SilverStripe.com Blog

Keeping up with demand

Thu, 28 May 2009 16:00:00 +1200

The video we made for the recent Gold Awards explains our problem: we have a lot of exciting work coming our way and we can't hire great staff fast enough. That's why we started looking at our inter-species and inter-generational options.

Watch our video and you'll understand our recruitment challenges.

Announcing the Partner Program

Wed, 06 May 2009 14:00:00 +1200

We are all very proud to announce the SilverStripe Partner Program! This is a big deal for us for a number of reasons:

Through our partners, we are able to provide local development and support services to the SilverStripe community throughout the globe.
Our partners are trusted providers who have demonstrated a commitment and ability to provide excellent SilverStripe-related services to their clients. All together, our partners offer marketing, design, development, and support for your SilverStripe needs.
We're answering the call: more businesses (and individuals) around the world will be able to attend local SilverStripe meetups, talk to local SilverStripe service providers, and get support when they need it.

Here at SilverStripe headquarters we're still providing the same services as always, but starting today, our partners will be able to offer their SilverStripe design, development, and support expertise with the backing of SilverStripe HQ here in New Zealand.

Why are we doing this? You told us to! For a long time now, we've been getting lots of queries from all over the globe from companies who wanted local SilverStripe help. Businesses (and government entities) wanted a local provider for SilverStripe support, but they also wanted that provider to have strong ties to SilverStripe headquarters in New Zealand. Then we started getting to know some awesome providers scattered across the globe and they wanted to know how they could help. The Partner Program is the result of those discussions.

To learn more about the Partner Program check out the press release or the partner page on our site.

Also, when you see the SilverStripe Partner logo on a service provider's site, know that they have the full support of our company and they will work with us to make sure you get excellent service for your new or existing SilverStripe installation.

Thanks for helping us spread the good word about SilverStripe, and here's to our partners helping to do the same!

2009 Gold Awards Finalist

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:28:00 +1300

SilverStripe has been announced as a finalist in the 2009 Gold Awards.

The awards recognise and celebrate the leading businesses in our city, Wellington. Being nominated for the Cyber Gold category was based on the views of 60 respected business people acting as judges. We'd like to thank the judges for choosing to recognise us in this way.

The awards focus on the achievements of the preceding 12 months, in which we:

Surpassed 100,000 downloads of our open source SilverStripe software.
Built many sucessful websites for customers including the Democratic National Convention.
Doubled our staff, grew revenue by 70%, more than doubled profit, and substantially grew our international customer base.
Released several new versions of our software.

SilverStripe and the other finalists will learn who the winners are on May 13th at a large black-tie event.

SilverStripe were also finalists last year—see our video recording of the night and our toungue-in-cheek video that described our company's achievements.

Internet Blackout

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:29:00 +1300

UPDATE: 12 March: One of the main companies that was needed to make this piece of legislation happen has said they won't support it! A TelstraClear representative said, "...we have had unprecedented customer concern and we can't try to make a bad law work." More at the original article.

New Zealand's Internet Blackout is coming.

SilverStripe supports the efforts of the Creative Freedom Foundation and we will show our support very soon... on the morning of Monday 23 February when we black out our .com and .org sites.

Today the CFF on the steps handed over a petition on the steps of Parliament. Heaps of signatures were gathered in just a few days' time, showing the power of grass-roots web organizing. Great job, guys!

Creative Freedom Foundation

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:37:00 +1300

Yesterday, the Creative Freedom Foundation launched. What is it? It's a group of Kiwis raising awareness around some terrible legislation that's set to go into law in about two months' time.

The CFF is focusing on the "Guilt by accusation" amendments to New Zealand copyright law. From their press release:

The Creative Freedom Foundation's first campaign is against a proposed law in New Zealand: Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act. S92 assumes 'Guilt Upon Accusation' - cutting off internet connections and websites based on accusations of Copyright infringement, without evidence or even a trial.

Foundation Co-Founder and Director, Bronwyn Holloway-Smith says: "The result of this law could be that one rogue employee or even one virus infected computer could bring down a whole organisation's internet and it's highly likely that schools, businesses, hospitals, and phone services will be harmed by this."

On 28 February 2009, S92 will come into effect in New Zealand if there is no positive action on the part of the Government to change it. To date the Government has shown support for the bill and, unless there is major public protest against it, it will "roll over" in to law.

If it goes through, this will expose businesses in New Zealand to undue risk. When businesses are trying to increase the amount of exports from New Zealand and compete more effectively in a global market, why hamper one of critical lifelines -- Internet-based business? It simply does not make sense.

The CFF has a "What can I do?" page with more details. Please check it out and sign the petition. New Zealand simply cannot afford to let this go through. Thanks.

Welcome to our new website!

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Welcome to our newly re-designed website! The launch of our new SilverStripe.com and SilverStripe.org sites is a big deal to us and we hope you find the changes useful.

One of the things we wanted to improve over the old SilverStripe.com site was to have a more clear distinction between information about our open source software and information about our company. We got a lot of feedback from developers and clients which centered around the fact that they couldn't find what they needed on our site. So we decided to create SilverStripe.org and have that as the home for all things related to our open source product.

As we started splitting out the content from the .com to a new .org, we pretty quickly realised a site re-design was in order. We enlisted the help of an extaordinairy designer, Sally Flewelling (moc.liamg@gnillewelfyllas), who guided us through the design process. We couldn't be happier with the outcome and so a big Thank You goes to her. We'd also like to thank Daisuke Maki for the very generous donation of the SilverStripe.org domain name to us. Finally, thank you to all the SilverStripe employees, especially the ones putting in extra hours to make these two sites happen (alongside multiple client site launches!): Sean Harvey, Saophalkun Ponlu, James Kirkus-Lamont, Michael Andrewartha, Will Rossiter, Sam Minnée, and our project manager leading the charge: Sibylle Schwarz. Thanks guys, you seriously rock.

So, to sum up:

SilverStripe.com for commercial stuff

SilverStripe.org for open source stuff

We've put a "give feedback" link at the bottom of each page. If you have comments about the new sites, please let us know.

Enjoy!

Brian

SilverStripe for Councils

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Having recently received quite a bit of interest from New Zealand councils, we attended the ALGIM conference, an annual get-together for council IT managers and staff.

We believe SilverStripe is a fantastic fit for councils, given it is so important to update content continuously for the communities they serve. It helps to have a user-friendly CMS like ours, as it requires little training and allows non-technical staff to be very productive.

The SilverStripe concept offers a lot more freedom to councils, too: our company can build websites for you, we can train your in-house developers, or leave it entirely to you or other developers, since our software and documentation is free.

We're seeing a large opportunity for councils to work together more, and use ideas like open source and open data constructively, rather than individually produce proprietary website features. This is especially relevant in building online services for rate-payers to engage with their councils and access the information held by them. These features cost a lot of time and money to build, and New Zealand councils would do well to come together for shared goals so they can match the innovation happening overseas.

See the video below and council websites for Redbridge and Bristol for an idea of where we'd like to see local councils head!

If you're an interested council, read over our SilverStripe brochure for Councils, and please get in touch!

A flurry of meetups

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Over recent weeks there's been a flurry of great meetups. These have provided us with a great sense of what people are doing with SilverStripe in London, Germany, and (pictured below) in Wellington.

We're very pleased to learn what people are up to, and what they want. We have taken feedback on board in either our development list or as one of the many new tickets in our bug/feature tracker.

You can also read Ingo's account of the meetups he hosted:

If you would like to organise a meetup somewhere in the world early next year, let us know so we can advertise it!

Coming 2009: Das SilverStripe Buch

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

German readers can now pre-order SilverStripe: Das umfassende Handbuch from Amazon, due to be published February 2009.

The 450 page German book offers a complete guide to SilverStripe for web developers with an intermediate familiarity with website development, PHP5, and object oriented code.

Ingo Schommer, one of the core SilverStripe developers based in New Zealand, has spent many recent months working on the book. The book is co-written with Steven Broschart, the person responsible for the major SilverStripe review in Germany's PHP Magazin. It's this article which has led to Germany being one of the main concentrations of SilverStripe developers globally, and hence paved the way for a German book to be written.

We are exploring options for an English book in the future.

youtube.com/silverstripe

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We've now acquired the youtube.com/silverstripe address!
Fom now on it replaces our old channel.

This new youtube channel contains all the videos we've produced over the past year...

...along with interviews and recordings uploaded by others.
Go check it out and tell us what videos you like most!

Wellington meetup and v2.3 pre-release party

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Join us on Monday 17th November from 6pm at the Southern Cross bar!

We're interesting in meeting up with the local web community and those who use SilverStripe, so that we can listen to your ideas and answer your questions, technical or otherwise.

You get to meet the people behind the code so it is a great chance to rant about your favourite interface suggestion or code quirk!

We'll also be demonstrating what's coming in SilverStripe v2.3...

Please RSVP on facebook (or say "+1" in the comments below.)

SilverStripe 2.2.3 released - recommend hot fix

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We have a new release of SilverStripe available: 2.2.3

Download here: silverstripe-v2.2.3.tar.gz
Post bug reports here: http://open.silverstripe.com
Change log here: http://open.silverstripe.com/wiki/ChangeLog/2.2.3

IMPORTANT NOTE

This release of SilverStripe fixes an issue that came to the attention of the SilverStripe development team earlier today. It could potentially let malicious users bypass the CMS security. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you upgrade all of your sites.

If you would like to apply this fix manually, the relevant patch is available here:

http://open.silverstripe.com/changeset/64988/
http://open.silverstripe.com/changeset/64988/?format=diff&new=64988

Thanks,
Sam

SilverStripe "Most promising open source CMS"

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A panel of judges and thousands of voters have put SilverStripe on the global stage today!

Each year, the high profile Open Source CMS awards are run by Packt Publishing, a U.K. based publisher of hundreds of technical books on software and web development.

Judged a finalist in the 2007 awards, SilverStripe has just been announced a winner by Packtpub:

"SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project receive $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up.

It received universal approval from the judges for its features and was praised as an excellent option for companies who want a powerful open source website that is professionally created and well supported. The judges were complimentary about SilverStripe’s scalability, use of Ajax, its healthy community and the impressive levels of input on the forums from its developers."

Read full Packtpub announcement

We're absolutely thrilled that we can use the prize money to top up supporting our upcoming release, and how this award lets us celebrate our focus and hard work on the project. The award also reiterates just how sucessful our decision to go open source has been, which in large part comes down to you, our community of users, developers, and contributors! Thank you!

Judges' feedback

Elliot Smith wrote on his blog (and which turned up on PlanetRubyOnRails):

I was personally impressed by the slickness of the interface, and by the fact that it has been designed to scale well to large websites. The developers have obviously thought carefully about the architecture, and are aiming for the "CMS plus web platform" approach of Drupal. I was also personally impressed by the responsiveness of the development team, their willingness to work in the community, and the clarity of their vision for the product. Worthy winners. Give it a look.

Bryan Ruby also gave some insights at his website, CMSReport.com, and promised to explain more soon:

My vote also went for SilverStripe followed by ImpressCMS for second place and CMS Made Simple for third place. Since I wasn't sure how the other judges on the panel were going to vote, I'm always a little nervous of being too far off from the consensus. Needless to say, I feel validated. In a few days, I'll throw my notes online for how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category.

Sam Minnee named one of 24 most valued open source CMS people in 2008.

In addition, SilverStripe project founder Sam Minnee has also been recognised as one of the world's most valued people in supporting open source CMS projects. Given he is the programmer and software architect most responsible for the SilverStripe project, this is a well-deserved accolade!

Celebrate with us tonight in London!

The core Wellington team took a moment to celebrate all of this with a few bottles of bubbles. However if you're in London, be sure to meet with Ingo Schommer and Tim Copeland and celebrate at today's London SilverStripe meetup which is being held at:

Meza Bar, Soho.
RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

PostgreSQL support prototyped

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

While MySQL is an extremely versatile and hugely popular database, we have been wanting to give users of our software choice in using other databases—this is very helpful, for instance, where you might have existing applications or software running PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server and where you want tight integration.

Last year, as part of the support we received through Google Summer of Code, Philipp Krenn started work on this effort, which was then passed onto Geoff Munn, one of SilverStripe's core developers.

A few weeks ago Geoff got SilverStripe installed on PostgreSQL, along with the blog module. There is still plenty of work to go, so this won't be making the upcoming SilverStripe 2.3 release. However, if you are able to volunteer serious help as an experienced developer, please contact Geoff (geoff at silverstripe.com), as this would be awesome in moving this ambitious work forward.

Check out what the comment says in the screenshot below...

SilverStripe's advisors

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Behind the scenes of SilverStripe, three experienced business experts have provided our company with years of valuable external perspective; offering ideas, challenges, experience, and inspiration.

Pictured below, they are:

Richard Francis, a chartered accountant and business advisor
Nat Torkington, open source guru and O'Reilly Radar blogger
Alasdair MacLeod, a long-serving Deloitte partner

Their support and ideas have been extremely valuable in company decisions like making our software open source and how to grow the company smartly, so we felt they deserved an introduction and a public thanks!

100,000 downloads!

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Today we passed 100,000 downloads of the core SilverStripe software. Much more comes from 2008 so far than from all of 2007; just one of the metrics showing our growth.

In addition, there's tens of thousands of other copies which were included on the cover disks of technology magazines like PHP Magazin and PC World, and where our software has been circulated on other websites.

The downloads of themes, widgets, and modules from our site is also growing quickly; they currently total about 10,000 per month. Add this to thousands of views each month of our CMS and developer videos, and it's quite a healthy traffic quota we're picking up!

Who's downloading?

