With the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system released last week, we thought we'd take SilverStripe CMS for a test drive on it. We used Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install SilverStripe. This approach has now been used about 36,000 times by the world to install SilverStripe.
We found the installation to be quick and easy. A dramatic improvement is that Microsoft's installer now installs MySQL for you, which it didn't when first released back in April. The CMS and public-facing website ran straight away and worked robustly in Internet Explorer 8. The installer automatically enabled Microsoft's new wincache bytecode cache which, despite being new, provided SilverStripe with a dramatic speed boost and didn't appear to cause any problems. All of this demonstrates Microsoft's recent work to streamline installing PHP applications on the native Windows stack.
We're confident that SilverStripe will install and run smoothly for you—but if you identify a problem please raise a detailed bug report at open.silverstripe.com so that we can squash it quick! For this test we used MySQL to act as the database, because the current stable version of SilverStripe (2.3.3) doesn't yet support SQL Server. (We do have SQL Server 2008 support as a module that works with our dailybuilds, and this support is used to run production websites powered by SQL Server. Once the SQL Server support is included in a stable release, we will bring this into the Web Platform Installer.)
