Silverstripe CMS is a

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content (content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

(CMS) and framework for creating and maintaining websites and web applications. It provides an out of the box web-based administration panel that enables users to make modifications to parts of the website, which includes a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

website editor. The core of the software is Silverstripe Framework, a PHP

Web application framework A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and ...

. Silverstripe CMS is released under the terms of the

BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

Software design

Silverstripe CMS separates the roles of: * content authors (who get a rich (

AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

) web-based user interface that omits technical jargon); and * website designers/developers (who write code: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP) This contrasts with CMS products which allow technical website development tasks to be performed within a GUI, and also contrasts with programming frameworks which offer no out-of-the-box content authoring application. The Silverstripe CMS approach allegedly removes complexity for content authors, and offers more flexibility to developers. The core of Silverstripe CMS is named Silverstripe Framework (formerly referred to as "Sapphire"). As with the rest of the platform, it is written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

(5.3), and takes advantage of its

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...

design capabilities such as name-spacing. The Silverstripe Framework provides website developers a framework to build and extend websites based on modern programming techniques including the model-view-controller pattern and object-relational mapper. Silverstripe CMS generates markup using a custom template-language based on

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

that offers simple placeholders and conditional logic. Silverstripe CMS is extensible through modules, widgets, themes and code customization.

Features

Notable features of the Silverstripe CMS include: * Out-of-the-box template, supporting responsive design (works on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers) * An extensible web application interface * Rich-text editing based on a modified version of TinyMCE * Quick embedding of videos and other resources from websites like YouTube, slideshare, etc. (using oEmbed) * Drag-and-drop tree-based navigation structure * Custom output markup and table-free default styles (including HTML5 and mobile support) * Work-flow management: Draft/Published separation through content staging, document

revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

/rollback with 'compare' functionality * Configurable security/permissions model (role-based) * Data object model, database generation through object-relational mapping, suite of customizable data input controls. *

asset management Asset management is a systematic approach to the governance and realization of value from the things that a group or entity is responsible for, over their whole life cycles. It may apply both to tangible assets (physical objects such as buildings ...

, image resizing, drag&drop images from OS desktop to upload. * Multiple templates per page *

Search engine friendly URLs Clean URLs, also sometimes referred to as RESTful URLs, user-friendly URLs, pretty URLs or search engine-friendly URLs, are URLs intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website or web service by being immediately and intuitively m ...

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

management, XML

site map A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site within a domain. There are three primary kinds of sitemap: * Sitemaps used during the planning of a website by its designers. * Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site. * St ...

generation *

Full text search In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts r ...

and

RSS feeds RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

* Optimizations for heavy loads (full and part-template caching) * Internationalization/Languages: Silverstripe CMS supports multiple-language content.

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

and the

internationalization In economics, internationalization or internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strateg ...

of character sets are supported. The CMS is available in many languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, and Chinese. * Hierarchical URLs * Cross-platform: OS (Linux, Windows, Mac), Web server (Apache, IIS), Database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server fully supported; SQLite and Oracle Database have limited support.) Notable features of upcoming releases of Silverstripe CMS include: * Additional administration UI (e.g. web-interface based installation of modules, widgets) * Complete transition to

jQuery jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax. It is free, open-source software using the permissive MIT License. As of Aug 2022, jQuery is used ...

library (currently uses jQuery with a mixture of older JavaScript frameworks.) * Site-wide widgets Common CMS features not currently available in Silverstripe CMS include: * In-place page editing * Web interface based installation of modules, widgets or themes * Web interface based customization of themes * Automated cache management/ORM refresh

Modules, widgets, and themes

Modules can be used to extend the core functionality of Silverstripe CMS. Some existing modules include: Blog, Advanced Workflow Management, eCommerce, Forum, and LDAP/OpenID authentication. Modules are available from the Silverstripe CMS modules repository, which as of October 2022, lists over 3000 modules. Silverstripe CMS Widgets are small pieces of functionality that can be

drag-and-drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

ped into Silverstripe CMS modules (notably the blog module). Examples of widgets include: tag clouds, Flickr photos, or word of the day. Widgets are a relatively less-used aspect of the platform. As of August 2012, there are 96 widgets. The Silverstripe CMS themes directory provides a number of community-contributed, freely available themes (114 as of October 2022). Modules, widgets, and themes are all available as free downloads under the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

, and the majority of them are community contributed.

Software requirements

Silverstripe CMS is a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

, requiring a compatible web server and SQL database. As of version 4.12., the requirements for Silverstripe CMS are as follows: *

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

v2.4,

Lighttpd lighttpd (pronounced "lighty") is an open-source web server optimized for speed-critical environments while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible. It was originally written by Jan Kneschke as a proof-of-concept of the c10k problem � ...

Nginx Nginx (pronounced "engine x" ) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. Nginx is free and open-source software ...

or Microsoft IIS 7.x+ ''(A URL Rewriter is required. As of 2.4.0 IIS 7 URL rewriting is supported out of the box)'' *

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

v5.6.X+, Microsoft SQL Server (community maintained),

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

(community maintained), SQLite3 (community maintained) and Oracle Database (experimental) *

7.4+ with PHP extensions: ctype, dom, fileinfo, hash, intl, mbstring, session, simplexml, tokenizer and xml. The gd or imagick extension for image manipulation and a extension for a database connector is also required.

Documentation

Silverstripe CMS is released under the terms of the

. Documentation is available fo
CMS users
an
website developers
An online demonstration of the CMS is available as a
interactive demo
Two technical reference books on Silverstripe CMS are available in English and one in German.

Recognition

Awards

* Winner Packtpub Most Promising CMS Award 2008, $2000 prize. Then was First Runner up, "Best Overall CMS" in 2009. Also Pact Publishing CMS Awards finalist in 2007. * Winner in New Zealand Open Source Awards for October 2008 and in 2010. * Most promising finalists in the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards * Finalists in the New Zealand Open Source Awards for October 2007 * Hi-tech Awards - Finalist, Emerging Technology Company of the Year in 2017 * Hi-tech Awards - Winner, Best Technology Solution for the Public Sector in 2016 * ALGIM Conference - Winner, Best All Round Exhibitor in 2015 and in 2014 * Internet Industry Awards 2009 - The Positive Societal Impact Award for “The Lowdown” website. This site was also a finalist in 2008 for the TUANZ Innovation Awards. * ALGIM Web Award - Winner, "Best Redevelopment Website, People’s Choice" for the Gisborne District Council website in 2009. * 2009 World Summit Awards - Winner for the National Broadband Map, a site created for the State Services Commission * 11th Annual Wellington Gold Awards - Finalist in 2009 and 2007 * 2008 ComputerWorld Excellence Awards - Finalist, "Innovative Use of IT"

Reviews and articles

Version 3.0 (latest as of November 2012)

* SSBits (10 September 2012)

Version 2

* SilverStripe Review (3 April 2009) * Microsoft Case Study (17 March 2009) * ReadWriteWeb, 14 September 2007 * Interview on New Zealand Television Show, 1 May 2007, (Video) * Hiveminds Magazine, 15 March 2007
SilverStripe CMS is proof that open-source works
'

References

External links

Silverstripe CMS open source project and community website

Online demonstration website

Official help documentation

Community forums

Developer documentation wiki

Public bug tracker, feature requests, patches, roadmap, changelog/timeline

Silverstripe website

Silverstripe CMS and Sapphire CMF API documentation
{{Application frameworks Free content management systems Free software programmed in PHP PHP frameworks Software using the BSD license Web frameworks Software companies of New Zealand