Ever since SilverStripe started being downloaded, about a quarter of our website visitors have originated from the United States. This is followed in hot competition by New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and the U.K., who jump in order month by month.

Reshaped into the geography of technology choice, it looks like this:

Thanks for all the support!

Improving our public developer documentation

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A key part of making it easy to learn how to use SilverStripe, or any other software project for that matter, is having great documentation. The PHP language, for example, now enjoys widespread adoption and is easy to learn in large part due to free and comprehensive documentation.

We're excited to say we've spent considerable time recently reviewing our existing tutorials and documentation, and discussing how to improve them. We'll let you know more as our plans develop.

Two Years of Open Source Goodness

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

As we approach the two-year anniversary of releasing our software under an open source license, I thought I'd write a bit about where we see things going. BTW, the official birthday of our open source software is 10 October 2006. Not sure how we're going to celebrate, but it's a safe bet there will be beer involved.

What's been different than expected over the past two years?

We are more aggressively focusing on a modular architecture for our product. This is purely pragmatic from a site-building standpoint. It makes things easier for us when we build sites for clients and we think it's good for the long term ease of extending the open source product in general. It's a long term effort we're maybe 70% of the way through.
We are de-emphasizing the phrase "CMS." More and more of what we do is web applications where the CMS interface may or may not be involved. The CMS function in our software is still very important and isn't going away, but what we build goes far beyond traditional notions of content management. We've been using other words like framework, and Sapphire (the core of our open source product), not just CMS. The emphasis on Sapphire in particular will be increasing.
The amount of global interest has been way higher than anticipated. From a magazine cover in the German PHP Magazin to doing the US Democratic National Convention's site, to the SilverStripe CMS being translated into dozens of languages, and a bunch of stuff in between. The global interest in SilverStripe the company and SilverStripe the product has been astounding.
The adoption of open source in New Zealand government has been progressing faster than we thought it would. Thanks to efforts from our friends at Catalyst, our friends at Ministry of Justice, and events like the e-govt barcamp we've seen a very significant increase in awareness and understanding of open source within New Zealand government. At the recent Open Source Awards in Wellington, there was a lot of buzz around government projects' adoption of, and general interest in open source.

What's coming up on the horizon?

Open source as the default option. We see an expansion of the current adoption trends of open source in business and government. Part of this increased adoption rate is how we approach the problem. In our view, business and government need to start with open source as the default option and make vendors justify why a proprietary solution might be more appropriate. This mindset shift is something we're close to today so I think if we keep pushing we can get there soon.
SilverStripe software as a premier web development platform. This is something we believe in very strongly. We think we have a great offering that allows businesses and government ultimate flexibility and can power the most complex and leading-edge websites on the planet. The first step in the plan was to open source our software under the BSD license. That's been awesome for the product itself and for us as a company. Next, we're going to greatly increase community involvement in the open source product. In a big way. Announcements coming in the next few months.
Open data, not just open source. We see the advent of open data as a monumental change in the software industry. Mashups of the past couple years were a test of dipping toes in the water. Once business and government stop using dreamy notions of cost recovery as reasons why they won't open source data they've collected, then there will be a tidal wave of business for heaps of players. We're talking about raising the water level for all boats here in that when datasets are released to the public, nobody can accurately predict the precise ways in which the data will be used, but it's well-understood that when you open up the proprietary stuff you're hanging on to, you enable people all over the planet to use your stuff in ways you never could have imagined. The New Zealand Geospatial Office has links to articles from around the planet that talk about this global trend. Also Laurence Millar, the government's CIO, mentioned the importance of open data when SSC won an award at the OS awards recently.

Well, that's a quick view of the past and future of open source at SilverStripe. Thanks for making the past two years a wonderful journey and here's to the future of open source. Let's keep the party going.

Meet us in Berlin, Munich, and London

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe is hitting Germany and the U.K. this month, with Ingo Schommer and Tim Copeland keen to meet developers and businesses interested in our software. You will get to learn the story behind SilverStripe, influence our upcoming decisions, ask pointed questions, and get a preview of new features!

Join us for a snack at one of the events listed below—we're told the Munich venue serves the best currywurst in town...

Berlin: 7pm Monday 20th October
(d & p media GmbH. Map) RSVP on Facebook or Xing.
Munich: 3pm Saturday 25th October
(Cafe Bergwolf, Schwabing. Map) RSVP on Facebook or Xing.
London: 6pm Thursday 30th Octobor
(Meza, Soho.) RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

SilverStripe takes home NZ Open Source Award

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Last night, Brian, Sig, and I attended the NZ Open Source Awards. We were finalists in two categories: Open Source Use in Business and Open Source Software Project. State Services Commission was also a finalist for the National Broadband Map, which we developed.

We were delighted to win the award for best Open Source Software Project!

The past year has seen tremendous growth in the SilverStripe project: the product has improved, the community in strengthening, and SilverStripe is being used to power more and more high profile websites. It was great to have this recognised at the NZ Open Source Awards.

No open-source project can get anywhere without the a strong user and developer community. So, I would like to say a big thanks to everyone who has been involved with SilverStripe. Together, we have made this happen.

This award is for all of us!

-- Sam

New Zealand Open Source Awards

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Over twenty finalists have now been announced for this year's New Zealand Open Source awards.

The range of organisations and people recognised and the achievements themselves are an amazing demonstration of New Zealand's adoption of open source.

SilverStripe has been is associated with three categories;

Category B : Open Source Software Project
The SilverStripe software project is a finalist for innovation in open source web content management.
Category D: Open Source Use In Business
The SilverStripe business is a finalist for business success through open source.
Category G: Open Source Use in Infrastructure
The National Broadband Map website run by the State Services Commission is a finalist for providing a unique national view of broadband supply and demand. SilverStripe software and our team were used to build the website. We collectively agreed to freely release the project source code as well as make open and free APIs and widgets available.

Winners are announced on September 24th. In the meantime, congratulations and thanks from SilverStripe go out to all the applicants, finalists, and to the organisations who have sponsored and organised the awards.

3.2 million visits in 4 days

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Interest in U.S. Politics set a new traffic record for a SilverStripe-powered website last week. DemConvention.com, the official website for the four day U.S. Democratic Party's National Convention, set some impressive stats:

3.2 million visits
2.6 billion hits
350,000 hours of streaming video served

The website runs on a number of Apache/Redhat Linux webservers. While PHP5 and MySQL underpin any SilverStripe website, the scalability is due primarily to the static file caching code we blogged about recently.

Virtues of the public development model

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We are frequently asked (primarily by business people) why SilverStripe is developed with an open development model.

People generally assume we get some form of contribution by outside developers, which is true, but wonder just how useful or worthwhile it is. All we can offer is that a closed-development model would never encourage genius contributions like this...

Read whole post...

(In case you wondered about the technical background: currently SilverStripe has a caching mechanism that offers speed improvements. If you make manual changes to your HTML templates, you need to instruct SilverStripe of this, so that it can update cache files. Mark's patch, changeset #61721, fulfills a long-desired new feature to remove all cached files, and not just ones pertaining to an area of the site you're working on.)

You got us into the CMS award finals. Now vote!

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Thanks to everyone who nominated SilverStripe for "most promising open-source CMS" in the Packtpub CMS Awards. We're excited to say that (like last year), we're one of the finalists!

We now need your support, from Monday, to vote for us. If we get in the top three, we'll get a monetary prize which will be used to build up the project! Voting ends October 20.

Feel free to circulate and use this banner!

TUANZ Innovation Awards 2008

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Each year, the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) runs a prestigious awards ceremony to recognise outstanding innovation in technology.

Winners and finalists were congratulated at an event last night at the Auckland Museum Dome. SilverStripe was associated with two categories.

Finalist in Healthcare Category

One in seven young New Zealanders are severely depressed each year, leading to suicide being their second most common cause of death, after motor vehicle accidents. As part of the Ministry of Health's National Depression Initiative, SilverStripe worked with some leading companies to produce thelowdown.co.nz, launched late 2007.

The website offers inspirational and honest videos about depression as delivered by New Zealand teen role-models, a large resource of written material, and contains an interactive chat room. The chat room provides a private and free online counseling service run by trained professonals.

The website is offered as both a very rich and innovative multimedia/Flash website and a bare-bones HTML site for dial-up users. The SilverStripe CMS powers both sites, with content automatically shared across them.

Since launch, the website has had over a million page views and hundreds of thousands of video views. Most importantly, on a regular basis, the counselors on the site observe an imminant risk of a young person about to take their life, and have intervened by calling emergency services.

TUANZ recognised this work by naming it as one of three finalists in the Innovation in Healthcare category; a very humbling result.

Geoff Munn Wins Government Category

Over several recent years, SilverStripe employee Geoff Munn single-handedly created an E-Govt Validator, an automatic tool to check websites against the New Zealand Government Web Standards and Recomendations.

It identifies compliance and warnings to enable people with disabilities equal access to government websites. It is open source, and can be used (and downloaded) for free at www.accessware.co.nz.

We congratulate Geoff on his hard work and for winning the prestigious TUANZ Innovation Award in the Local and Central Government Services category!

Highlights of the night

Sigurd Magnusson and Geoff Munn attended the evening, with Kim Hill as MC.

Scaling SilverStripe with Caching

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

When you are dealing with the levels of traffic seen on sites like the Democratic National Convention, it's not enough to dynamically serve every page view. You need to change your approach.

To this end, there is a new feature in the trunk / daily build version of SilverStripe: "static publishing". What happens is that each time you publish a page in the CMS, it will generate static versions of appropriate URLs. You can then configure Apache to send these files directly to the visitors, without hitting Sapphire or the database. And because the cache generation is linked to the publish function, your cached site is kept up to date.

The result: the ability to serve 100s of requests / second from a single server, provided your network bandwidth can hack it!

For more information, see the documentation wiki. This documentation will be expanded in the coming weeks.

-- Sam

Powering 4 days of political history

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Tens of thousands of people are currently in Denver, Colorado, as part of a major process in the U.S. Presidential Election—the Democratic National Convention.

The four day convention schedule supplies key speeches and decisions by the Democrats, and there is significant interest in what Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and others, are going to announce.

Pew Research notes "the upcoming Democratic National Convention is generating much more public interest than did the party's convention four years ago. Fully 59% of Americans say they are interested in following what happens at the Democratic convention, up from 36% in 2004."

Major announcements are expected to align with the American evening primetime television segment, however this year particular emphasis is being placed on demconvention.com, the official website.

In a convention of many firsts, the website aims to be the most tech-savvy of its kind, for instance providing HD-quality streaming video, a virtual Town Hall for submitting questions to the Democrats, blogs, and Spanish content.

As announced on our blog back in April (and covered in the T.V. news clip below) both the SilverStripe software and the company were used to build the website. Demconvention.com shall certainly become the most visited SilverStripe-powered website to date, easily surpassing our past record of 80,000 page views in 3 hours that was set by the California Women's Conference ticket rush last month.

The video can also be downloaded in high quality mpeg format.

3 days left to nominate!

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Help us to gain exposure and money to further our software in the Open Source CMS Awards!

All you need to do is complete the tiny form below by Monday 25th August. If we are amoung the top five most nominated we get into the finalist round.

(The award organisers even put you into the draw for an iPod Nano.)

Join our website showcase!

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We've created a new RSS feed so you can be a part of the steady stream of new SilverStripe powered websites added each day:

silverstripe.com/showcase/rss

This gives everyone an extra incentive to submit SilverStripe-powered websites to our showcase, since there's a larger audience to appreciate them now!

It's truly fantastic to see the diversity of visual design and functionality of websites in the showcase, given the product and its documentation are little more than a year in the public eye...

Auckland meetup on Aug 27

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Aucklanders interested in SilverStripe are invited to an informal after-work meeting at the Empire Tavern in the CBD (map, directions?) from 6pm on Wednesday the 27th of August.

Both Geoff and Sigurd shall be up in Auckland after being named finalists in the TUANZ Innovation Awards. We're taking the opportunity to meet with you to share views, get insights, and support the Auckland SilverStripe community.

Businesses and organisations interested in meeting people experienced with building websites in SilverStripe are most welcome also.

The San Francisco meetup last month was a great success, so we're expecting the Auckland one to offer equally as intelligent and animated discussion.

Please RSVP on facebook so we can advise the Empire on numbers. (Just comment below if you're not a facebooker.)

Up and coming features for developers

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Here's a blog post for all you hard-core developers.

This week we are merging a number of exciting changes from a development branch - known as "branches/roa" to some - into the main subversion trunk release. Those of you who wish to access these features early will be able to do so by using the subversion trunk or the daily builds.

Update: These features have been merged into the main trunk and stabilised.

With these features, we are improving the usefulness not just of SilverStripe CMS, but of Sapphire, the underlying application framework that we developed in-house to power the CMS. The common thread in all these new features is that, by increasing the intelligence of the model layer, we are able to provide an out-of-the-box application with a completed user interface, that tailors itself to the data model that it is given.

The SilverStripe CMS is a good example of this: you are able to easily customise the content fields available on each page, but the overall CMS interface is there for you out of the box, and is fairly consistent from site-to-site. These new developments take the paradigm that we successfully applied to content management, and extend it to support a wider range of applications, such a CRM systems.

Historically, we haven't said a lot about the Sapphire framework, but you can expect this to change. The Sapphire framework is becoming an increasingly important part of the software that SilverStripe produces.

So, what are these new features? Here is a quick sneak-preview of what they will all be; more detailed developer documentation will be available soon.

ModelAdmin

ModelAdmin is a revised version of GenericDataAdmin, re-written from the ground up. It lets you build a sophistic data management application solely by defining the data model that you wish to manage. It is supported by two more general enhancements: SearchContext and scaffolding. Both of these enhancements are part of the Sapphire framework, usable in a wide range of applications beyond CMSes.

