Hey Everyone,

I have a new potential client, and as a new-ish webdesigner, this will easily be my largest undertaking to date! I'm considering several CMS solutions for the job, and I've done some research, but I could use some suggestions on which direction to go. The CMS's I'm looking at are Wordpress, Silverstripe, and MODx, but I'm open to any other options you my suggest.

Some of the pages the client wants are standard and can be easily done with any CMS:
About, Services, Testimonials, Videos, Contact, along with some other standard pages.

However, they also want two portions of the site that I'm not sure how to tackle. One part is an E-Commerce store, which I've never dealt with before, but have looked into several solutions.

The other part is an Online Personal Training section where new clients can pay for admittance and current clients can sign up for, where they can have customized workouts and diets shown for each client. The biggest issue I've run into when trying to find a solution on this front is that any plugin I've looked at for say Wordpress is that none of them offer individual pages on a per member basis. I hope this all makes sense, and if anyone has seen a CMS or plugin for a CMS that can pull this off, that'd be great!

If anyone has any advice or suggestions for me, I'd be eternally grateful! Thank you so much!

I know this is a Silverstripe forum, but I figured you guys might be able to help!

Hi shick11sp,

I certainly can't say what you should use, but I can tell you why I like SS.

I've been researching, using, messing around with probably 20 different cms solutions for over a year now and by far SS has proven itself superior in almost every way.

1. It handles multiple templates (more than just a home page and sub-page)
2. It's built on a PHP framework

As for what it can't do...It's built on a framework. I'm not sure there's anything it can't do.

I can only name one other cms that meets both of those criteria and it's not open source. Just doing a comparison on those two criteria alone should be enough for most people to look seriously at SS.

Good luck!

Chris.b

Thanks Chris!

Anyone else have any further insight on the matter? If so, thanks!

Hi shick11sp,

I develop websites on both SilverStripe and WordPress, have never used ModX. It seems you would have more flexibility with SilverStripe but implementing your ecommerce and member sections will require some custom development work to extend SilverStripe. If you haven't already, picking up a copy of "SilverStripe - The Complete Guide to CMS Development" will bring you up to speed on working with SilverStripe.

ExpressionEngine is a licensed commercial solution with a lot of add-ons that you could look into.

As prawnstar stated, SilverStripe is a framework and essentially can do anything you put your mind to coding. The considerations for ecommerce vary greatly depending on the project. Something to consider, if you don't want to get your own SSL cert and deal with PCI req., is to use a hosted cart/payment solution like FoxyCart.

- Ryan

I always use Wordpress for small-ish jobs. For anything not too involved it's the best there is. Silverstripe has a lot of positives but you need to know how to write PHP in order to get it to work - I can't stress that enough. If you want something with plug-and-play modules etc you're probably better off with Drupal or Joomla. Personally, I've been writing PHP for years to Silverstripe suits me. Also, there is one book for Silverstripe but it doesn't cover the newest release - otherwise it's a good book, but there are no others to choose from.

Anybody who uses Silverstripe will tell you the documentation blows and the community is fairly small. It's a great community, but compared to other CMS not nearly as many people are on the forums. On this forum you may wait days for somebody to respond, on a Drupal forum it's more like minutes. (Case in point I'm the third person to respond to you on this thread a week after your first post!) I'll often Google a problem only to find a thread on the forum where somebody has asked the same question but nobody has answered it. Despite all that bitching once you get into Silverstripe it's power and flexibility is unmatched by any of the other CMS I've tried (which is a ton). However, it is not for everybody - I'd suggest making a test site in Drupal, Joomla, ModX and Silverstripe and pick the one that suits your strengths and your project best. I chose Silverstripe.