Hey guys,

I have been asked to review some CMS systems for a new project, I have been prototyping with Joomla 1.5 so far and have come to the conclusion that it requires too many changes to core files to be manageable for our needs. So after another long search I finally stumbled upon SS, which in my opinion looks very good :)

So I have some general questions just to check the basics, sorry if they are answered somewhere else.

The site we would be creating would be a large news portal, with thousands of news items. From looking at the admin interface the way the site content tree works for news articles this style would not be very practical for thousands n thousands of articles. So is it possible to add top level modules ( like the newsletters ) so we could create a custom interface for managing the news items? Also how difficult would this be and would it require any core file changes ?

Is it possible to restrict front-end access to certain pieces of content / is there an acl api?

Is there an issue tracker so my team could submit bugs and patches etc?

Are there options for paying for official support?

Ok I think that's about it, time to prototype some things :)

Thx

[MuTe]

So is it possible to add top level modules ( like the newsletters ) so we could create a custom interface for managing the news items? Also how difficult would this be and would it require any core file changes ?
> Yes, you can add more top level items easily and customise them greatly within the existing framework. Example is "Inform" and "NZCT" at http://www.silverstripe.com/web-applications/

Is it possible to restrict front-end access to certain pieces of content / is there an acl api?
> I did a post recently on this on how you can easily put together something, however shortly one of our Google Summer of Code projects will provide this; check our homepage over the weekend when I do a write up.

Is there an issue tracker so my team could submit bugs and patches etc?
> Trac will be open at support.silverstripe.com shortly to anyone, although those paying for service have this already (for years).

Are there options for paying for official support?
> Yes, see http://www.silverstripe.com/support/

Thx for the reply :)

I will probably do some prototypes over the week then, what's the best version to use. The release asked me to turn short tags on, I would like to avoid doing this if possible.

Thx

[MuTe]

Use 202rc3, its likely to be renamed and made the 202 stable

Out of curiosity why the hestitation around short tags?

Its just part of our coding standards and that it isn't a standard php 5 setup.

Time for some prototyping now :)

Thx for your help