SearchContext

SearchContext is a class that eases the creation of a search form and the generation of its result set. It is used to make the search system in both ModelAdmin and RestfulServer.

Given a set of search filter definitions, it will create an appropriate search form, and then it will create a SQL query when that form is submitted. As well as searching on fields of the the DataObject itself, it also lets you traverse DataObject relationships to search by fields in related objects. For example, suppose that we have an Organisation DataObject. Instead of having its address fields directly on it, has a 1-many relationship with an OrganisationLocation DataObject. If you were to define the following on your Organisation object, then ModelAdmin and other users of the search context would be able to search for Organisation objects by looking for related OrganisationLocation objects.

	 static $searchable_fields = array(
 		"Name" => array(
 			'field'=> 'TextField',
 		),
 		"OrganizationLocations.State.ID" => array(
 			"title" => "State",
 		),
 		"OrganizationLocations.City" => array(
 			"title" => "City",
 		), 
	);

Scaffolding

Our scaffolding system is a way of generating sets of FormFields for editing a DataObject, based its definition. For example, a Varchar would be editable with a TextField, and an Enum would be editable with a DropdownField. SilverStripe takes this a step further, and can generate fields for editing relationships as well as regular fields. For example, a ComplexTableField is generated for a has_many relationship, and a ComplexTableField with an autocomplete facility is generated for a many_many relationship.

To access the scaffolded fields, just call getCMSFields() on any DataObject. ModelAdmin uses this to build its add & edit forms for records.

RestfulServer

The RestfulServer is another system that makes use of this enhanced data model to provide you more useful functionality out of the box.

On any of your data objects, simply specify static $api_access = true;. You will then be able to access your database using RESTful requests. All the the requests start with /api/v1, which is handled by the RestfulServer controller. Here are some example requests that you could make on the RESTful server, if you set Page::$api_access to true:

GET http://www.example.com/api/v1/Page/36.xml: Get Page record #36 in an XML format.
GET http://www.example.com/api/v1/Page/24/Children.json: Get all the children of page #24 in JSON format.
PUT http://www.example.com/api/v1/Page/24.json: Update page #24 using JSON format.

Security is configured using the canView() and canEdit() methods on your data-objects, and RESTful users can authenticate themselves by sending their regular log-in details over HTTP basic authentication.

New URL Hander

As part all this work on ModelAdmin we've improved the URL handler that processes requests. To give an example, consider the processing of the URL "admin/crm/Organisation/36/edit".

Historically, a URL such has this would have been handled by a single Controller. It would have been up to that controller to identify the different URL components and amend the responses of all handler functions accordingly.

Now, however, the URL is processed by a chain of controllers and sub-controllers:

admin/crm directs Sapphire to the ModelAdmin class you have created
Organisation/36 directs to a special "sub-controller" that will handle any requests about Organisation #36 within that model admin.
edit is an action on that sub-controller. Specifically, it will provide the interface for editing Organisation #36.

The URLs can be arbitrarily deep. This makes it easier create complex FormField subclasses that have their own behaviour such as pop-ups or ajax responses. In particular, we used this new URL handler to clean up the internals of ComplexTableField.

That covers the changes that I wanted to introduce! I'll update this post once we have merged these changes back.

SilverStripe adds a touch of design, and a whole lot more...

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

In keeping up with the demand for services from commercial SilverStripe clients, and in doubling our office space today, we have recently employed five new staff in our Wellington office.

We welcome James Kirkus-Lamont, a full time multi-disciplinary designer. He will add a real touch of design that will be offered to our commercial clients as well as directly for the SilverStripe software and company.

Aaron Magon has joined us for a dedicated account management role, ensuring relationships with SilverStripe's commercial customers and partners are enduring and strong.

To keep our appetite for developers at bay, we have new two fantastic additions to our development team, Josh Kosmala and Saophalkun Ponlu. Both were familiar with SilverStripe before starting here; Saophalkun was on the hunt for an open source company and Josh had previously built commercial websites like the Tearaway youth magazine website using our software.

We're also very pleased to have Nivea Nicolas on board, who is helping with website testing and content entry, and other general office activities.

From left to right: Saophalkun, James, Aaron, Josh, and Nivea

PC World SilverStripe tutorial online

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

The July issue of New Zealand PC World featured a several page tutorial titled Build your own website with SilverStripe. The tutorial demonstrated how to install our software and some basic customisations appropriate for first-time users. For those unable to grab a real magazine, as of today you can read the tutorial online.

SilverStripe moves up in the world

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We all knew that the internet is overtaking television, but finally there is proof! To accomodate new staff, SilverStripe's offices are moving from the third to the fifth floor of our building (Symes De Silva, 97-99 Courtenay Place, in the Wellington CBD.)

The space we're moving into is twice the size, and were previously tenanted by a television station that has downsized.

Our new address takes effect Monday 4th August.

Update. Highlights of the move have been made into a youtube video:

Google Highly Open Participation Awards Ceremony held at the Googleplex

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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.

California Women's Conference website sets SilverStripe traffic record

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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.

iPhone as iPlatform

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Today's the day the iPhone launches here in New Zealand. We're excited about this because it's a fun device with heaps of integration among the out-of-the-box software, but most importantly, in ushers in a very clever application development (and business) model.

The iPhone App Store is open for business with (as of this writing) 552 applications for download to your iPhone. 24% of those are free downloads. If you're a software development shop and you want to have your application run on the iPhone (maybe taking advantage of all the location-aware built-in GPS goodness), you can get Apple to distribute and sell your application for you! Apple will take 30% of the sale price for each person who downloads your application via the App Store. You get to keep 70%. Not a bad deal considering Apple takes care of ecommerce, marketing, distribution and delivery. Of course, to prevent l33t h4xx0r software from getting on the App Store, Apple will review each software submission for appropriateness.

From the tech side, when you develop for the iPhone you can create iPhone-specific webpages, little mini-applications called Widgets, or full-blown Mac software applications which use (largely) the same tools and APIs as developers use to create regular Mac applications that run on "regular" computers. So what we're seeing now is a re-definition of what a computing platform is. Apple has done an amazing job in allowing developers to think creatively about what software is, what it can do, and where it can run.

About a year ago, we tried running SilverStripe on a first-generation iPhone. Now with the App Store for iPhone, the world is going to see some incredible new software and new ways of thinking about software. Here at SilverStripe we're looking very seriously at iPhone development and we're helping our employees get iPhones by chipping in a bit to help defray the costs.

Seriously fun times ahead for businesses like ours and for consumers too. Three years from now I think software written by web developers will be a lot more pervasive, running on lots of different kinds of devices. Thanks, Apple, for helping to lead the way.

Start voting from Monday!

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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!

15,000 more copies of SilverStripe thanks to PC World.

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +1200

The July issue of New Zealand PC 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!

200th translater joins SilverStripe

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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!

San Francisco meet-up: July 12

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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

New Windows Installation Screencast

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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!

New automated testing tools

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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. Just landed in trunk are some recent changes aimed at improving the experience of testing and making it easier than ever for developers to write automated tests that run alongside application code and SilverStripe modules.

Our new Testing Guide explains what you need to know, and how to get started. As our user-base expands, and we continue to build larger and more sophisticated applications atop the SilverStripe core, we're upping the ante for module maintainers and contributors to commit unit tests along with their new code.

The great thing about unit tests is that as well as improving the reliability and documentation of particular parts of the codebase, they also function as an 'early warning' system for regressions across the entire product platform. Our continuous integration server at http://buildbot.silverstripe.com/waterfall automatically runs the entire suite of core and module tests every time new code is committed to the open source repository, providing real-time feedback and additional motivation for keeping those builds running green!

Last month, Mark gave a presentation to the SilverStripe team that gives a good introduction to many of the concepts. It is available on slide share:

| View | Upload your own

Thanks to Mark Rickerby for his help developing SilverStripe's automated testing tools and putting this blog post together.

How SilverStripe makes money, in 30 seconds.

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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.)

Staff changes and positions available

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

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.

SilverStripe youtube.com channel

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

You may have noticed that the recently mentioned videos about us on youtube were all uploaded by the same user...

This means you can visit www.youtube.com/SilverStripeSoftware to watch them all.

On that page, youtube lets you subscribe to our videos so that you can be notified of new videos we upload.

In addition, videos that have been uploaded by others and which feature SilverStripe are marked as favourites.

So, now you have one easy place on youtube to keep tabs on SilverStripe...

Vote in New Zealand Open Source Awards

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

The New Zealand Open Source Awards have recently re-opened.

We love open source, and think these awards are doing a great job of raising public awareness and opinions about open source.

If you know great New Zealand examples of open source software projects, evangelists, or open source being used to great benefit in commercial, education, or government circles, then please visit the awards website and fill out the short nomination form!

You might also like to tell others about the awards, or distribute the one page flyer.

You do not need to be a New Zealander to vote.
Nominations close mid July.

You might recall that last year we were very pleased to be a finalist only a matter of months after our project was released.

SilverStripe v2.2.2 released

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We're proud to announce that SilverStripe v2.2.2 can now be downloaded. It fixes hundreds of bugs and adds a few new features, such as a paste from Microsoft Word button in the editor!

Thanks to the community for helping to raise and solve some of the bugs, and for being patient while we worked on this release.

One of the areas where the community has helped a lot is with new translations, such as Sinhalese. European languages also got a boost, with interface translations for Dannish, Finnish, Esperanto, and the less-well known country of LOLCAT also being included.

Under the hood, version 2.2.2 introduces unit tests, so look out for some upcoming documentation on how to easily use unit testing to make your projects more reliable.

Follow our normal upgrade process if you wish to update your existing SilverStripe websites.

If you encounter any problems please login or register and submit a report.

Important changes to Windows installer

Creating a windows executable file that bundelled SilverStripe with the necessary webserver, MySQL database server, and PHP created a fast and easy way to get SilverStripe running on Windows. Unfortunately it is time consuming to produce, and it stole time away from other core work. As of version 2.2.2 we won't be providing the .EXE windows installer, and so have provided easy instructions on how to get SilverStripe running on your local Windows (or Macintosh) computer if it is not currently running as a PHP-based webserver.

SilverStripe recognised for ICT Innovation

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Last night finalists for the 2008 New Zealand ComputerWorld Excellence Awards were announced.

SilverStripe was mentioned as one of three finalists for "Innovative use of ICT" for the creation of our free software. You can watch SilverStripe's Tim Copeland receiving the award on behalf of our organisation:

Comment on our documentation

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

One of our favourite features of the online PHP language documentation are the user-contributed comments found at the bottom of any page.

They allow the public to suggest improvements, offer examples, and link to other resources in an obvious and clean manner.

While our documentation has been publicly editable since the beginning, we're pleased to announce that doc.silverstripe.com and api.silverstripe.com now both have page comments enabled.

We're using Disqus to provide this feature, which provides a RSS feed of comments and many other features.

SilverStripe makes Sun news

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Sun, who recently purchased MySQL for US $1 billion dollars, were interested to learn more about SilverStripe, and our experience with MySQL and Sun. They were also keen to learn about our involvement with powering the Democratic National Convention website because MySQL powers the database behind it.

A video team covering the MySQL conference interviewed us at the SilverStripe expo hall booth. The footage was completed yesterday and can now be viewed online on the Sun website and youtube:

SilverStripe features in Gold Awards

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Last night SilverStripe featured in the Gold Awards ceremony, the premiere annual business awards for Wellington, New Zealand.

We were very humbled to be one of four finalists in the Cybergold category. Winners from the night represented some of the most successful businesses and well-known acts from New Zealand, including our sole New Zealand-owned bank and the Flight of the Conchords comedy act. Congratulations also to our friends at PlanHQ for their win, too.

The night included Prime Minister Helen Clark, who chatted with us about our approach of using open source as a way of quickly growing our market and as a better way to produce software.

See two minutes of highlights:

SilverStripe overview videos produced

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We've made it easier to introduce people to what SilverStripe can do with two new videos showcasing our software. They're designed to be the starting point of people's knowledge with SilverStripe, and lead them to our demo and probe further.

Site editing / content management system overview:

Overview of building websites with SilverStripe:

The videos are based on what we had looping at our expo stand at the recent MySQL Conference. The two videos now feature on our standard SilverStripe overview page.

Back from San Francisco

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We've just returned from a trip to San Fransisco, where we exhibited and spoke at at the global MySQL Conference held in Santa Clara.

We met with hundreds of people, received very positive feedback about our presentation (slides and resources now online), and secured commercial business. We're also seeing our developer community grow as a result, as April has already topped our all-time high for our software downloads.

A number of the press interviewed us, with one interview already available for listening online. Sun, who now owns MySQL interviewed us at the conference, producing a two minute video.

You can watch the fourteen day trip abbreviated to eight minutes:

A huge thanks go to Lenz Grimmer from MySQL for inviting us over, and to many others who helped out with the conference and accomodation. In particular, Manisha Nagrani and Matt Parker for volunteering to help out with our stall.

Congratulations to Ligaya Turmelle for winning one the iPod shuffles we gave away at our stall. Ligaya is the founder of PHP Women, a global community aiming support women to become more heavily involved in the PHP community.

SilverStripe on Business Breakfast show

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +1200

This morning, SilverStripe featured on the New Zealand national television show, Business Breakfast. It summarises how our open source software led to our involvement in this year's U.S. Democratic National Convention.

The two minute piece also mentions two other SilverStripe websites: TheLowDown.co.nz, a collaborative effort with Oktobor and Draft FCB for the Ministry of Health to combat youth depression, and an upcoming project in partnership with Inform and design company The Church to simplify understanding and joining KiwiSaver, New Zealand's main retirement fund.

