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SilverStripe vs Other CMSs.


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7 Posts   6960 Views

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SteveG

Community Member, 3 Posts

1 May 2008 at 11:47am

Hi all,

Newbie here. :-)

I have spent several months looking at a heap of different CMSs and had just about made my mind up to go with two: CMS Made Simple (www.cmsmadesimple.org) for simple websites (because of ease of use) and Joomla for more complex ones. And then I came across SilverStripe.

It looked very, very interesting so I downloaded and installed it. When I logged in I thought, well, it looked kind of sparse. But looking at some of the sites built with SilverStripe it looks like it can do some very impressive things.

So I'm guessing I'm probably missing something and that there is some functionality I'm not aware of. Can anyone perhaps tell me how SilverStripe compares with other CMSs in terms of functionality, ease-of-use, etc.?

Also, are there any plans to add PayPal support to the ecommerce module?

Please note that I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything like that. My questions are genuine. I really want to know if I should be looking at SilverStripe instead of other CMSs, especially the two I originally decided to go with.

To give you a little bit of background, I am mainly a Delphi programmer developing Windows applications. I have built a few websites using HTML, CSS, ISAPI, IntraWeb etc. I don't have any experience with PHP but I'm planning to learn it as I have seen a lot of impressive websites that have been built with it.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

Regards,

Steve

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saimo

Community Member, 67 Posts

1 May 2008 at 7:37pm

I have never made a site with either of the CMS's you mention, but I have seen Joomla's admin area.

Silverstripe tries very hard to separate content from design and functionality (it's a MVC framework). This essentially means that you have a little less control from the controlpanel than in some other CMS's. This is the design of SilverStripe. If you want to have some more functionality you have to subclass a pagetype in php. To change the style of the site you have to install or make a theme and then set that theme in the file called _config.php. This is because the admin area is made for content authors, not designers.

If you want to build a site without coding any php, you should choose Joomla, but I don't think Joomla's database abstraction is as good as SilverStripes, so if you're looking at doing a lot of customization, you might find Silverstripe easier to use, especially if you're not used to databases. On the other hand Joomla have more avaliable plugins and modules than SilverStripe.

You should know also, SilverStripe is quite demanding for web servers compared to other CMS's, especially it's memory intensive (they recommend at least 32Mb of php_memory compared to joomla which I belive requires around 10Mb).

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Willr

Forum Moderator, 5523 Posts

1 May 2008 at 7:56pm

Also, are there any plans to add PayPal support to the ecommerce module?

search the forums / download the trunk off SVN. Its in there somewhere!. Like saimo has mentioned SilverStripe has a certain way of doing things that make it awesome for some projects and less helpful on others. A couple points - SilverStripe is actually 2 things. Down below the hood it is a PHP Framework. The CMS ontop just provides an awesome addition.

It is also very much more 'hands on' then Joomla. We don't have have the amount of modules/plugins that are available for Joomla so alot of features arent just plug and play you will need to get you hands a bit more dirtier in the code. Saying that through our modules do provide alot of common functionality that you can build with - forums, ecommerce, blog and these install super quickly and easily. Also the MVC approach with the Framework does make coding a lot more fun then hacking say Wordpress to add features.

I recommend downloading it, mucking around with it, try a few things see if you could use it or not. If you have any issues or questions feel free to ask!

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SteveG

Community Member, 3 Posts

2 May 2008 at 1:48pm

Thanks guys. I really appreciate the comments and advice. I will definitely spend some more time looking at SilverStripe. It has got me intrigued. :-)

Regards,

Steve

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Sam

Administrator, 690 Posts

8 May 2008 at 12:18pm

One of the things that you wind up doing a lot of in SilverStripe is creating different page types. Each page type can have its own fields for content, etc. The system is designed to do this relatively easily.

In this way, you tailor the CMS to the content needs of the specific site. The end result it a CMS that is much more intuitive for your content authors, because it isn't cluttered with 1000s of options that don't really apply to this site.

But, yes, it does mean that the default install is a little sparse ;-)

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raamklaza

Community Member, 182 Posts

3 August 2008 at 1:40am

Qoute: "This is because the admin area is made for content authors, not designers."

Why not use the Sercurity tab to set permissions for stuff like this?

It would be a really nice enhancement to do more from the cms then going in the code. So you have and admin permission who can do everything and maybe a webdev permission who can only do webdev stuff and a author who can only use the site content.

Some configurations should be available for a admin in a cms. Like turn on comments, turn on rss feeds, edding modules as a zip through the browser (sometimes you don't have ftp access), changing css or even templates,

These are just some examples but it would make it a complete product in my opinion. It now relies on webdev with php knowlegde. A nitwit should be able to set the general website meta tags or upload a module to extent his website. All with the right permissions set in the securitity tab ofcourse.

How is Silverstripe looking at this internally?

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Willr

Forum Moderator, 5523 Posts

3 August 2008 at 11:03am

Some configurations should be available for a admin in a cms. Like turn on comments

Things that are per page defined eg comments and meta tags should be in the cms as do things that are optional like widgets etc. Turning on comments is already there...

Global Varibles like site name and settings in the cms is currently a bit of a mess if you want them. dio5 has made an module which allows editing of Site variables (eg SiteName and any other options you want) from the cms - Its on the forum somewhere.

Installing/maintaining modules from the CMS is also something thats been mentioned and Im sure we will see something in the future to do with managing modules from the backend.