Hello all. Must say I'm very excited to hear about SilverStripe. After a moderately underwhelming experience trying to incorporate a wordpress blog into my existing site, I decided I should have a better look into CMS's so as to fix a number of issues in one move. When I found there was a solid alternative from of all places, my home country I had to check it out. Well everything seems to check out on a fundamental level, but I want to ask a few questions to see if SilverStripe will (easily) do what I am after.

I already have a html/php website set up for a gaming community I'm involved with. I put it together by buying a decent looking template and then systematically pulling it apart and making it do what we need - which is about my level of programming. It started with a few static pages and I have added wordpress and a phpbb3 forum, but I am getting pretty tired of toying with the static pages, especially in order to get say, activity highlights from other pages to display on my main page. I assume a CMS will be much better integrated by nature. Am I right?

So here's the stuff I'm after that ideally is already included in the SilverStripe install, or alternatively can be added with existing modules and/or existing tutorials:

* Blog or something like a blog for articles with good options for menu's, tags, categories, and permalinks
* User comments on articles
* Forum
* 1 sign-up for users to post on the Forum and Comment on articles
* Can utilize and manipulate incoming RSS and post updates as new articles (A News Feed)
* Automatic updates to homepage based on content from other pages
* Making/modifying templates is no more difficult than working with an existing website
* Search

That's about it i think. Pretty straight-forward wish list for my demographic I'd say :) but I just wanted to be sure my expectations were achievable before going and doing a whole lot of work.

Any response or advice very much appreciated. Thanks

* Blog or something like a blog for articles with good options for menu's, tags, categories, and permalinks

The Blog Module should have you covered

* User comments on articles

User comments are standard on any page. Out of the box you have Page Comments, Comment Moderation.

* Forum

Forum Module which you see right here. Currently 0.2 version is nearing official release.

* 1 sign-up for users to post on the Forum and Comment on articles

Yep again this is an out of the box feature. You just need to add a few config settings. We have done this on the http://www.californiawomen.org/

* Can utilize and manipulate incoming RSS and post updates as new articles (A News Feed)

Can do this one again, Widgets which do it out of the box but sometimes you will have to write some code for this but an RSSParser class is provided

* Automatic updates to homepage based on content from other pages

You will have to write about 5-10 lines of code for this - Its covered in tutorial 2.

* Making/modifying templates..

Have a read of tutorial 1 + 2.

* Search

Covered in tutorial 3 or 4. Built in as of 2.3 aswell.

As with most Frameworks its not quite as easy as click a button and you will instantly have a working site but nothing in the list should be so scary / unthinkable you couldn't get it to work in SilverStripe. Anyway your best bet is to read tutorial 1, 2 get a grip to using SilverStripe and fill in the blanks