The story can also be downloaded as a high quality mepg video.

Help out at MySQLConf

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We have a free pass to the annual global MySQL conference for someone who can help man our stall in the expo hall.

We were invited to speak at the conference (about our experiences with PDO) and invited to exhibit within the open source pavillion, and would be thrilled to have some local support.

The conference runs from Monday 14th through to Thursday 17th in Santa Clara, California. It is filled with tutorials, workshops, and sessions, as well as being a great way to network—about 1600 delegates are expected.

If you're motivated and able to help represent the SilverStripe developer community on the Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th of April with myself (over from New Zealand), please drop us a line before Friday. You will get full access to the conference on the other two days.

To anyone else who is around San Francisco, we hope you can come to our presentation or to our expo stall. The expo hall is free if you register online or $25 at the door.

Learn from the leaders of the web

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

In February, a few dozen leaders in the web industry presented fresh and inspiring material at the Webstock conference, which was held in Wellington with various members of SilverStripe presenting and helping with organisation.

Webstock featured dozens of talks covering the technical through to the philosophical, and the recordings are now online to watch for free.

We urge you to put aside a few evenings to watch them as there's something relevant for everyone!

Help us to write the SilverStripe book

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We're looking for a technical writer to work with our core developers to produce a SilverStripe book aimed at web developers.

The main reason we're calling out to the community is that the core developers don't individually have the time to tackle a book by themselves. We also expect that by working with someone familiar with book writing, they can bring a whole set of fresh ideas, professionalism, and efficiency to the table.

One obvious aim of the work is to build significantly on our current documentation; our existing tutorials could be considered the first 50 pages of a longer 300 page work.

However, the wider reason ties back to our motivation we released SilverStripe as free software. We truely want to make it easier for website developers to build innovative websites and online applications that are easy to use, update, and manage. Producing the software is only half the challenge: people need to understand how to take advantage of it, and a book is a great means to that.

We very much want to stress we agree with the wisdom found in many writing guides. The book will be of limited appeal as "SilverStripe: The Definitive Guide," as few people will be browsing the web or walking into a store with that in mind. (Besides, SilverStripe is developing quickly so a reference or API guide would be out of date before it printed.)

Instead we expect the book to far more successful if it more generally aims to give website developers extra personal satisfaction in their job, and lets them do better work for their customers. So while the book will methodically take you through the various features and philosophies of SilverStripe, the structure and emphasis of the book is more practical: teach the reader to build websites and applications that are easier to use, are more reliable, take less time to build, are easy to update, have useful novel features, and so on.

As Kathy Sierrra might put it, we're not trying to form a dry Nikon Coolpix 5700 user manual, but rather an engaging and practical guide on "How to take stunning photos of your family." This provides a better type of learning.

We have interest from book publishers, so our next step is to find one or two people to really own the book writing venture. See Alistapart for the sort of professionalism and quality of writing we're after. We are really keen to see this happen so are happy to make the timeframes and payment attractive; our organisation would consider supplementing the publisher's advance. Also note that we are interested in having a free online edition.

Finally, we're looking to find someone with experience in the software ideals on which SilverStripe is premised. We'd hope you're familiar with or have written about many of the following: Object oriented PHP5, MySQL, web standards, unobstrusive javascript, usability, open source, content management systems/blogging tools, ORM/MVC frameworks, et al.

If you would like to author the book, please answer a few questions for us. We hope to figure out who would be involved towards the end of April.

If you have any general comments on the book idea, add a public comment below!

SilverStripe into business awards finals

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe has been announced as a finalist in the tenth annual Gold Awards.

The awards focus on achievements of the preceding 12 months, a very busy time for us! In 2007 we released SilverStripe as an open source package and quickly grew its adoption, community, and features. At the same time, the project and the commercial side of our business fed each other, enabling us to secure exciting projects like the TheLowDown and the Democratic National Convention, in turn landing us on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list for revenue growth.

The award winners will be announced at a black-tie event on May 1st. (Tickets will be available from the awards website later in March.)

SilverStripe main feature of Germany's PHP Magazin

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

The March edition of Germany's largest PHP Magazine has come out with a several page feature on SilverStripe being the cover story.

It provides an overview of our software supplemented with a developer tutorial on quickly building ready-made interfaces to manage complex relationships, similar to one of our public online tutorials.

One of our core developers (Ingo Schommer) is a fluent German speaker and was able to contribute to the article, and has provided an overview for English readers. Some of their observations:

"The installation process is unproblematic, fast and easy."
"Its easy to enhance the uncluttered interface with minimal PHP knowledge."
"The small community is encouraged to extend the limited number of modules because of the sheer ease of developing them."
"Silverstripe is fun: Developers with an envious glance towards Ruby on Rails get a solid alternative built in PHP - including CMS. It enables them to build arbitrary database structures and a matching backend in a couple lines of code."

Thanks very much to Steven Broschart for approaching us and doing the review.

Steven recently wrote on his blog (in german) about his experience of relaunching a website very efficiently and cost-effectively using SilverStripe. He says it wouldn't have been possible with any other CMS he was aware of. Having several document categories and templates, with attached PDF-downloads, he mentioned SilverStripe's MVC-framework shone through in comparison to heavyweight alternatives because the mapping of datastructures was easy and extremely fast. He made the suggestion of speeding up the backend but said he was optimistic that the pace of development would solve these issues in reasonable time.

(Performance improvements are one of the suggested projects if we are successful in participating in the Google Summer of Code this year.)

Google Summer of Code 2008 project ideas

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Summer of Code season is back and that means its time for us to suggest to Google some of the key areas of SilverStripe we would like improved and that equally provide stimulation and reward for students to work on.

If we're selected by Google to participate, then between March 24 and 31st, University students can apply to Google to work on one of the programming challenges below, receiving USD4500 and some swag for the effort.

Extend the blog module

Significantly increase the features of the existing blog module and improve usability. Solve the outstanding issues, reduce the steps and add more flexibility to the task of writing blog posts, improve comment moderation and management, and allow multiple blogs to run off the same installation. You'll be looking to do smaller number of well documented, well engineered, intuitive features, instead of a mass of poorly executed ones. We hope that you would stick around after GSOC to continue to be responsible for the blog module's development.

Extend the ecommerce module

Similarly, increase the features of the existing ecommerce module and improve usability. In addition to completing bugs and issues already submitted, provide new features, like:

More reporting, admininistration, and workflow features
Allow Items in stock, and discount codes
Loyalty schemes (e.g. buying $100 of goods entitles you to $10 off your next purchase).
Add support for new payment gateways (Google checkout, Amazon checkout, PayPal, Authorize.net, Paystation, etc).

CMS Usability and improvements

We strive to make the CMS of SilverStripe as intuitive and flexible as possible and you will be responsible for keeping that pledge true. Working off a detailed list, you will reduce the number of steps it takes to perform common tasks, relabel and reposition aspects of the user interface, add tool tips and helpful cues, and fix frustrating bugs, in precisely the same fashion as was done last year. This is a very important project that will you see yourself greatly appreciated by all users of the SilverStripe user and developer community. An eye for user interfaces is just as necessary as good PHP, CSS, Javascript and HTML knowledge.

Performance

A good project for someone with solid back-end skills, patience, and care.

Through a combination of PHP and Javascript wizardry, reduce the time it takes for the CMS to initially load and make the user experience quicker and more responsive for common actions like expanding tree nodes, performing a sitemap re-arrange, loading a page to edit, etc.
Build a system that provides very fast caching of public-facing pages to facilitate high traffic sites.
Increase the performance of (uncached) framework that will speed up public facing pages, as well the CMS itself.

Unit Testing and Automated Testing

Improve the stability of SilverStripe and make it faster to develop code by adding unit tests throughout the core SilverStripe APIs. Also use Windmill to emulate a browser using the CMS to provide automated testing that all of the major functions of the CMS work.

We currently have basic infrastructure for unit testing and windmill. Your task is to get both to a production state that is then used consistently and confidently by all of SilverStripe's core development team.

Build a Social Network / Directory Module

Build a generic module which lets “members” create an account, and be able to add and edit information to the site, manage their profile, and provide the groundwork for billing for premium membership.

In terms of application think of both the simple end (silverstripe.com members uploading their ‘showcase’ sites and widgets) through to a sophisticated online social network where people could be uploading news, job vacancies, or cars for sale.

Note that we have the notion of a membersignup form, a newsletter system, a forum module, a blog module, an ecommerce module that manages customers as an extension of a 'member' and so on. It should naturally fit with these, which may require refactoring code used by these other parts of SilverStripe.

Social Network Portability is a big issue in 2008. Can this module let people build social networks that play nicely with each other? Can the Googe Social Graph API be used constructively?

Note: This page may be extened with other project ideas if SilverStripe is selected to participate.

SilverStripe helps the world move forward

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We agree Al Gore has a point. We agree that the leaders of the world must concentrate more on preserving our natural environment, and that through public education, the people shall elect politicians who care about the lives of our future generations.

For well over a hundred years, just prior to election season, the US Democratic Party have held an official convention to announce policies, garner support, and determine their candidate for President. This year, the event is to be held in Denver, with 35,000 total attendees, and millions watching on the television worldwide.

Democratic National Convention, 2004.

The supporting website, DemConvention.com, just relaunched, and is expected to build up to multiple millions of unique visitors as political interest boils.

Thanks to the choice of the DNCC's Official Website Producer, Dewey Digital, the SilverStripe web framework now powers the website.

The website in it current form is just the first phase. Tim Chambers, the cofounder of Dewey Digital explains what made SilverStripe special:

"We rapidly needed a robust website that quickly and efficiently let us push English and Spanish content to a vibrant-looking website for the millions of people interested in the November 2008 presidential election.

We also needed a platform that could continually evolve to support the latest emerging web technologies. After evaluating the alternatives, the clear choice to us was SilverStripe, especially since we could rely on working with the core developers to ensure success of the website, a critical part of the overall Convention experience."

Trent Reznor and open source

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A couple days ago, Trent Reznor, the brains behind Nine Inch Nails, released a new album. This is the first album he's released since he left the major record label under which he was contracted. He's long been a proponent of more independently-created music specifically as it relates to musicians having to sign onerous contracts just to get a record out. That was the old way of doing things.

For the past year at least, Trent Reznor's been talking about how he wanted to offer his audience different options for experiencing his music, all of which would be high-quality (he rightly wants control over the production quality of his music). If you go to his new site Ghosts you can see he offers five options ranging from free to $300 USD for experiencing his new album via download, cd, vinyl, etc. Well, there are only four options now that the $300 limited edition vinyl-and-gyclee-print package is sold out. He also mentions on the site quite a bit about how the overall process went. Fascinating stuff.

So how does this relate to open source? One of the ways you can buy the new album is to pay $75 USD and you get the album on cd, a hi-def audio dvd, and a dvd with all songs on the album in multi-track format (and a bunch of cool packaging & pictures). You can then load up Apple's Garage Band or some other music sequencing software with the "source files" of the music from the album. Even though you have to pay to get the multi-track files, it's still open source. And it's a far sight more open than anything I've seen from other popular musicians.

We at SilverStripe care a lot about new business models (such as what Trent is doing) especially when the original author of the content cares deeply about giving people an awesome experience at a variety of price points, including free.

Microsoft listens to the developers

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Earlier this year, Microsoft controversially indicated that many of the eagerly anticipated features of the Internet Explorer 8 browser were to be disabled unless a webpage was specifically edited to make a request to turn them on.

The idea was that this could allow the large number of websites built to to work with Microsoft's (buggy) browser, but not built to industry best practices (notably corporate intranets), would continue to work by default. However, by manually opting into webstandards, it makes it too easy for websites to be lazily built without adhering to best practices, not to mention complicating web development and Microsoft's browser development and creating lots of debate.

Molly Holzschlag recently announced at the recent Webstock conference (pictured above) that Microsoft were toying with other ways to make it easier to enable IE8 in "true" standards compliance mode (with a meta tag, using an HTTP header, or using the prospective HTML5 doctype), although developer concern prevailed and Microsoft have changed their mind.

The IE8 blog has reported that their change ("interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do") is based on a major recent PR exercise titled "strategic changes in technology and business practices to expand interoperability". It is good to see any major organisation encouraging the general developer community to work towards industry best practices, and we look forward to more of the same, given even Apple could be doing more.

Update: Microsoft have released a beta of IE8.

Screencast Tutorials Contributed

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

One of the tasks offered to high school students earlier this year was to produce screencast tutorials on some of the major things you do with SilverStripe; such as:

Although these tutorials are little more than following our existing text instructions or following common sense, by being a movie, you can sit back and relax to appreciate how easy it is to perform these tasks with SilverStripe. Thanks to Gadulix, David Mestel and Simon Welsh for producing these tutorials.

Google Summer of Code 2008

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Over the past three years, Google has spent millions of dollars to pay over 1500 talented individuals to work on open source software projects through their Summer of Code program. Google has now officially announced they're repeating it this year, offering a comprehensive overview.

If you'd been following our blog posts last year you will know how much of a success the Summer of Code was for SilverStripe; from usability work, through to OpenID support, online image editing and multiple-language capabilities, a lot of what you take for granted in SilverStripe was produced last year by our dedicated Google coders.

While Google has not yet announced the projects that are involved, it is safe to say from observation that many projects in past years have been successful at being included again. If you're a university student who would like to be involved with us this year, there's no reason to wait until the successful applicants are announced.

