I'd like to make an unusual post and throw a bit of praise the way of SS. I see way too many negative posts from people who just simply don't "get" how Sapphire & the CMS works, because they either don't understand the MVC architecture concepts, or haven't taken the time to learn the framework and plow through the issues, gaining some experience with it.
In the beginning, I too was unimpressed by SS and Sapphire. I ran into problems. I was too used to the sleek Wordpress, which has a larger open source community and years and years of development behind it. However, if you can get past the fact that it's a young framework, Sapphire and SS are actually pretty great tools to use in building custom websites.
For these who think SS isn't professional enough, or can't cut it, handle the load, etc. I say you're wrong... I've built several high-traffic sites on the framework, and have some amount of experience with running Sapphire-based websites. The websites I manage, on average, get tens of thousands of visits and triple that in pageviews. These sites are secure and run smoothly without much maintenance needed. We haven't had much member complaints, if any at all they were aesthetic issues, not functionality issues.
So in closing, I just wanted to throw some good words towards the SilverStripe dev team and encourage them to keep up the great work. They need a bit of praise every now and then because they gotta deal with our griping all the time!
I also look forward to being a part of the SS community in the years to come.
-R
Webmaster of the Regal Models network of websites and consultant to several Los Angeles & New York based companies in matters of web design and development.
