Hello!

Last year I became disappointed how some issues were handled within CMS Made SImple community and left it looking for another CMS.

I played some time with MODX (Revolution), but it was too young, not many extensions etc. After that, I decided to use Concrete5 which is nice CMS and I've invested into its marketplace by buying several add-ons (ecommerce, pro blog, pro news, google maps, some themes etc.). In order to have my small company site finished I had to order custom payment gateway which was done by 3rd party. Everything is nice...except that I do not like C5's business schema and control which they force upon users by connecting add-on licensese with the community site.

I 'll probably have to finish our small 'company' web site and launch it in C5, but I'm looking into the future and here I see only two candidates: SilverStripe & MODX.

I like MODX concept of template variables (TVs), snippets...while I very mu appreciate that SS offers Postgresql support and Sapphire seems to be nice framework.

I know that installing & playing with both CMS-es is unavoidable (though I played with MODX in the past) and I'll do it, still I'm looking for some piece of advice which CMS would be more suitable for our needs & skills which are:

1) Having simple 'business' site for our 'company' which sells 'services', so we need simple webshop - nothing spectacular for those selling hundreds/thousands products, different categories etc. Of course, I'll need to order (again) custom payment gateway and the guy who did it fo C5 wrote me " if you need a payment addon for some other cms with a clear API, we can do it.", so my question is what is the future of ecommerce SS module? I've found out it's not any longer officially supported, but wonder whether one can count on it for the future? (MODX will soon get VisionCart 1.0 release of its ecommerce module.) Besides that, we'd need some basic News module, Google maps for contact pages...

2) For our personal needs, we want to have another site with the list of open-source stuff we'll be workin on, as well as decent blog module. I haven't tried module for SS, but it looks OK. Am I right? (Pls., don't recommend me WP :-) )

- Based on my choise between MODX/SS, I'd put chosen CMS on some other relatives/friends sites who have similar needs as described in 1) & 2) above.

3) If I'm correct, SS is more suitable for usage with one's preferred code-editor and development of the site can be kept under DVCS (I mostly use Fossil SCM), while with MODX one works only withing admin. Is it true? If it is, it is big advantage of SS.

4) Considering we are not full-time (PHP) developer, although familiar with several programming languages, I bought "Beginning PHP 5.3" book and plan to learn, I wonder how much is SS suitable for someone who is not fulltime PHP coder and what is the learning curve in using Sapphire?

5) I'm excited seeing the plan & design for 3.0, so do you recommend to wait a bit with migration from C5 to SS (if it is recommended choice for us) 'cause 3.0 will probably change a lot developer-wise or SS/Sapphire-2.4.x knowledge won't become obsolete? There is 'old' SS book done by Ingo, but I see that Packt is preparing a new one: https://www.packtpub.com/silverstripe-2-4-module-extension-themes-and-widgets/book. Is the old one still relevant for 2.4.x or the new one is recommended?

6) Both MODX & SS seems to be (more) open (source) projects, so being supporter of open-source, I tend to believe that those communities are more suitable for me in the long run. Atm, I use Archlinux, but very soon I'll migrate to Free(PC)BSD, but hopefully there are no issues using SS there. (My hosting is running Debian.)

Any light you can shed to help me decide is welcome, especially from those which are (somewhat) familiar with both CMS-es (MODX && SS).

Sincerely,
Gour

so my question is what is the future of ecommerce SS module?

There are now 2 ecommerce projects for SilverStripe. The standard ecommerce model is being supported by a group of developers and SilverCart.org has just come out. Haven't used either but their has been quite a bit of interest around them both.

2) For our personal needs, we want to have another site with the list of open-source stuff we'll be workin on, as well as decent blog module. I haven't tried module for SS, but it looks OK.

The module does the job generally, some issues around having 1000's of entries not working very well and development on the blog module doesn't appear to be very heavy but it'll always be supported.

3) If I'm correct, SS is more suitable for usage with one's preferred code-editor and development of the site can be kept under DVCS

Correct, most configuration is set in the code which can be version controlled (which the core devs prefer!)

4 - Yes their will be a learning curve. Read up on OOP PHP and you should have a fairly good understanding of how it's put together!
5 - 3.0 isn't due to be stable till the end of the year at the earliest. There will be a massive amount of API changes around 3.0 so you will have to relearn that but like I said it could be a year off.

6 - Will doesn't really matter what OS you're running, depends more on your PHP configuration. The installer will warn you of any missing dependencies.

There are now 2 ecommerce projects for SilverStripe. The standard ecommerce model is being supported by a group of developers and SilverCart.org has just come out. Haven't used either but their has been quite a bit of interest around them both.

Hmmm....this sounds great. I was not aware of SilverCart. Thanks a lot for this info. I was asking in #silverstripe about ecommerce, but nobody mentioned SilverCart.