In fact, by producing a theme, writing a widget, offering a new translation, or submitting a patch to one of our numerous feature requests and known bugs, you make it easier for us to have confidence in inviting you to be included. Bear in mind that there are plenty of contributors to SilverStripe who are not involved with Summer of Code, so to the students who unfortunately cannot participate, we still really value your help and enthusiasm.

If you are interested in being involved with Google Summer of Code, keep the last week of March free, as this the only time when your applications can be made.

SilverStripe 2.2.2rc1 released for testing

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe 2.2.2 release candidate 1 is now available for download. It is a bug-fix release only, and solves several dozen issues.

Please help us make this a stable version of SilverStripe by downloading, and looking for problems during installation, upgrading, and general use.

50,000 changesets!

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Every time someone at SilverStripe writes code, each change is separately recorded as a "changeset". We've now hit 50,000 changesets, demonstrating just how much work has done with the SilverStripe framework. This number includes both work directly on the SilverStripe open source project itself, as well as the private commercial jobs we use it for.

Before you ask, the 50,000th change was simply an internal instruction to make a directory; too bad the slightly more interesting change 49,999 didn't come a few minutes later!

Claiming your Google contest prizes

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

If you participated in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest over the past few months and successfully completed one of more tasks, you must complete a parental consent form and submit your address details if you want your prizes sent to you! Only two thirds of the contestants have completed this thus far, and the deadline is the end of the month, February 29th.

Webstock 08

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

What an awesome time we had last week at Webstock 08. For those of you not in New Zealand, Webstock is web-industry conference held here in Wellington every two years. This year the speakers included the likes of Tom Coates, Kelly Goto, Liz Danzico, Peter Morville, Michael Lopp, Kathy Sierra, and New Zealand's own Nat Torkington and Russell Brown, among many others.

My head is still spinning with the exciting ideas and conversations from the past few days at the conference. One thing that really came out as a common thread was the need for focus on people in all of the wonderful stuff we create for the web. That was a really nice tie-in to my very quick talk on What it means to be human at the 8x5 session.

Some of the key ideas I took away from the conference were:

OpenID helps to solve a lot of increasingly difficult problems and looks very promising.
As the challenges of the web increase, we can look to nature, music, and sociology for examples to help us out.
There's still a lot of fundamental web design problems such as confusing visuals, tiny text, and flash-only interfaces that impede basic usage of many sites.
Data is becoming increasingly important as a front-end to a "site." 90% of Twitter traffic is from APIs.
The people I met were all quite eager to attack the problems we face and move the web forward.
SilverStripe as a company, and the product, are both well positioned to take advantage of a lot of the exciting stuff people talked about.
The People's Coffee is quite good and staffed with people who really put in the extra effort.

What Webstock means to us is that we'll be taking a lot of what was discussed and seeing how we can fold the ideas, techniques, and technologies into our core product. We're very excited and can't wait to apply what we've learned!

Big thanks to the Webstock team (including Siggy!) who put the whole thing together. Great job, guys.

Google Highschool Contest Winners

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Since late November, hundreds of highschool students have been working around the world on about one thousand predetermined challenges set by ten open source software packages as part of Google's inaugral Highly Open Participation contest. Today we're excited to name the individuals who distinguished themselves while working with SilverStripe.

It was easy for us to determine our top three students, but much harder for us to rank them. All three completed a staggering quantity of professional work which was often creatively solved. Importantly, because student interest meant SilverStripe recieved 173 pieces of submitted work (up threefold from our expectation of 60!), we were delighted to see these three students earnestly helping other contestants through our forums and IRC (chat channel), otherwise we'd have not been able to cope with the unanticipated success of the contest.

First Prize: Wojtek Szkutnik, Poland.

Of the three, Wojtek Szkutnik from Poland distinguished himself by doing 29 tasks, the greatest number out of the hundreds of students involved, and we are excited to announce him as the winner. He'll recieve an all-expenses paid trip to Google in California.

Even if another student had done the same quantity, Wojtek would still have gained a lead due to the diversity of work he did. Wojtek completed to a high standard at least one of almost every type of challenge we had: He produced over a dozen stylish themes, provided Esperanto and Polish translations, updated our documentation, built sites for non-profits, and did a presentation to promote SilverStripe, to name a few. In comparison to others who concentrated on a smaller variety of challenges, he had to learn much more about our project, community, and process; and overcome far more challenges.

We look forward to meeting Wojtek in person at the awards ceremony at Google's headquarters later in the year!

Second Place: Simon Welsh, New Zealand.

Officially we were going to only announce a single winner, however Simon Welsh did such a great effort we felt obliged to make a special mention.

Simon did 22 tasks, the second greatest number in the contest, tied with one other student. Contestants get paid based on the number of completed tasks, so Simon will recieve Google's maximum reward of USD500 cash and some of their swag. He helped extensively in our online community; our logs show he wrote more than 5000 lines on IRC during the contest, and we're pleased to see him regularly returning to help people needing support.

We were very happy to see Simon take the initiative to complete several tasks to a standard well beyond what we asked; for example, allowing his widgets to work in multiple languages (a great sign for someone only familiar with English!), and commiting intelligent enhancements to the core SilverStripe package instead of hacking workarounds in his code.

Simon's prolific ability to write so many drag and drop widgets was one of the chief reasons we recently automated the process of getting widgets into our download directory.

Well done Simon, it's great to see a New Zealander do so well!

Interview with Simon about SilverStripe and the contest

Third Place: Jeff Chan, California.

Jeff Chan, like Simon, also completed 22 tasks, and with Wojtek, were the three students who did the greatest quantity of successful tasks across the entire contest.

Given we care strongly about usability, documentation, and good programming quality, it is the fact that all of Jeff's work was of a high standard that we're so pleased with his efforts.

Jeff completed several beautiful themes, interesting widgets, translated SilverStripe into Taiwan's dialect of Chinese, and researched how SilverStripe can be improved to suport right-to-left languages like Arabic (Good news: little work needs to be done). Like Simon, he will recieve USD500 and Google swag.

Interview with Jeff about SilverStripe and the contest

In Summary

We were very keen to be involved when Google approached us, and very optimistic that the contest would be a success. We were especially interested in giving the world's top high school students a chance to get networked into popular open source packages, and this seems to have worked marvelously.

In the end, our main challenge was keeping on top of the onslaught of queries and to promptly review work to let students work on their next challenge, and it was fantastic to see a key tenet of open source--collaboration-- showing through in a competition. The students did great work, appeared to have lots of fun and gain valuable experience, and the SilverStripe project (and thus you, since it's all free to download!) benefitted hugely. Thanks very much to Google, and all the students involved!

You can learn more about the other projects and their winners at the Google contest page.

The Internet Explorer 8 doctype smackdown

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Over recent weeks, and at Kiwifoo (pictured), there's been some considerable debate about Microsoft's proposed features of the Internet Explorer 8 release.

Microsoft has failed to upgrade a large percentage of their browser users from v6 to v7 because many intranets and web-applications were not designed for standards, and so break when you upgrade. Microsoft's suggestion is for webpages to indicate they are 'compatible' with newer versions of IE, so that existing pages don't break. This doesn't allow sites broken in IE6 to work, and is fraught with other problems, athough it is similar to how the problem of breaking the web has been dealt with in the past.

FireFox, Safari, and Opera work closely with each other, and use a public, open process for their browser development and genuinely strive for consensus with the developer community about their direction. Microsoft would be wise to follow suit if they genuinely wanted to reclaim marketshare and goodwill with the web developer community.

How can I help fix SilverStripe bugs?

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Becoming a valuable community member of SilverStripe is really easy: just read the How To Contribute section of the community pages, and if you are still unsure, suggest some ideas on the forum and have the community delegate tasks and work with you! There are all sorts of ways to help out, and not all of them require a deep understanding of complex programming. For instance, simply spreading the word is just as awesome as refactoring one of our core classes.

Recently we also started marking certain items in our bug tracker as 'easy'. This has been done deliberately to encourage new people to help with the SilverStripe project, and gain the confidence and understanding to move up to more complex tasks.

Easy issues
See open.silverstripe.com to see all other issues, roadmap, changelog, etc.

SilverStripe doubles Auckland PHP meetup attendance

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

This week's Auckland PHP meetup was a real success, with double the normal attendance turning up to learn about SilverStripe.

We covered our goals, the features and mechanics of the SilverStripe project, provided a hurtling summary of our achievements in the 12 months since we officially launched, and showcased work from the Google Highly Open Participation Contest.

It was fantastic to see the support and interest from fellow New Zealanders, so thank you to all those who packed the venue!

Thanks also go to Jochen for inviting and hosting us, and to Selena for asking lots of intelligent questions and taking photos.

Based on the interest, we'll be back in Auckland on Thursday 13th March to present at the monthly Auckland Web meetup.

Apple iTheme

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Joao, another one of our prolific theme builders from the Google highschool contest, recently published a stunning new theme that is free to download, based on the current Apple asthetic.

Called iTheme, not only is it slick, it is features drag and drop widgets!

Preview the theme and try it out!

Google Highly Open Participation contest ends

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

After a spectacular two months, the contest to engage highschool students with our project has ended. Back in November we came up 60 initial challenges, and we weren't sure they would all get completed. In fact, we've ended up with three times that!

We've had a tonne of themes, widgets, translations and other work contributed, and we now have the hard task of choosing a supreme contestant who shall be awarded a trip to Google's headquarters.

A special credit goes to Wojtek, Jeff, and Simon for each completing more than twenty tasks; putting them at the top out of the almost 400 students involved.

See all contest work

Check back in one week for our announcement of the winner!

Get webstocked...

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Webstock, a 5-day workshop and speaker line-up of international industry leaders, is set to be Wellington's biggest web industry event of the year.

If you've got a few days to spare next month it will certainly be a fun, edifying and professionally-rewarding experience to attend!

SilverStripe is a long-serving supporter of Webstock: we're on the organising committee, we've been a past sponsor, and this year two key SilverStripe staff will be speaking;

Upload your widgets to us!

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We've now added a form to submit your widgets so that they feature on our widgets download page.

So, if you've created a cool widget please upload it! If you're new to widgets then please post it first to our forum and get feedback, as we will only host widgets that meet our coding conventions and widget packaging guidelines.

Stop Spam! Read Books!

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Recaptcha is a fantastic twist on CAPTCHA, a trick often used to prevent malicious scripts from filling out online forms. Recaptcha asks you for two words; one known by the system, and used to check your biological nature, and the other, unknown, used to digitize a book one word at a time (learn more).

It's a wonderful idea, and thanks to Ingo, there's now a download (and documentation) for you to easily add recaptcha to your own SilverStripe forms!

Wojtek updates themes

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Wojtek recently finished updating many of his 15 themes with the sorts of changes that a perfectionist always goes back to do. Read the details and head over to the themes download area!

Having now built over a dozen themes, Wojtek has been working on a program to help automate the process of adapting existing HTML templates to the SilverStripe conventions. You can see his work in progress and give feedback!

FullCodePress winner joins SilverStripe

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We're pleased to welcome Mark Rickerby as our most recent full-time developer at SilverStripe. He brings years of experience with many of the country's best web development and design companies, and was on the look-out to apply his skills on a longer-term, bigger software package.

Mark also had the honour of representing New Zealand to compete against Australia in a recent competition to build a fully-operational website for a non-profit organisation in 24 hours, with no excuses, no extensions, and no budget overruns. As the sole programmer on the team, Mark helped the submission by New Zealand beat the Australian submission. Awesome effort!

You can learn more about Mark at his bio and read his insights on his blog.

Aucklanders, learn about SilverStripe!

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Are you able to be in Auckland city on Monday 4th February at 7PM and wish to gain an introduction to the SilverStripe web platform, and how our involvement with a Google contest helped around 200 complex tasks get done by highschoolers worldwide?

If so, RSVP for February's Auckland PHP Meetup; a free event at Natcoll (corner K Road and Symonds St.)

Please come along whether you're wondering if SilverStripe is suitable to build a website irrespective of if you're a webdeveloper, or if you'd need to hire one to get the job done—both sides of the story will be covered. Stick around to ask all your hard questions afterwards, too!

23 new SilverStripe themes!

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Thanks to a super-human effort by Google Highly Open Participation Contest participants Wojtek, Jeff, and Joao, we have more than doubled the number of SilverStripe themes. We were careful to come up with a diversity of design aesthetics, so check them out and get a SilverStripe website looking the way you want it!

Interview with Jeff, GHOP student in the Silicon Valley

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Completing my interviews with the top three GHOP students in terms of quantity of tasks, is Jeff from San Jose, considered the capital of the Silicon Valley. His work in the contest so far includes website themes, a website, widgets, and translating SilverStripe's interface into Taiwan's dialect of Chinese.

Jeff, tell us about yourself and where you've grown up...

Born in Taiwan, I consider myself a Taiwanese. I currently live in San Jose, California where I attend Evergreen Valley High School. Life as a high school student is quite busy for me. Not only do I have to worry about my rigorous academics, I also have to balance enough time to pursue my hobbies, like web development and robotics. One of the best things about living in the Silicon Valley is that you are motivated by the great innovations that happen around you.

Wow, that's cool to grow up with the innovation around you. What's your story with getting into computing?

I've always been passionate about the web and technology. In 7th grade, I became involved in an online gaming community where I was inspired by the site owners to learn programming. By 8th grade, I had taught myself the basics of PHP and SQL. My programming skills improved as I took up freelance projects. I would always look for open source tools and software like phpBB, CakePHP, and WordPress to help me build websites. I constantly motivate myself to learn from other people's code and strive to be a better programmer. Off the web, I've taught myself Java and C which I use for robotics over these two years.

Cool, and how'd you discover SilverStripe and GHOP?

