Hello,

I'm a graphic designer, used to building somewhat static websites in Dreamweaver. I have now been asked to become involved in a revamp of a client's website.

The site in question is pretty big and requires a CMS to look after membership details and allow easy editing of content by the client themselves.

Registered members will have access to non-public parts of the site and (thus) non-public files too. The members will have their own "home page" within that members-only section... listing contact details about that specific member.

Equally the site will need to be able to seamlessly connect to a 3rd party "portal" which will contain e-commerce facilities. The intention is that membership log-in details from the main site itself will be passed via "web services" to the portal... so that members do not need to sign-in again at the portal.

Does this sound like something SilverStripe can handle? And is SilverStripe simple enough for a designer to grasp the the more tech CMS stuff?

Cheers,
m.

I'm kinda new to SilverStripe myself but have more experience than you so thought I'd try to help. What you've described sounds like something SilverStripe could handle, yes. I don't know how "seamlessly" the portal integration thingy would work, but then I don't really understand what that would entail. But SilverStripe has "web services" functionality as both client and server. With some PHP coding I imagine you could make it work.

As to how far you could go as a "designer", presumably with little or no PHP experience, I'd suggest not very far... unless you're prepared to dive in and learn a bit about PHP pretty quickly. Assuming that's not what you're envisaging, you'll need to hook up with a programmer to help you.

Toby