meadow, our resident usability testing expert, and he'll send you more details. Those that participate in both stages will be rewarded with an iTunes or book voucher.
Of course, anytime you have feedback on our sites you are always more than welcome to let us know by filling in a feedback form, which can be accessed via the the footer on both sites. We really appreciate your comments, so keep them coming!
We'll keep you posted on progress over the next couple of months.
Wellington's June Meetup
Thanks to everyone who came along to our June meetup in Wellington. We hope you enjoyed your well-deserved beer and learnt a thing or two! We were treated to two excellent talks from Sam Minnée and John Milmine. Here's a quick rundown of what they spoke about, with slides and videos for those of you who weren't able to make it.
Sam Minnée
SilverStripe CEO Sam Minnée spoke about the technical improvements being made to the ORM in SilverStripe CMS 3, explaining how it will improve performance and reduce the code needed to get information in and out of your database.
A Sapphire framework for OceanBrowser
With the release of SilverStripe 3 preview 1, Sapphire is to be independent of the CMS, to really unleash the full power of the framework. We believe that Sapphire can be used to build much more than just traditional content managed websites - and we're not the only ones who are thinking that way.
Sapphire has also been embraced by OceanBrowser, a Dunedin company who make OB3, a web app for learning that is based around the social media model.
Winners at the CMS Expo SilverStripe Awards
As part of the recent CMS Expo in Chicago, we held SilverStripe Awards to celebrate the amazing work being done by our community. We encouraged everyone to enter, and were thrilled that there were nearly sixty entrants for the eight categories.
The awards were judged by a panel independant of SilverStripe Ltd, and were announced at the end of the expo. Awards were given to companies from Europe, the UK, USA, Canada and New Zealand - a good spread around the world.
Wellington’s April Meetup
Last Wednesday, 38 people gathered at an Irish pub to have a drink. More specifically, in Wellington, 38 people came along to the SilverStripe meetup we hosted, to meet one another, listen to some speakers, and just generally immerse themselves in the community in the flesh. In case you missed it, we've got slides and videos of the speakers.
Felipe Skroski
Our creative director, Felipe Skroski, presented work in progress on the interface for SilverStripe CMS 3.0, and the process SilverStripe is following for its development.
Even more meetups and reminders
The meetup bandwagon is continuing to roll out around the world!
We've had write-ups after recent events in Melbourne, Utrecht and London, and there's still more meetups to come.
SilverStripe Awards at the CMS Expo
We're running some SilverStripe Awards, in conjunction with the CMS Expo, and we want you to enter. You, your website, or your company may be a worthy entrant - or you may know of someone else who should win.
Nominations are open until April 20. There are a lot of categories, and they fall into three groups:
SilverStripe core now on GitHub
We have recently moved our source code from Subversion to GitHub. GitHub is a popular and hosted source code control system based on Git, an advanced successor to Subversion.
We've made this transition because it simplifies our software release process, as we can now more easily work on two versions of our code simultaneously - our current stable series (e.g. v2.4.x) as well as upcoming releases that contain vastly different code (e.g. v3.) GitHub makes it much easier for developers outside the company to contribute code to us. This is important because, getting our community more involved with core development is a key part of our plans for SilverStripe 3.0.
SilverStripe meetups happening all over the place!
People like to talk about SilverStripe face to face. Our amazing community has taken it upon itself to arrange meetups in several countries, complementing the meetups we run in Wellington.
All events are free to attend, let you meet others using and developing with SilverStripe CMS, and cover a range of topics, including discussing the features in our next major upcoming software release, SilverStripe CMS v3.0. We hope you can make it to one!
Meetups and 3.0
Last Wednesday around fifty SilverStripe CMS users gathered here in Wellington to have some drinks, chat about what they’re up to, and learn from each other.
We started out the event with presentations from community members Tim Klein and Cam Findlay. Then, for the first time, we publicly presented information about SilverStripe 3.0, with Ingo Schommer giving a well-rounded summary of what we’re up to, then answering the many questions asked by those present. It was really great to be able to meet so many people who are all contributing to the open source project. It’d be nice if we could travel the world doing these presentations to all the SilverStripe communities, but in lieu of that, we’ve got videos and slides to share with you - feel free to ask questions in the comments if there’s more you want to know. We’re also planning to hold meetups every two months, with another Wellington meetup on April 13, with more details to come.
The Trials and Tribulations of a Freelancer
<p><em>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 <a href="http://www.silverstripe.org/silverstripe-paypal-mini-cart-integration/">SilverStripe PayPal Mini Cart Integration</a>.<br/></em></p>Want to know more about the company that brought you SilverStripe? Then check out SilverStripe.com
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