Hi there,

Looking to create a CMS for a local sports club which can take registrations for teams as well as pay subs through paypal or similar.

Other than that it will have standard stuff like news, image gallery, blog, team/player profiles etc.

I have previously built sites in Wordpress more than anything but looking for something more suitable for this project. I have spent some time with drupal but it seems to be a steep learning curve and wondering whether Silverstripe is a better alternative?

Any help/tips/ideas would be great. Does silverstripe have modules that can deal with what I am trying to build?

Thanks,
Ben

http://www.silverstripe.org/extending-silverstripe/

There's Blog and Image Gallery modules, and I'm unsure on modules for member profiles in the manner you'd like but you can search at the link above or custom code the DataObjects and relationships. There are some excellent tutorials on using DataObjects as pages at ssbits.com.

If you like the "easy install", "drag and drop", "almost never get your hands dirty in code" kind of stuff, then you probably should stick to Wordpress. SilverStripe is still a young CMS and a lot of the commonplace features offered by WP modules haven't made their way here yet. If you're a developer, feel free to contribute by building a module of your own! Or two! (and submitting them to us, of course)

Hey Leithal,

In my experience with CMS's, SilverStripe is a lot more flexible than most. It also has a powerful framework behind it, you can easily build anything from simple web sites to complex web apps. There are modules available to do pretty much everything you listed and they are easily customisable too.

http://www.silverstripe.org/blog-module
www.silverstripe.org/imagegallery-module
http://www.silverstripe.org/payment-module
https://github.com/ajshort/silverstripe-memberprofiles

More modules, themes and widgets can be found here - http://www.silverstripe.org/extending-silverstripe/

Thanks very much for the advice! I would say I have junior PHP knowledge but keen to further my knowledge. Thinking I will give it a go, looks easier to get my head around than drupal.

Again thanks for your help Squatch and Ryan - looking forward to learning about it hopefully can contribute something along the way.

Cheers.

I have junior PHP knowledge but keen to further my knowledge

Then stick with silverstripe - it is by far the best written PHP code in a CMS I have found and will enchance your knowledge, learning good OO && MVC habits - instead of some of the other systems that may well introduce bad habits.

thanks swaiba - def sounds like something im after then!

Have spent an hour or so going through the basics and liking what I see. Just getting used the rebuilds and adding manuals etc. which is all new but makes perfect sense.

How hard would it be to implement something like the news slider like what's on this website?

http://www.whscharmers.org/

Is it a matter of getting it working in html/css first?

Cheers,
Leithal

Sliders are fairly straight forward. I would probably find a nice jQuery slider plugin first, add the javascript, css and html to the template and make sure it's all working with (static) placeholder content. Then you just have to create a dataobject with the required properties (image, title, caption, etc), populate it with some content and send that to the template to replace the static placeholders.

Once you are comfortable with creating and looping through dataobjects in the template, you shouldn't have much trouble with displaying the content in a slider :)