The module does the job generally, some issues around having 1000's of entries not working very well and development on the blog module doesn't appear to be very heavy but it'll always be supported.

I hope it will get some more love making SS as nice blogging platform.

Correct, most configuration is set in the code which can be version controlled (which the core devs prefer!)

The more I think about it, I believe it's one of the 'killer' features of SS. I simply cannot imagine doing all programmers-oriented work by mousing & clicking around using only simple HTML box.

Moreover, now I understand that this approach makes GUI of CMS less cluttered 'cause the configuration is done externally.

I believe this is, along with the fact that SS is the only top10 CMS-es which thinks seriously about Postgres, THE feature which drags me towards it.

Maybe because of that I never bothered to try to understand e.g.'frameworks' available in MODX nor C5. :-)

4 - Yes their will be a learning curve. Read up on OOP PHP and you should have a fairly good understanding of how it's put together!

I'm not afraid together as long as the project is nicely organized...Based on what I see about the SS book (Wiley) and the one which is prepared by Packt, I tend to believe that former is (much) better dealing not only with how, but speaking about why as well. Do you consider it is still quite relevant for 2.4.x?

5 - 3.0 isn't due to be stable till the end of the year at the earliest. There will be a massive amount of API changes around 3.0 so you will have to relearn that but like I said it could be a year off.

Heh, this one is tricky...;)

I believe that many would like to move to new stuff, I wonder how do you anticipate the migration from 2.4.x will be done to 3.0?

Will the modules need lot of work to me rewritten to 3.0?

Otoh, I believe, that if one learns about working with SS(aphire) that the learning curve for 2.4.x --> 3.0 won't be as steep as scratch --> 2.4.x, right?

I'll ask more about SilverCart in their forums, but based on what I see now, it looks certain that SilverStripe is going to be (new) home for my projects. :-)

I believe that I'll finish and launch 'company' site in C5 for which ecommerce module I got custom payment module, but I may soon convert my personal/blog site, as well as some friend's sites, to SS-2.4.x.

Then depending how the development of 3.0 will going on, I may wait for 3.0 or not. Considering we paid development of custom payment modul for C5's ecommerce, and we'd have to pay (again) for the e.g. SilverCart one, it would be (maybe) wise to wait to avoid paying for the 2 modules (2.4.x & 3.0) since we are not sure whether we will be able to write it by themselves. :-D

Last point...I saw that Croatian translation is neither complete nor the people who worked on it seem to be very active. I' like to do translation, but similar to the wish to avoid duplicating effors, what is your estimation is there will be lot of work for translators to migrate from 2.4.x to 3.0?

Too bad, that one, afaict, cannot do translation work offline. :-(

6 - Will doesn't really matter what OS you're running, depends more on your PHP configuration.

I'm glad to hear you don't mind about OS. ;)

Willr says: "The module does the job generally, some issues around having 1000's of entries not working very well and development on the blog module doesn't appear to be very heavy but it'll always be supported. "

Then, Is good thing to build a newspaper without using blog base, but build up site like normal site with pages+comments and then rebuild functions like archive, latest comments, latest news and so on..

Do you agree?

biapar - it depends on what you want to have, using the blog module to start would be easier and quicker, however, like I said you may want to change the behavior later on and it gets harder to change it later on. I've seem quite a few custom blogs using DataObjects and Model admin rather than Pages and the SiteTree which requires basically a rewrite of the whole module. Just work out what you'll need for you site.

I'm not afraid together as long as the project is nicely organized...Based on what I see about the SS book (Wiley) and the one which is prepared by Packt, I tend to believe that former is (much) better dealing not only with how, but speaking about why as well. Do you consider it is still quite relevant for 2.4.x?

The book should still be relevant for 2.4 apart from new features like SiteConfig and other new API's. http://doc.silverstripe.org/sapphire/en/changelogs/2.4.0

The book should still be relevant for 2.4 apart from new features like SiteConfig and other new API's.

Thank you. I'm going to buy it - new SS user. :-)

Just to clarify for posterity sake..

You totally don't have to connect to the community to install add-ons. There's a manual install method where you simply drop a folder in your packages directory and it'll install. The connect to the community stuff is great for our less technical users, but it's certainly not forced.

-Franz Maruna
CEO, concrete CMS inc.

just to throw this into the mix, i've been developing another ecommerce module that leverages foxycart.com's services called foxystripe. there are foxycart modules for other cms's like modx and wordpress as well, so this is sort of the silverstripe equivalent. just fyi, foxycart is a service that lets you manage your products in any cms or through html, but checkout happens on their servers, so they offer pci compliance and take care of all the payment gateway stuff. its about $20/month so its sort of a decision between pci-compliance and free e-commerce modules that you'll have to weigh. i never threw the code in the extensions section of this site because i havent really documented anything, but it works pretty well in general.

-Chris