Hi,

Can someone with SilverStripe experience suggest how it might work as a community software site with visitors able to register, add comments to blog entries posted by others, add short news items (quick hits), add blog entries, add events. Basically how it compares to BuddyPress and WordPress with multiple blogs. For example, what's native in SilverStripe and what requires plugins and/or widgets.

I'm also interested, in general terms, how SilverStripe scales over time, no such much the marketing hype but more how SilverStripe code works as page loads increase, as the database might move to its own server, and the like. I'm familiar with WordPress, ExpressEngine, MovableType, and other CMS software over many years. I'd like to know how SilverStripe compares, in your experience and opinion.

If you have any ideas, thoughts, warnings, I'd appreciate it. Honesty also is even better. 8-) Thanks!

Tim

Hi

I have done huge websites with Silverstripe Cms / framework and apart from other frameworks I have learnt a lot of advantages using Silverstripe.

Also there are some community websites I have done which has more than 1000 users, if you want to talk more please email. ;)

I manage a network of websites that have social network features such as registration, profiles, messaging, photo & video uploading, blogs, and so on.

Sapphire is very well suited for websites like these. By Sapphire, I mean the core of the software. The CMS leaves a little to be desired when it comes to managing a social network. Although you can customise it to your tastes, it isn't suited for communities right out of the box. You'll have to spend some time extending the CMS.

Otherwise, I recommend SilverStripe for communities if you can figure out how to customise the CMS to be optimized for a community.

Thanks, Ryan (and Nivanka!) for the responses. In going through the tutorials and reading the topics documentation, it appears SilverStripe is almost all DIY. The good news being that it appears SilverStripe is a clean PHP framework to add code: it's obvious where things would go and there doesn't appear to be much cruft in the code.

But I wonder if there is some code repository where people have posted their implementations, as part of SilverStripe being open source and all? Or are we to simply reinvent the wheel?

If there are any URLs, too, that explain the difference between Sapphire and the CMS, that would help. Perhaps the tutorials and topics dealt with Sapphire?

But I wonder if there is some code repository where people have posted their implementations, as part of SilverStripe being open source and all? Or are we to simply reinvent the wheel?

Most people release the code they use (if it is reusable) as modules. You can find a wide range of modules which are great to learn from on this site. For example you will find modules for blogs and member profiles which sound like 2 areas that you'll need. You will however have to extend the blog module to do exactly what you want. The site ssbits.com also has a number of good tutorials to learn from.

I'm also interested, in general terms, how SilverStripe scales over time, no such much the marketing hype but more how SilverStripe code works as page loads increase, as the database might move to its own server, and the like

SilverStripe comes with a number of tools to help scaling. Partial caching, Static caching provide the 2 main ways to increase performance by relying on caching. Both of these are built into sapphire. You can find documentation on the docs site for both of these.

If there are any URLs, too, that explain the difference between Sapphire and the CMS, that would help. Perhaps the tutorials and topics dealt with Sapphire?

Sapphire is the PHP framework the powers the whole of 'SilverStripe'. It is the basis of everything and contains core libraries such as Database support / ORM, Templates, Controllers ... the CMS is a module written on top of sapphire which provides you with a nice backend to edit content. In future releases this separate will be emphasized a lot more.

Thanks, Will for the link to ssbits and the clarifications. While I've installed and used almost every blog imaginable, going back to GreyMatter and Radio, mostly I've used WordPress which has plugins to do most of what I need. My concern, though, is the mash up of WP plus plugins and how that scales. It works. People do it all the time. But I'm also looking for simpler alternatives, frameworks like Sapphire. Certainly I'll start to use it for a couple client projects I'm working on. We'll see about this particular immediate requirement. I'll have to figure out how to phase functionality to buy me time to add what's "missing".

Appreciate everyone's time/help this weekend!

interesting thread. I thought about making a social network from SS a year ago but got sidetracked, I then noticed Uncle Cheese's postale module which takes care of the messaging recently and I started thinking about this again. I'm curious about how much you guys are using the CMS?

From what I can see it is pretty quick to get most of a social network together, the main parts I see missing are:

-friendship links and the invitations and banning which would be needed with that

-some kind of management console for admin, deleting members, administering photos and such

also allowing members limited CMS access would make it a lot easier for them to manage their images and blogs but would this be a security issue or potential confustion for them?

thanks

Will

one subject I havent seen covered anywhere is the friendship link. having a bug list of members who can do different tasks is one thing but if you want them to add or delete friends then that is another level on top.

I was thinking that a member could have a many_to_many link with other members and that is true on the very basic level, either friend or not. as an example two friends mike and tom are either friends or not

but the link is more complicated than that in almost every social network, mike can invite tom, be turned down, be banned, favorited just as the minimum. so I was thinking that I would create another class FriendshipLink but this can not be bidirectional it has to have an instigator and a receiver.

so you have an object controlling the relationship from tom to mike, would I then need another object for the opposite direction? potentially it would not be optional it would have to be created so once a connection has been made between two people their are two objects existing showing the link.

its an interesting subject, I havent come across any situations before where a database conection is to another object of the same class. any thoughts