Having rolled ,my own PHP5 OO CMS I can appreciate what these guys have done, Drupal on steroids. Would be great if there were more modules, etc. but that will come in time, SS is the only viable PHP5 OO CM platform on the market to my knowledge.

By no means am I a professional web designer or programmer but I do respect and like it when good design has been employed and used on open source CMS sites, the primary drawcard that made me want to try out Silverstripe’s features. But for the WordPressing generation like myself, I would say stick to the easy products as Silverstripe has caused me a lot of grief over installations/hosting (half due to the fact I’m on a cheap host that’s not been ‘dream filled’ let’s say. It’s a commercial product wearing open source clothing (think wolf in sheep’s clothing) and I agree with the above comments expressing similar sentiments.

I hadn’t used any other CMS before I tried SilverStripe. I chose SilverStripe because I saw it won a ‘most promising open source CMS’ award on PacktPub website. I wanted to try something that people thought was good, while avoiding the well-known big boys ie. Joomla, Drupal etc.. So, I downloaded SilverStripe and installed it – and my nightmare began. A few of the niggling things that frustrated me:

* The CMS editor was very poor, the HTML generated when you paste content is poor in the way DIV formatting works.
* Community support is poor. The developers either don’t answer user questions or have left it to the community to answer other struggling users questions. There are some ‘guru’ community users who are regulars on the forum, they use terms (words) like ‘controller’ (WTF?) that are alien to new users, and their way of helping you out is ‘you should really read this page of the documentation..’
* It doesn’t have a scrolling news ticker plugin.. yet.. ie. nobody has developed it yet.
* Slowwwww performance..
* so many more things… that it is so annoying.

I finally gave up on it after struggling with it for a month – and moved to Drupal.

..As a piece of software, I think it’s just a poor quality product.. (I’m a Win32 desktop software developer for the last 15 years.)

(Just my opinion and real life experience, you are free to comment or start a flame war)

Willr is an absolute gem of an asset to the project but he can only do so much and compared to other open source projects with a similar short history the forum, in general, lacks a certain impetus and general busy dig out atmosphere. Recently I’ve posted a fair few comments and reported some bugs I’ve found, but have received very little response from other users or the team and the time difference makes the IRC channel and the Friday morning Pow Wows unusable for me, which is a shame.

We all agree it’s a great framework and has real potential as well as extremely good of a web dev company to share it’s IP in this way Ingo. But I am now going to have to employ you guys in the Silverstripe team to finish one project I have in order to complete the job successfully. Hopefully some good will come out of it in the shape of another extension that the SS community can tap into, but with better forum response and more verbose ‘how to’ tutorials I might not have needed to go that route.

Aaron, I think you’re seeing the situation with having a commercial entity behind an open-source product a bit too negative – its basically a “fast-forward” factor behind a young product that lots of good ideas out there don’t have. Sure, the Silverstripe community has to grow to become self-sustainable – but if you see us in the context of a roughly 2-year-old random opensource-product, we’ve come quite a long way

It was love at first sight for me, especially when I ran through all the tutes and saw how easy it was to extend the system AND the CMS administration (“Thankyou Jesus” were my exact words)

Being in this subsection of users (the ones who can’t or don’t have time to delve into the core), there is one major concern I have for the SS project that grows daily, and I think it really needs to be addressed if it is to succeed to the level of Drupal or Joomla.

I feel that this concern directly relates to the structure of the development. And relates closely to item 5 on your list. Communication.

Silverstripe is a company, they build websites like you and I. They have shared this great CMS and IP that they have shared with every man and his dog.

Now, being a developer myself, I can’t imagine getting my bread-and-butter, maintaining a CMS product (An open source product), documenting it, and supporting it. It’s a huge expense, and Silverstripe can’t be blamed for this concern, yet it is a problem none-the-less.

For this reason, support – both on the forums and in documentation – is fairly lax. In the case of the forums, I think I have had responses to maybe 20% of the questions I raise. There simply doesn’t seem to be much in the way of seniority on the forums, no gurus except for Willr (one of the developers), who tends to come on daily but can only do so much alone.

The thing that is most concerning is that the majority of these questions are of the sort that are dead simple to answer if you know a system well. (like functions and methods). E.G One of my own questions was relating to the currencyField object. This field defaults to ‘$’, but how do I go about making it handle GBP? No answer to this has forced me to use a decimal instead, and hard code the symbols in the page class.

I think this is a flaw with the infrastructure model of a commercial development house maintaining an Open Source project. It’s very different to the likes of Drupal and Joomla.

And again, you can’t blame Silverstripe (the company) for this. It’s not like I expect their Devs to be on the forums answering questions. But given the growth a web development company experiences, I don’t really see the support situation getting all that much better.

Cheers
Aaron