I first heard of the name "SilverStripe" from Wikipedia where I was looking for a comparison of PHP frameworks. I did not look into it in depth, but the name struck back at me when I was going through the GHOP project list. I decided that I would stick with SilverStripe because I thought this would be a great opportunity to improve my knowledge of object-oriented programming.

Nice, we were pleasantly surprised one day to find SilverStripe added by someone outside our community last year, and find that now its one of our major sources of traffic to SilverStripe.com. I'm sure Google would love to know how you discovered GHOP, too?

Being the geek I am, I learned about GHOP from digg. Without a second thought, I decided to participate simply because it was a great opportunity. I choose to go for SilverStripe because I felt like I belonged to a small community rather than a big community like Drupal. I also wanted to learn more about object-oriented programming.

Nice, all makes sense. Now that you've had some time with SilverStripe, what have your experiences been with the project and its team members?

Working with the SilverStripe framework has been fantastic experience. I've come to appreciate the genius idea of having a framework that is ideal for both developers and site owners. The complexity and thoughtful design behind the framework also boggles my mind sometimes.

The SilverStripe’s close community is one of the reasons I choose SilverStripe as my GHOP project. I’ve always liked small communities because they promote collaboration and you can actually “be a part of it.” I think the community itself is heading towards the right direction, but we definitely do some work to promote our great piece of software.

Each and every one of the SilverStripe community have been extremely pleasant to work with. I would join the IRC channel where I get helpful answers and some laughs. It’s awesome!

That's awesome to hear! If GHOP were to repeat, what you like improved?

The GHOP contest is no doubt a wonderful idea. It can definitely be improved in many ways though. There should be an automated system to accept claims and sort out duplicates. I think the contest dates should be in spring or fall so that people in both hemispheres get an equal chance. The reviewing process should also speed up to ensure the fairness of the contest. Last but not least, we need a proper official “score” tracking system.

I enjoyed the “create a widget” tasks because they require me to think about the programming design and the interface design. I think the SilverStripe community needs to suggest more tasks for the GHOP students to do. We could definitely move some of the trac tickets as GHOP tasks.. We’re don’t have many advanced coding tasks so “Create a simple module” type of tasks would also be awesome.

That's great feedback, thanks very much! One of the challenges is to keep all the tasks roughly equal in terms of complexity, but all of your ideas make sense. So, back to you. What are your plans after GHOP?

I’m aiming for University of California Berkeley or M.I.T. where I’ll probably major in engineering and artificial intelligence. I’m quite fascinated with robotics and artificial intelligence so I hope to study more in the field. I also wish to move back to Taiwan after I finish graduate school. Taiwan is an awesome place. My dream is just to live a peaceful and healthy life. :)

Speaking of the future, how do you see the web and computing advancing?

Today, web and computing has already shifted focus onto the user interactions, like the SilverStripe CMS. In 5 years, I think we’ll start to see companies incorporating these user interactions into our daily lives, rather than being limited to the computer. And not even in twenty years, we’ll begin to see artificial intelligence like visual reorganization begin to dominate our lives. Yes, I think we’ll have to live with robots.

I think so too. If the robots are as cute as KeepOns, then that won't be so bad a thing! (Check out the video below) Thanks very much for your time, and thanks for being such an hard worker in the contest!

12 hours left to be a part of Google's highschool contest!

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

The first phase of Google's highly open participation contest draws to a close at 12:00AM US Pacific Time (08:00 UTC) (21:00 NZST) on January 22, 2008, which is about 12 hours away (See official contest timeline).

The top students engaged in the contest have an insatiable appetite for our tasks, which is why you're seeing a blossoming of new themes right now, but if you'd like to enter history as a highschool student in Google's first global open source contest (and get a Google T-Shirt to boot), then read the contest rules and choose an open task to work on pronto!

Once started, you have a week to complete your work.

Please chat with on IRC if you want prompt replies and assistance, but please don't rush to us in the final 60 seconds expecting us to review your work and give you another task!

Sun acquires MySQL

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

In Jonathan Schwartz's recent blog post he talks about why Sun purchased MySQL and what it means for them and the internet industry at large. Sun paid $1,000,000,000 USD for MySQL which had $50,000,000 USD in revenue last year.

What does Sun get out of this?

The ability to tightly integrate and optimize MySQL for their own hardware.
Positioning themselves more at the center of the LAMP-stack worldview of how the internet should be run.
A stronger argument for associating Sun with datacenter solutions for the internet. Sun has had a long and complex history with Oracle. This move makes strengthens Sun's position against Oracle, especially because Oracle owns InnoDB, one of the core plug-in engines of MySQL.
The chance to provide commercial support and services to organizations who otherwise may not choose MySQL.

All of the above are good for Sun and on the whole, good for the internet community.

What does this mean for SilverStripe?

Having Sun behind MySQL should give an increased level of confidence to our current and future clients that their SilverStripe-based web application has the database backing of a long-time industry leader in Sun.
We hope that Sun will take this opportunity to simplify and provide greater value for the various commercial support options.
We have been working on multi-database support for awhile and plan to make PostgreSQL support available later this year with more database support to follow. As optimistic as we are about Sun's purchase of MySQL being a Good Thing, there is now the possibility that Sun will have a detrimental effect on MySQL. It's far too early to tell how Sun will treat MySQL, but Jonathan Schwatz offers some encouraging words in saying: "We're not acquiring them to tell them what to do - we acquiring them to listen. To their leaders, their community, and their customers." In the end, SilverStripe offering multiple database options to our customers is the best way to prevent database vendor-specific issues that may arise.

In general, the acquisition is good news for SilverStripe and our clients. The Sun-based support offerings and tight integrations with Sun hardware are things we are optimistic about. In particular, we believe that this move will allow more New Zealand-based businesses and government entities to consider MySQL as a viable database platform.

What do you think?

Interview with Wojtek, our prolific Polish GHOP contestant

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Shortly after interviewing Simon Welsh I thought it fair to chat with Wojtek Szkutnik (pictured), currently the GHOP 2008 contestant with the largest quantity of challenges successfully completed...

It's the height of Summer where I am, so its quite peculiar to imagine you in feet-deep snow working away on SilverStripe code. Can you give us a feel for Poland and the city and school you live in, and life there?

Krakow, with over 1 million inhabitants is one of the biggest cities in Poland and its historical capital. It is located in the southern part of our country. The city is known for its significant scientific community and 7 universities (among them, Jagiellonian University and AGH University of Science and Technology, two of the best Polish universities). The IT business sector is developing very fast, represented by many important companies (e.g. Motorola, Google, ComArch). Additionally, Krakow is a beautiful city with a splendid medieval old town and the biggest market square in Europe. It’s also famous for its thousands clubs and pubs, so that Krakow is called “the city that never sleeps”.

As for my school – I love it! Certainly, you couldn’t find a better one for a programming enthusiast. Our schedule is mainly focused on various competitions and contests, and lets us develop our skills the way we want to (well, almost). My teachers have taught me a lot about all the aspects of programming, especially algorithms, on which our school is focused.

Wow, it's always interesting to learn about other cities, and that's quite a contrast to highschool education in New Zealand, where any advanced computing skills must be self-taught. My family had programming careers and encouraged me to learn QBasic before I got to highschool. This let me learn C, and later PHP and web technologies... what is your experience and background with programming, and open source? How did you get into them?

I’m involved in the WWW since I was 12 – that’s when I have started creating my first websites. During these years I have learned PHP on a pretty good level, and when I started attending the 5th High School in Krakow, my C++ and algorithms knowledge has visibly increased. During the last two years I was working as a freelancer and making projects for a bunch of different web developers which brought me a lot of experience. As for my own projects, I have created two browser based PHP games that attracted dozens of thousands of players, which I’m really proud of!.

My open source experiences are mostly related with the phpBB project, which I was using and developing on my own for very long. I was also cooperating for a short time with the Polish translation team of this project.

Great! I'm always curious to learn where people first bump into SilverStripe. How did you first come to learn of SilverStripe?

I have read about SilverStripe some time ago on an IT website, but, to be honest, I learned more about it, when I started to work with SS during the GHOP.

My school teacher told me about the contest, and after taking a look on the contest website, I already knew that it was something for me. I went through all the companies profiles and have simply chosen what I found the most interesting. The SilverStripe tasks seemed nice for me and I decided to go for it. If I had to choose once again, I would certainly participate in the SilverStripe project for the second time.

Glad to hear there's a multitude of places that feature us! How have you found SilverStripe to work with, so far?

I think that SilverStripe is a fantastic project. Its simplicity and flexibility are impressive. I have no doubts that the project will become even better than it is now, as more and more people will be involved in it. I’m looking forward to my future experiences with the Polish SilverStripe support that is going to start soon!

How do you see your involvement with SilverStripe continuing?

I would love to get seriously involved in the SilverStripe development and I feel that I could bring lots of great ideas to the project! I’m thinking about creating some new modules and improving a few things in the code… In my opinion, all SilverStripe developers should focus on the simplicity of use and the extendibility – for me, these are the two biggest advantages of this CMS.

Wow, we'd love to have you on board! Its also great to see our emphasis on usability and extendability be noticed. So, tell us about your experiences working with the other SilverStripe people (core team members, GHOPers) you've interacted with over the contest.

During the contest I was really happy with the amount of work that the SilverStripe staff put into reviewing the tasks and helping the contestants with their issues. The majority of my tasks were reviewed by Ingo, Will and Sigurd and their suggestions made the effects of my work to be better and better. Working with these three people was a real pleasure for me (unfortunately, I haven’t had the occasion to work longer with the other SilverStripe members, but it may change in the future, I guess...).

The atmosphere of the competition between the GHOPers was really nice!

Phew! We've been working quite hard so am glad to hear its been appreciated. How do you feel the contest could be made better?

I have no serious complains about the contest. I think that it was well prepared and I’m looking forward to the next year’s competition (the next year will be my second and last GHOP year), and to this year’s Summer of Code, of course.

I have had a lot of fun with the build-a-theme tasks–after creating two SilverStripe styles, I knew everything about it and the rest was a real pleasure :) . But, certainly, the LOLCAT translation was the funniest of all tasks–I hope that the SilverStripe community will like it, just as the SilverStripe staff did!

Glad you had a bit of fun with the LOLCAT challenge! What was your toughest moment so far?

It's ironic since its snowing outside, but my ADSL modem overheated and died. I was really worried it would stop me in my tracks but fortunately my network provider took only an hour to replace it, but my family suffered for a bit while I cursed about unreliable equipment!

In addition to LOLCAT, you did translate SilverStripe into Esperanto and its modern revision, Ido. Can you explain how you learnt these and in what way to do you use them day to day?

For the first time I ran across the Esperanto language was when I found a book which I was able to understand despite being unfamiliar with the language. It seemed funny to me and I read it carefully, trying to understand the Esperanto grammar. Later someone told me more about this language and that was the beginning. After some time I found the Esperanto internet courses that taught me the rest. I use this language only on the web, because that’s the easiest way to communicate with the other Esperanto speakers. As for Ido, it’s very similar and it took me very short time to understand it. The biggest differences are the word suffixes, but the grammar rules remain the same. Ido was created to make Esperanto sound better, but it’s rather a dialect than a new language. The Ido community is thousands times smaller (millions of Esperanto speakers, as opposed to a few thousands of Ido fans), but it’s growing very rapidly due to the internet. I must admit, that I never used any of these languages to communicate in a normal way, because English and French were sufficient for me. Maybe it will change in the future?

How do you personally see open source is better than closed source software?

Recent years have brought a revolution to open source development, as more and more people are engaged in the OS projects. Personally, I think that in some aspects the closed software is still better, but the open solutions have a much bigger potential and I have no doubts that in a few years it will rule out the closed software. Projects like SilverStripe can develop that fast also due to the GHOP and GSoC projects, which is not possible for closed software.

What's next for you?

After finishing the high school, I’m planning to go to a university and study computer science, but I don’t want to be a programmer with no freedom of being creative. I would like to be involved in original and interesting projects that will help to improve the web and people’s lives – that’s what IT should be for.

Apart from the career, I would love to travel to a few places around the world – it’s great to see how people in other countries and cultures live.

What's next for the web and computing?

It’s very hard to predict. As for the web, the new html and css standards may bring a lot of new features to website developing, but it won’t be a big revolution. I think that in a short time all the home electronic devices will be integrated and we will use one machine to watch TV, listen to the radio, browse the web, play computer games, buy something through the web etc. During the next years, e-shopping will become more and more popular; we will probably become more familiar with the e-signatures and e-voting… The multitouch interfaces can be the new devices to substitute the computer mice. I’m looking forward to see it happening. In the next decades the quantum computers will bring us something totally new. Who knows what will we be able to do then? I do not. But, certainly, the future looks very exciting.

Great, you've been really interesting to talk to. Best of luck with the rest of the contest!

Thanks!

SilverStripe at MySQLConf08

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Wow! We've been invited to speak and exhibit at MySQL's annual global conference.

MySQLConf08 is the largest gathering of MySQL developers, users, and DBAs worldwide, and we're honoured to be an official part of it.

Our speaking slot will feature me on "Upgrading to elegant and versatile database architecture using PHP5 Data Objects," a technical talk based on our experience building SilverStripe's database abstraction layer, which got a real boost from Philipp Krenn last year.

If you're in Silicon Valley this April then register your atttendance and come listen, and find us at our exhibition space!

Exhibition space is expensive at major conferences and talking slots are a real privilege, so we're very thankful to MySQL's generosity in supporting open source projects like ours, and in particular to Lenz Grimmer of MySQL who brought about our attendance:

"While judging what would be considered the world's primary CMS awards, I was struck by what I saw when evaluating SilverStripe. SilverStripe is a technically-elegant product with a vibrant and growing developer community around it; just the sort of thing to demonstrate at our global conference as an example of what can be done with MySQL."

