Compelling Reasons To Use Silverstripe
Silverstripe is a CMS solution built under sapphire PHP framework. To know more about it please visit http://www.silverstripe.org/.
Now let’s go the main point of this blog post. Here’s the story:
I shouldn’t have been looking for another PHP based CMS solution for my personal projects; totally ditch PHP and try something else like ruby on rails or django. But not until my current company introduces silverstripe, which they extremely use to their prime products and services.
I’ve done several projects using various PHP frameworks like zend framework, codeigniter, symfony and custom one; and also joomla, drupal and wordpress. Believe me or not, silverstripe struck me how compelling it is to work and learn it that I even recommended it to close friends and to the community. It’s like working on ruby on rails (slightly) with the model layer. I’m not going to compare silvestripe with other CMS or any other frameworks out there. I’m just gonna list down here the reasons why you should use it.
1. Framework plus CMS in one equals awesome app.
- Just imagine you got drupal or wordpress built under your favorite PHP framework. Sweet and awesome right? Create and customize functionalities/modules as you’ve used to. And you can also just grab existing solutions http://silverstripe.org/extending-silverstripe/. As perusal, http://silverstripe.org/community-showcase/.
2. OOP Centric / MVC Structured
- Yeah! That’s the buzz word with today’s mainstream frameworks. If you’re already familiar working on with MVC framework, adapting Silverstripe and the learning curve is pretty much the same. Disregarding the setup, installation or configuration. Watch the video here http://vimeo.com/16842606 to fully understand it.
3. Templating
- In relation with item # 2, the separation of concerns; now with the view. The templating system with silverstripe is designed to be as simple as possible. No logics and no complicated statements are allowed on it enforcing those to be in the controller or model because what the view layer should do is to simply render the html without any complexity. In short, don’t mess with the view. 
4. Scalability
- Silverstripe cares about the performance of the site specially when it consumes a lot of bandwidth usage from visitors. It’ll not let do the scaling yourself because silverstripe provides caching utilities that should be taken advantage of. They are as follows:
Static publisher: http://doc.silverstripe.org/sapphire/en/reference/staticpublisher
Template partial caching: http://doc.silverstripe.org/sapphire/en/reference/partial-caching
5. Agile / Test Infected
- The success of this CMS was when they started to implement and support unit testing with the core modules. If you’re not into advocating TDD, silverstripe will transform you into becoming a test infected developer. Get started here: http://vimeo.com/16446690
6. Flexible / Extensible
– Silverstripe has this decorator w/c will extend a certain model or controller class without creating a new subclass of it. This is to primarily avoid hacking/editing directly on modules and core classes. I’m quite guilty about it with some of my past personal projects. Take note that decorator in silverstripe is not the decorator pattern. For reference:
7. SEO Support
- Silvestripe doesn’t only helps you develop a site in agile way then scale it easily. It also helps to your site to have a good ranking in google search. Because in the cms backend it encourages one url segment which is actually good in SEO. It also has the googlesitemaps module which included in the default package.
The list above I guess will suffice to some developers to discover those advantages of using this one of a kind, revolutionize and amazing cms. Of course there are still some areas that I don’t like with silverstripe. I’ll be tackling on that into another blog post. What are you waiting? Come on download and try silverstripe. http://www.silverstripe.org/stable-download/
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February 13, 2011 at 9:12 am
I’ve just started to use Silverstripe, and i’ll be using it for all future CMS clients of mine. I like the template system and the ease of optimising for search engines!
FH Web Services - SEO Bournemouth
February 14, 2011 at 4:49 pm