Thursday, May 19, 2011

SilverStripe CMS for PHP programmers, not for dummies

Hi there!

Recently I've came across a pretty standard problem:

1. I had a simple php website with little php really, some routing, contact form handling, teamplating, nothing fancy
2. I hate doing boring stuff like CRUD's and CMS's
3. I make a lot of changes to the website
4. The website comes in 2 languages

If you think "just user some cms" - well I had the same idea. I started from the best known to me - Wordpress. It's pretty robust, but not being written as a CMS, but as a blog, it didn't really fit in. Of course I could force WP to do what I wish, but anyone who developed something in WP knows it's not really for programmers (or by programmers IMO).

The second choice was on pretty standard CMS's like Joomla or  Drupal, still programming was really problematic, extending stuff hard, since I wanted pretty much nothing form Drupal, and had to leave all that was on the old page.

Finally a friend of mine introduced SilverStripe, a New Zeland made CMS/Framework.
I'm a sceptic by nature but this I loved at first sight.



1. You program first what you want (pretty much no prerequisites), and let the framework build the rest. It's really for programmers, you can't just click away compromising modularity or re-usability. Everything is a class, that you can create and use over and over.

2. Every one of my custom objects (like for example ProjectRealisations) are encapsulated in a single class, that was pretty easy to set up and extend.

3. Multilingual setup for the CMS (options to get any additional language) - 5 minutes.

So what I've done is set up a completely custom website with a CMS for multilingual content (with ACL cf course) in a few days, while learning the CMS/Framework (ssbits.com - a big help).

I strongly recommend the framework for small websites, for lazy programmers (like myself;) )

See you next time,
Peter