I was recommended the SilverStripe platform for a CMS/Ecommerce project I'm due to start for a client, but I suspect it was suggested simply because the CMS aspect looked easy, and with no thought on whether it was suitable from an e-commerce perspective.

Judging by comments in some of these threads, I'm not convinced that this will be an easy thing to implement. I gather it's unstable, lacks real documentation on how to install, configure and modify, and is a mishmash of modules and extensions that are needed for it to installed, which could potentially mean more places for it to fall over.

It's rather off-putting, as I want to go with something that has an obvious timeframe for completing the project, and something that I can be confident in putting forward to the client as a working, safe, stable environment (as much as any selling online can be) in which to sell his products.

Ideally I am looking for a CMS/E-commerce system that will be simple for the end-user to maintain, once the bulk of it is set up, allowing them to concentrate on order fulfillment, change their product catalogue, and create the odd blog post. documentation on integrating payment with Datacash processing system would also be a bonus. In fact, looking at the requirements, I suspect the CMS is mostly about product catalogues, rather than anything complex with multiple templates etc, so perhaps I should consider prestashop or Magento instead?

Hello Andrew,

I agree that the unstable state of e-commerce and lack of documentation are off putting. We hope to rectify this, particularly as the module approaches version 1.0. We can't provide a date, but we're certainly on the way to achieving this.

It is our intention that the SS eCommerce module be user-maintainable as you mention.
Integrating the blog module would be the solution to having a blog.
I'm not sure if anyone has written a Datacash Payment type, but that could be arranged. The silverstripe payment module is actually separate from eCommerce, and works fairly well...but some changes are being proposed: http://groups.google.com/group/silverstripe-dev/browse_thread/thread/109b1df6848fd740

What do you mean by having 'multiple templates' ?

hope this helps,
Jeremy

Sorry, should have been more clear. Some CMSes come with the ability to choose a template which defines how the content you're adding will be laid out. This would probably just be for individual blog posts, but could even potentially allow templates for different product ranges, depending on how much info is available for that product. I don't just mean different templates that are then applied across the entire site, but potentially different layouts on an individual product-by-product or blog-post basis. Does this make sense?

Having discussed the requirements further, it's probably a nice-to-have as opposed to being a requirement in this particular project.

Yeah, it makes sense. I haven't tried using different templates for different pages before.
Could be possible, you'd need to find out how to force a different template be used, based on some selection stored in the database.