Hey guys!

Let me quickly introduce. I'm Martijn and I'm currently running a small webdesign company by my own. I'm a freelancer and looking for a good open source content management system. I've used CMS Made Simple for a couple of sites now, but the community isn't really big there and I have the feeling Silverstripe is way better supported and has more options in the end.

So, I'd like to ask a few basic question, to get a site up and running as soon as possible:

* the "Blog" module is the only Blog module out there right? Does it come with commenting options?
* is there a News module?
* is there a module with which you can make other modules? Suppose I want to make a catalogue module for clients in the CMS, with which they can enter a title, description and an image. Is that possible in Silverstripe: creating custom modules easily? Is that Dataobjectmanager by any chance?
* Is there a login module?
* Is there an image gallery module?
* I'm a vivid front-end developer. Is there any way I can control the HTML output of the modules in the CMS?
* Can I modify the TinyMCE editor, so that clients can do a lot less harm with big tables etc?

I hope to hear from you guys soon! Thanks a lot in advance.

Hi Martijn,

I'll give short answers to all your questions.

-Yes, as far as i know, the blog module is the only blog module available. commenting can be turned on or of for every post. Just like the standard Page class in which you can turn commenting on or of for every Page. By using the Page class and extending it for your own needs you could also create your custom blog module.

-Its very easy to create your own news module by creating a News Holder and News Article classes that go in them.
Here http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=tutorial:2-extending-a-basic-site there is a tutorial for creating a news section

-You can create modules yourself by using the posibilities Silverstripe gives you for it. Dataobjectmanager is an extension which gives you extra functionalities and dataobjects. But by using and extending the Page class and the DataModel you can create a lot already.

-There is a Member object which has a login functionality and which you can extend to your own needs.
See http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=member

-Yes there is a very nice image gallery module using the Dataobjectmanager, it is created by Uncle Cheese
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9dkx_poybA

-You can not edit templates in the cms, but you can add settings to the cms which control the apearance of Pages. Editing html templates in the CMS is in general not a very good idea, they would be either in the db or the templates would be writable in de files system. Why would you want to be able to edit templates directly from the CMS?

-Yes it's posible to use a simple TinyMCE editor as Field type

Silverstripe is a very solid CMS framework which is both very end-user (site-admin) and developer friendly.

I recommend reading the book:
http://www.silverstripe.org/silverstripe-book
And the documentation:
http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php