Late last year, Google launched a global software contest for highschool students called the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest. The contest boasted some impressive statistics: nearly 400 students around the world contributed a total of about 1000 tasks for ten software projects over a very busy two-month period.

SilverStripe was one of the ten projects in the contest, with tasks by students ranging from translating SilverStripe to other languages, building themes and widgets, testing, and doing presentations to spread the awareness of our software. Much of this work is in use by thousands of SilverStripe sites.

After the contest ended, we announced three individuals we felt had done outstanding work for SilverStripe, and announced Polish Wojtek Szkutnik as the grand prize winner.

Last week, Google held an awards ceremony for the the ten grand prize winners as chosen by the respective projects involved. The ceremony included a representative from each project and was held at  Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, and also featured a campus tour and interesting talks about Google,  Android, Google App engine, and internal testing methodologies.

Contest overview and awards ceremony footage

Google put together a 14 minute video summarising the contest.

Interview with SilverStripe's winner at Google

SilverStripe's grand prize winner, Wojtek, and SilverStripe's Sigurd Magnusson briefly discuss the GHOP contest (under two minutes.)

Five minute interview with Wojtek by SilverStripe

We took a few minutes to interview Wojtek too. You can also read an written interview with Wojtek from earlier in the year.

 

Thanks very much to Leslie Hawthorn and her team who made the contest shine! The contest really showed the virtues of open source, the talents of highschoolers, and was a very enjoyable experience for SilverStripe.

Yesterday the SilverStripe-powered website CaliforniaWomen.org began offering conference tickets for the largest and most dynamic gathering of women in North America. All of the tickets were sold in an unprecedented less-than-three-hour rush.

Thanks to a new caching system that shall be documented and released in an upcoming version of SilverStripe, a single webserver handled more than 80,000 page views in these key hours, in addition to associated images, animations, stylesheets, and javascript files. SilverStripe was used to handle the public-facing aspects of the conference website, and conference organisers even used the CMS to edit pages during the burst of traffic.

 

The main global awards for our type of software kick off next week, run by U.K. based technical book company, PacktPub.

Starting Monday, we would love your support by nominating us for Most Promising CMS. This category is open to software launched within the last two years and best suits SilverStripe.

Last year we ranked first for community votes, and if you help us repeat that achievement it will drive the adoption of the SilverStripe platform. We also stand to gain a few thousand dollars to drive future software development.

Update: Nominations have opened... fill out the form!

 

The July issue of New Zealand P.C. World includes a full page interview about SilverStripe, and a multiple page tutorial on how to install SilverStripe and do basic website customisation.

The software is included on the cover DVD, so go out and buy a copy from a local retailer! (For those outside of New Zealand: the tutorial will be online at the PC World site in one month.)

Thanks to PC World's coverage, over 15,000 readers will come across SilverStripe this month!

The SilverStripe interface has been translatable into multiple languages for some time now, thanks to Bernat and the Google Summer of Code program.

The translations are all contributed by our community, and we've now hit our 200th contributor, a really positive sign in how much help we're getting.

Despite 26,000 translated phrases now in our system and all the recent translation activity, there are still hundreds of phrases to translate. Please apply if you can help! We've been working to make more of our software translatable  and so previously complete languages now have new phrases needing translation.

Top Translaters

Name	Translated phrases	Languages
Wojtek Szkutnik	2302	Esperanto, LOLCAT, Polish, French, Slovak, Czech, German, Japanese, Slovenian
Hristo Rumenov Pantaleev	1433	Bulgarian
Andrey Zhuravlev	1021	Russian
Vadim Zhernovoi	1001	Ukrainian
Jeff Chan	864	Chinese (Taiwan)
Milan Barta	798	Czech
Normann Lou	788	Chinese (China)
Navdeep Dhaliwal	779	Punjabi
Jesper S. Pedersen	758	Danish
Marko Hmjak	735	Croatian

Wojtek is also responsible for many SilverStripe themes and is one of our main community contributors. His work with SilverStripe is to be rewarded at Google headquarters later this month!

Update: This has moved from Tuesday 6pm to Saturday noon.

We really want to meet fellow SilverStripe users and developers in San Francisco, so join us for a coffee, lunch, or beer this weekend.

If you're new and interested in what SilverStripe can do, want to meet other locals using SilverStripe, or if you've been using it for some time and want to pass on ideas and feedback, we'd love to see you.

We're holding it at 21st Amendment which happens to have its own twitter account, lots of room to chat, and being a brewery, restaurant, and bar, it offers an American dinner menu.

 

Where: 21st Amendment, 563 2nd St. (between Bryant & Brannan.)
When: 12 noon, Saturday 12th July 2008

• RSVP at upcoming.org

 

Over 80% of visitors to SilverStripe.com reportedly use Microsoft Windows, so we expect many try to get SilverStripe running on a webserver running locally on your  PC. It's now easier to do this thanks to a new instructional screencast. It explains installing SilverStripe on Windows with the free Windows webserver package, WampServer, much like our written instructions.

The video was produced by Jep Casteline, a SilverStripe developer community member based in the U.S.

The video makes it a breeze to trial and build websites on desktop Windows machines before uploading the sites to a professional hosting environment, so thanks very much Jep!

With demands of recent projects, we've done some internal work to improve the visibility and documentation of our testing infrastructure. Much of this functionality has been available in SilverStripe for some time, but we want to continue to raise the bar.

Read more...

People ask us how we make money if we give away our software.
Our CEO Brian Calhoun shares a key secret in a 30 second video...

(This video was privately aired at the Wellington Gold Awards ceremony last month.)

June marks the arrival of Sibylle Schwarz to our team. She is an experienced senior project manager who is working full time to help ensure we deliver amazing work for SilverStripe's commercial clients. Welcome Sibylle!

Tim Copeland, one of SilverStripe's founders, is set to spend a month touring Africa before setting up in the United Kingdom for a number of months. He will be exploring opportunities to build up the commercial client base and developer community in the UK. Sigurd Magnusson will be the primary contact for new commercial enquiries whilst Tim is away.

This month we're saying farewell to Mark Rickerby. During his time here as a core developer he has provided great work on complex client projects. He has also positively influenced the architecture of the SilverStripe software and its development process, for instance contributing heavily to new software testing features.

Developer, designer, and account management roles

We have several full-time roles available immediately in our Wellington office:

• Senior Developer Focus on back-end (Object oriented PHP5, MySQL) with understanding of front end (XHTML, CSS, Javascript). Client and project management experience useful.
• Junior Developer/Designer Have some combination of: moderate skills in visual design, HTML/CSS, and programming (PHP), and passionate to jump in and learn quickly. 
• Sales and Account Management. Pitch to and look after organisations needing complex web application and website services.

Please email C.V.s to brian at silverstripe.com.