Interview with kiwi GHOP contestant Simon Welsh

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A few weeks ago Simon Welsh, a local (Wellington) contestant involved in the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest popped up to our office to introduce himself. It was great to put a face to a name, and to a hard worker who is one of the most hard-working contestants. He answered a couple of questions I put to him...

How did you find out about SilverStripe and the GHOP08 contest?

Over a year ago my brother and I were searching the internet for the appropriate tool to build a website for our church, and we came across SilverStripe. In the end, we never made that website, but we kept monitoring SilverStripe's progress, and when the blogpost about GHOP was added, it came up in my RSS reader and I was quick to sign up--I was keen on the Google money, T-Shirt and the trip!

What have your experiences with GHOP been?

It's been really fun, and the people who volunteer their time in the support channel have been great, especially Matt Peel who I know also has University and his job at SilverStripe to keep on top of. While I do have a laptop, I can't get on the internet all the time. This prevents me from consulting the SilverStripe documentation, making it slower to figure out how to do my work. It's also been rather rewarding to find bugs and submit patches to SilverStripe as I know I'm making a real improvement to the package.

What tips do you have to improve the contest?

In general I think the contest is already great, and possibly the only improvement would be expanding the prizes to include tools for students like hardware and software to let you explore and learn more geeky stuff. This is because as a highschool student its unrealistic to afford the expense of your own fast computer or commercial software. The ten projects the contest currently includes are fine, but if GHOP were to repeat and include other projects, it would be important to ensure the extra projects are ones that highschool students use already, so that it is relevant and attractive.

How did you get into programming?

Back in 2001 I entered the Television New Zealand Web Challenge and before long I was on the path of making websites; first static, then quickly into increasingly complicated dynamic ones using PHP. My brother found a PHP game called Legend of the Green Dragon which really interested me and I put my newly formed PHP knowledge to use and moved my way up to be a core developer for it.

In New Zealand, highschool only teaches computing at a complete novice level, so to get anywhere you need to be really proactive and learn most of it yourself: its great that the TVNZ and Google contests exist!

What are your plans after school?

I'm really keen to increase my involvement with open source, such as being a regular and useful contributor to the dragon game and SilverStripe. I'll probably study computer science and hope to find a fun and challenging web development job.

Thanks Simon for popping by!

No problem, was great to visit the SilverStripe offices!

I'M IN UR CMS MESSN WIT UR PAGEZ

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe just got a healthy dose of humour thanks to Wojtek's recently created LOLCAT translation. Wojtek mentions this challenge as the highlight from more than a dozen challenges he's worked on while working with us on the GHOP 2008 contest.

To enlighten your SilverStripe installation, save the three files below:

Then login to the CMS, click the "Profile" link at the bottom right of the screen and choose the blank option as your interface language. Hit save, and refresh your browser window!

Spread the word and vote for our LOLCAT picture above...

We're hiring

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe is growing! We're on the lookout for a fantastic developer to help rock the world with the core development team.
For details, check out our career page.

Update: Friday 18th of Janurary

We’ve found the next legendary SilverStripe developer. He’ll be joining the team at the end of the month. We’ll make some introductions early February. Thanks to all those who applied!

Google contest ignores Christmas break

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

While most of the SilverStripe core team were at the beach, having a barbeque in their backyard, or on a bush walk over the past few weeks, by contrast the 60 students involved with SilverStripe in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest have produced a horde of work, leaving us feeling guilty for taking the time off!

In particular, as you can tell from their task lists, New Zealander Simon Welsh, Wojtek Szkutnik of Poland, and Californian Jeff Chan are racing through tasks.

New themes:

Maori theme by João of Portugal
Curiously Green by darek of Canada
Mintswirl by Draicone of Australia

New code:

Google Adsense widget by Ryan Rymax.
Google Custom Search widget by Samiam14.
LastFM widget by sharntehnub.
Ohloh Contribution widget by Simon Welsh.
PayPal donation widget by Simon Welsh.
Module to embargo/expire pages by Simon Welsh.

Check these out at the widgets download page and provide feedback and suggestions in the forum...

Dozens of other contributions:

Tutorials updated to reflect the latest version of SilverStripe
Polish, Finnish and Esperanto translations
Websites for non-profit organisations launched
Browser bugs (IE6, Opera, Safari) for us to solve
Confirmation that SilverStripe's multilanguage capability works with right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hewbrew.
Manual testing of the installer to improve reliability

You can be involved, too!

There's still a month more to be involved, so if you are a high school student keen to get involved, there's still lots of time to choose tasks and work on them.

We've already doubled the number of challenges we thought would be needed for the contest, and will continue to add more tasks as they get snapped up.

Äˆu vi parolas Esperanton?

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

One of the unexpected delights from the still-running Google Highly Open Participation contest was Polish highschooler Wojtek Szkutnik's translation of the SilverStripe system into Esperanto, an easy and flexible language created in 1887 to be a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

So, as the title of this post asks: can you speak Esperanto?

If so, we'd appreciate your help in reviewing Wojtek's translation so that it meets our quality policy of peer review and can then be included in our core SilverStripe release! Apply here.

Happy new year!

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Today marks the first official day back for us in 2008.

You can now expect our full commercial services, as well as our regular and helpful presence on our forums, mailing lists and IRC. We hope your Christmas all went well and that you had a wonderful few weeks full of rest and relaxation.

We also extend our appreciation to dozens of Google Highly Open Participation Contest students who distinguished themselves through working hard over the Christmas period. Look out for an update of new what they've produced later in this week!

Pictured: Our SilverStripe Christmas retreat in Wairarapa.

SilverStripe 2.2.1 released

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

To keep you merry over Christmas we've released a new version of SilverStripe that contains a number of small but important bug fixes, and a number of new languages for the administration interface: Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Swedish, Slovak, Turkish and both Brazil's and Portugal's dialects of Portuguese.

Download silverstripe-v2.2.1.tar.gz (linux) or SilverStripeCMS-v2.2.1.exe (windows)
There are no special upgrading instructions.
Just follow the normal upgrade process.

What makes this release so cool is that most of these languages were included thanks to our involvement in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Either the students translated the langauge, peer reviewed it for quality assurance, or both!

While work from the contest is already publicly available for download as official themes and widgets made by students, this release is exciting because it represents our first release that GHOP work made it into our core package!

Forum boasts OpenID and other improvements

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Version 0.12 of the our forum module has just been released. One of the key improvements is making it easier to register and login to forums, thanks to an ongoing effort by Markus Lanthaler who joined us for Google Summer of Code at the start of 2007.

Markus added OpenID support, including the use of attribute exchange.This means visitors to your forum can store their personal details (name, email, password, etc) in one place and not have to manually type them in when registering to your forum, saving them time. The fact your password is centralised is also more secure and convienient than might expect; I hate the fact that if I sign up to a system that any password I use could easily be tried on another account, and OpenID solves that.

In addition, it contains a number of nice security, usability and performance improvements.

Recall you can now use themes to make the forum easily look any way you want!

Agile Barcamp Success

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

The dust has settled, but we're still buzzing from the Agile Barcamp in Wellington on 7 December. This was a contributor-organised all-day conference held in the gorgeous office space at the top of the Deloitte building in the CBD. At the previous E-government Barcamp one of the recurring topics was agile development and project management methods. Some of us who attended thought it would be a good idea to organise another barcamp focused on agile so we could more deeply explore some topics that were hinted at during the e-govt barcamp.

Some attributes of a barcamp are that it's not commercial (there were some generous sponsors who covered costs of food and t-shirts but attendance was free) nor polished in a traditional conference sense, and that it relies heavily on interaction betweent the presenters and attendees. There is no schedule of talks until the day of the event when people who want to speak put a yellow sticky up on a big sheet of paper, indicating where, when, and what they want to talk about. Sounds like it won't work, right? It actually works surprisingly well. It also gives people who roll up on the day a chance to present. That's a key point.

We ended up with about double the attendance that we anticipated. Many of the sessions were standing-room only (four simultaneous "tracks" of sessions throughout the day) . Attendees were from a variety of organisations; there were people from government, small companies, big companies, and what was really cool was that the stick-on nametags only had room for people to write their first names. No room to write your company name! Cool. You had to talk to people to find out where they worked. And often, you never did find out because people were talking about things they were interested in, as opposed to necessarily putting on the corporate identity and being a mouthpiece. It was great to just talk about industry stuff without feeling like you're at some kind of company pimp-fest.

All in all a great day. I know I learned a lot about how people are dealing with software projects in an agile manner. One thing we learned was that many of the attendees were hungry for deeper insight, case studies, and experiences. It turns out there's quite a bit more experience with agile in Wellington that we thought! That's a very good thing.

Can't wait to kick up some more dust next year.

More goodies!

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We've just released:

SilverStripe 2.2.1rc2 and forum 0.1.2rc2 for testing (changelogs)
Two new themes to download, Gecko and Haze.
Three new widgets to add feedburner support, show links, or display the current time in any country.

Thanks to everyone who helped put these together!

It being the festive season, you can expect a lot more from us before the year ends...

Open Source Software taking off in government

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

I imagine Barry Polley expertly swinging a machete to clear a path in a dense Honduran jungle. If Barry's never cleared a path in a jungle, I'd be surprised. Because that's exactly what he's doing at the Ministry of Justice.

Barry has authored the Ministry of Justice Open Source Discussion Paper which was just released. It's a broad and deep document that talks about open source in general and talks about specifics of why the New Zealand Ministry of Justice needs to adopt open source strategies. (Full disclosure: I reviewed a draft of this paper and provided some small amount of feedback)

Here are some highlights from the paper:

"The Ministry needs an explicit strategy to embrace the adoption and use of OSS [Open Source Software]. Our vendors are moving to OSS without our encouragement or consent...We cannot choose to keep OSS out of the Ministry; our choices are to accept our vendors' decisions as they occur, or to adopt OSS for strategic benefit on terms of our choosing."

"In summary, the adoption of OSS can lead to a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective IT environment, and should be pursued for pragmatic reasons. OSS adoption is not a panacea, and should proceed or not based on a particular package's merits. Given two equivalent packages, one open and one proprietary, the OSS one would be the preferable choice for reasons of better supportability and lower lifecycle cost."

"Knee-jerk prohibition of OSS is no longer feasible or cost-effective."

"An internal checklist for selecting an OSS product should include the following:
1) If there is a proprietary competitor, does the OSS alternative do at least one thing better?
2) Is there an active development community? (Not necessarily a large one)
3) Are there developers who are paid to contribute?
4) Is there a documentation effort that's kept current?
5) Are the licence terms clear and compatible with other licences?
6) Can support be obtained? (Must be available, affordable, with QoE/QoS specified)
7) Is the adoption rate stable or growing?"

"The Ministry, along with the entire NZ government, will need to revise its procurement practices to reflect the reality of OSS."

"Large consulting firms' traditional bespoke waterfall model of development will not be able to compete in any important sense (functionality, cost, or time-tomarket) with OSS adoption."

"In some cases, core developers of a given OSS product may be available to perform custom development, and if that custom work is of general use it can be released to the community for review and ongoing maintenance."

We at SilverStripe are very pleased to see this paper. We agree wholeheartedly with the spirit and content of this paper. Details are spelled out as to why and how the Ministry of Justice (really any government entity in New Zealand) should adopt open source.

Barry concludes by spelling out ten policies. I'll just highlight a couple here:

"Policy 1: Open standards
Choose software that implements open standards wherever possible."

"Policy 2: Prefer OSS
When evaluating software as part of a technical solution, preference is to be given to OSS alternatives over comparable proprietary solutions."

"Policy 3: Review licences
A simple way to comply with this policy and reduce risks associated with licence terms is to require that MoJ adopt only OSS using one of the widely-trusted licences: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical"

"Policy 7: Commercial support
Adopt OSS products that have commercial support options available."

"Policy 10: Documentation
Adopt only OSS that have an ongoing technical documentation effort associated with them. Many of the OSS benefits outlined in this paper accrue from simply having access to source, but if that source is incomprehensible, those benefits are much reduced."

Justice is now taking the lead for open source adoption in New Zealand government. But the points made in the paper apply very well to the commercial sector, too. This paper points the way forward for how software should be developed and adopted.

The path through the jungle is now a little bit easier to navigate. Thanks Barry.

p.s. I gave some presentations at the e-govt barcamp and the agile barcamp that relate to many of the points in the paper.

SilverStripe 2.2.1rc1 and forum module update

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

UPDATE 18/12/2007: SilverStripe 2.2.1rc2 and forum 0.1.2rc2 have been released.

Hot off the heels of SilverStripe v2.2.0, which introduced a major new look and feel, and dozens of new features, comes the SilverStripe v2.2.1rc1 release, with:

New languages:
- Brazillian Portugese
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Hungarian
- Russian
- Slovak
- Swedish
- Turkish
- Several others are awaiting peer review. Can you help?
Bug fixes and minor improvements - see our ChangeLog

Please download silverstripe-v2.2.1-rc1.tar.gz and test this new release. If, after a period of time there are no major faults, it will be relabled as the recommend stable release. Log problems directly into our bug tracker (Register first.)

Forum module update

In the same vein, we recently forum module now has new features including OpenID support, improved security, performance, usability and design. Please try it out and confirm with us that it can be recommended as the stable release.

Download forum-v0.1.2-rc1.tar.gz

Don't forget you can pretty up the forum module with our new themes.

Brian's blog

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Our CEO, Brian Calhoun, has started a stream of thought-provoking articles at the newly launched Brian's Blog. Most recently he's written about SilverStripe's human approach, and how the Ministry of Justice, who set many of the trends the rest of the New Zealand central government follow, is boldly advocating open source software.

Go check out silverstripe.com/brians-blog or subscribe via RSS to get the latest on some of the bigger things that are on Brian's radar.

Google Contest already producing great results

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

The first two weeks of the Google Highly Open Participation contest have been amazing.

We had so many tasks worked on by highschool students that we've had to create a whole new batch of tasks, and it looks like we'll be needing to repeat this throughout the remaining six weeks of the contest to prevent it from prematurely finishing.

It's inspirational to see smart highschoolers get a webserver going, install SilverStripe, and perform technical work, be it XHTML, CSS, design, translation, PHP coding, or debugging, and packaging it to a quality you'd expect from a professional with significant work experience.

Best of all, only two weeks in, a large amount of the work done is already available for you to download and make your SilverStripe website even cooler!

Stunning new themes to download!

Khaki Kraze	Olive Sunset	Nouveau
by jtbandes	by joaopauloreisalves	by joaopauloreisalves

There's many more in progress and a few new build-a-template spots for students left...

New language translations

Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Italian, Brazilian Portugese are now ready to be included in our next official SilverStripe release
Finish, Swedish, and Dannish have now been completed and now only need a peer review
The blog, ecommerce, forum and other modules have now been made translatable, and will be released early next year.
Check translate.silverstripe.com to see languages needing translation; anyone can apply to help translate SilverStripe!

New widgets for your blog

Instant messenger status
Language changer
Countdown
Recent articles on digg
Video widget

Screenshots and downloads at silverstripe.org/widgets

And a bunch of other great stuff, including:

Presentations to teach people about SilverStripe (pictured).
New SilverStripe-powered websites being built for non-profit organisations, like Philadelphia's Holocaust Awareness Museum.
Setting up an archive of the activity at our SilverStripe online chat channel
Review of our forum posts to produce a list of recommendations of improvements to SilverStripe.
Testing, testing, testing! We're getting a great list of improvements to make to the installer and the overall package.

If you're a highschooler anywhere in the world who hasn't yet looked into the contest, there is still plenty of time to get involved and earn a T-Shirt, a bit of spare cash, and compete for the grand prize, a free trip to Google!

SilverStripe ranked 113th in Asia Pacific for Growth

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe Limited has been ranked ranked the 113th fastest growing company in the 2007 Deloitte Asia Pacific Technology Fast 500 index, which ranks technology companies across Australia, China (including Hong Kong), India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand.

As part of the index, Deloitte have compiled a comprehensive report about the 500 companies including reasons for growth and success, perceived threats, business confidence, and acting "green". It is awesome to see an overwhelming trend that successful companies are like-minded to SilverStripe: not only working in the interests of environment, but doing it because they felt it's the right thing to do (rather than a facade to sway the consumer.)

Congratualtions to our friends at Run the Red, First Rate, Trade Me, Breathe Communications, Direct Payment Solutions, Redvespa and Optimal Usability who also made the index.

Be more human

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +1300

What does it mean to "Be more human?" The concept of being more human has been running around in my head for a number of years now. The basic premise is this: we as people can group together with a few (dozen? thousand? million?) like-minded individuals and get some great stuff done. What is that "great stuff?" For me, the great stuff revolves around making the web easier, more fun, and more exciting.

The "Be more human" aspect really comes in when you think about what it would take to achieve that great stuff. In the web industry, those of us who create software and websites (those terms are almost indistinguishable for the kind of work we do) spend a lot of time in front of computer screens. Ten to sixteen hours a day is common. During those ten to sixteen hours it's easy for us to focus on the next new feature, the next browser compatibility issue, the next Ajax debugging technique. All those things need to be done, sure, but there needs to be more context. That context is, quite simply, being human.

What are the things that make us human? What are the things we value as individuals? These are the things that need to funnelled into our work, our software, our websites.

The people who work at SilverStripe and the people who are part of the SilverStripe community are open, honest, technically savvy, and genuinely care about raising the bar for websites, web apps, and CMS's. "Be more human" is a reminder to us to live and code the principles we believe in. When we do that, we take the best of who we are as people: the creativity, the honesty, the boundless energy and desire to make the web more interesting, and create awesome stuff for our clients and the world.

Two examples of ways we're trying to be more human:

1) One of the primary focuses for SilverStripe has been on ease-of-use of the SilverStripe CMS and framework. We know there are people who manage and build websites who don't want to spend a lot of effort on lower-level stuff. Put another way, as an industry/language/anything evolves, the technology gets more abstracted so people can focus on higher-order stuff. The trick is to not be so abstract as to be unusable by those who do want to dig into the details. We will never completely "solve" this one in that it's a moving target and something we continually strive to do better.

2) We open sourced our core technology, the CMS and the website application framework under the liberal BSD open source license. We did this because we believe we've built a good thing and importantly, we want the world to use it to make the web better. One way to look at this is as a trust issue. It can be mighty scary to open source proprietary software. But we trusted that the web building community would be better off if we open sourced. An awesome side effect of this is that the open source community has been very supportive in contributing patches, new features, and generally holding us accountable to make sure what we put out there rocks.

You'll see more about "Be more human" on our site in the coming weeks and months and we're happy to hear your thoughts about this journey that we're on. It really is about all of us, as web builders, but more importantly, it's about us as humans.

Highschoolers! Add Google to your CV!

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Over the past three years Google has encouraged and paid over a thousand University-level programming students to contribute heavily to several of the key global open source software projects through the Google Summer of Code.

We were very grateful to be included in this program in 2007, as it led to the bulk of the new awesome features in SilverStripe v2.2, our language-translation system, several extension modules (e.g. Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps), and bolstered the global developer community around SilverStripe.

Over the past few months we have been working with Google and a couple of other open source projects on a similar program that lets high-school students also get a great taste of what it's like to be involved in a global, open-source software project.

We have come up with over 60 tasks for high school students to work on. They are deliberately kept fairly simple and most don't require you to be a geek genius to be a stand-out contributor! Examples:

Design and build beautiful themes
Code up a widget
Translate SilverStripe into another language
Improve our documentation
Test the project and file bug reports
Build a SilverStripe website for a non-profit
Present SilverStripe to a group of people

Students get paid USD100 for every three successfully completed tasks. Tasks can be worked on right now, and must be completed by 4 Feb 2008. If you're deemed by us as the best contributor you'll get an all-expenses-paid trip to Google! Everyone involved will get a Google T-Shirt and fantastic real-world experience working on an open source project, which will be loads of fun and a real boost to your CV...

See the SilverStripe GHOP Contest Website to get started
The list of contest tasks to work on
Read Google's Contest Rules and FAQ
Ask on the forum, the GHOP mailing list, or online chat to get questions answered.
Update: See the work done in the initial two weeks of the contest.

A world of mashups now possible!

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe websites are now more easily able to contain articles, photos and videos found elsewhere on the internet, thanks to Lakshan Perera, who has released:

Flickr Module v0.2: An update to the existing module, sporting more configuation, reliability, and a more polished interface (demo).
Youtube Module v0.1: Provides equivalent features, but for movies (demo), and
Technorati Module v0.1: Lets your SilverStripe automatically contain the latest and most relevant links and stories about any given topic on the net (demo)
TwitterStatus Widget v0.1 which extends the SilverStripe blog module to show your latest Twitter Status.

Our modules page has screenshots and more information. These modules require SilverStripe 2.2.

Working over in Sri Lanka, Lakshan is one of our Google Summer of Code hackers who has turned into a longer term community contributor, which we're really thrilled with. Lakshan has also put his hand up to help out with translations, our e-commerce module, and the events module that is under development... thanks very much!

SilverStripe 2.2 released! Redesigned interface and double the features...

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We're about to lift the world's expectations about building and managing websites even further. SilverStripe 2.2.0 is a major release containing a staggering quantity of new features and work from our ten Google Summer of Code students and an equally impressive effort from the core team.

Download silverstripe-2.2.0.tar.gz (2MB) - Upgrade guide
Try it out at demo.silverstripe.com
Review our detailed Changelog

Overview of new features:

Redesigned interface and workflow:

Elijah Lofgren, Sean Harvey and Will Rossiter added hundreds of usability improvements, judiciously removed clutter from the interface, and reduced the steps to perform common tasks. The result: more fun and productivity for the content editor!

Every interface got a little clean up. Here's an example from the files and images area:

Some of the other highlights include:

Overall colour scheme updated
Less "dead space": more of your screen is a useful editing area.
Inserting images and links made easier
Sitemap area less cluttered, contains resizeable panes
Publish several pages at once
Search for pages within the admin area
Sitemap Drag & Drop function more intuitive
Drag & Drop file management
Dangerous actions turn red when you mouse over them
Lots of mouse-over tooltips added
Improved the "Save changes to your page?" popup.
Buttons like "Save" animate once pressed, to inform you of progress.
Dozens of phrases in the application renamed for improved clarity and consistency

Elijah was very methodical when doing his work. You can read his complete and rather impressive worklog for a detailed account of most of the usability improvements made in SilverStripe 2.2 ...

Multiple language support for the CMS

Thanks to Summer of Code student Bernat Foj Capell and his mentor Ingo Schommer along with initial translators/testers, the SilverStripe administration interface has been translated from English into:

French
German
Spanish
Chinese
Croatian
Dutch
Polish
Portugese

Bernat created a web-based system allowing volunteers to add and maintain SilverStripe translations, and we'd love for you to apply to translate SilverStripe to a language you know fluently.

Multiple-language support for the public-facing pages of your website

As well as the backend administration system being multi-lingual, thanks to Bernat you can now also have your public-facing webpages in any language you want. As an example, see demo.silverstripe.com in french!

SilverStripe flexibly lets you author and translate in language combinations that suit you. For instance, you can choose to have the administration system in English while translating the public-facing page into French:

Online image editing. Impulsively upload files.

It's always been easy to insert and resize images to put them in to SilverStripe pages, especially since it automatically resamples your images ensuring they're small in filesize and download time. The competition is still to catch up on this, but now we've raised the bar considerably further:

Select multiple files and upload in one step
Crop, resize, and rotate images
Add new folders to keep images organised
... all without moving away from the page you are editing.

Mateusz certainly gets to Pass Go and Collect $200 for the months of work enhancing these fundamental features of SilverStripe!

Watch videos on image uploading and editing.

Improved rank in Google

Every SilverStripe website now sports a special file, sitemap.xml, that ensures Google knows about all of the pages on your site. SilverStripe also informs Google whenever you publish a new page to encourage immediate inclusion (Read more about this technology on Wikipedia.)

See demo.silverstripe.com/sitemap.xml as an example; add new pages in the demo and see them update in the XML file.

These features are thanks to Will Scott, another of our Google Summer of Code contributes. He will later be releasing Google Adwords and Analytics modules.

Reporting Engine to quickly code up custom reports

Quin Hoxie built a graphical reporting system that lets developers produce stunning bar and pie graphs. This release contain a few reports out of the box, and you can look forward to futher reports in subsequent months.

The focus however, is letting developers be more productive by making short work of writing new custom graphs for websites they build.

Quin wowed us initially with the graphs he used in his code sample for his Google Summer of Code application. We're thrilled with where this is going and excited with the technology it uses; the canvas element. (Despite concerns, yes this works in Internet Explorer!)

Learn more about the graphing system.

Webwide single signon via OpenID

Sick of maintaining a hundred seperate accounts on various websites that you use? Waste time resetting passwords to a system you've not used recently? Worried that you use the same password on a bunch of different sites?

So are we, and OpenID is the answer.

Markus Lanthaler spent several months coding two key features:

Single signon to the CMS (video)
OpenID support for the forum (video)

(Note we also recently launched a module to allow for LDAP, Active Directory and other external forms of authentication).

Newsletter module enhancements

The newsletter module got lots of love from Elijah.

It's now even quicker to setup, is more intuitive to use, features more reports, allows you resend old newsletters, and handle bounces better... letting you manage your newsletter announcements in increased confidence.

Developer tools, more APIs make it more fun to be a SilverStripe geek

The geek in you will love the hundreds of new features and bug fixes to the underlying framework underneath SilverStripe. Check out our new Tutorial 5 to explain some new features, and check the changelog for the exhaustive list!

Thank you very much Google!

A staggering proportion of the SilverStripe 2.2 release is due to the ten students we had through the generous support of the Google Summer of Code programme. Between them, they wrote thousands of lines of code and and worked solidly for many months! So a big thanks go out to Google for seriously supporting open source projects like ours.

Donning our beloved new Google shirts from left to right are SilverStripe core team members who oversaw the Google student work: Sam Minnee, Sigurd Magnusson, Brian Calhoun, Sean Harvey, Ingo Schommer and Matt Peel.

Use SilverStripe with LDAP & Active Directory!

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Thanks to one of our open source community members, Roel Gloudemans, you can now use SilverStripe in conjunction with external authentication sources. This allows you to login to the CMS or other secure parts of your SilverStripe website with an account stored in LDAP, Active Directory, a mailserver and so on.

Roel would appreciate people to test the module and give feedback.

Documentation
Downloadauthexternal-0.1.tar.gz

SilverStripe 2.2.0-rc3 released

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

With today's release of SilverStripe v2.2.0-rc3, we're only a matter of days from releasing the stable version of SilverStripe 2.2.0.

There's been a handful of fixes since RC2, so please help us test so we can get SilverStripe 2.2.0 stable out.

Download SilverStripe 2.2.0rc3
Log problems to our issue tracker.

Check our our earlier post on the new features that SilverStripe 2.2.0 will provide.

Demo Updated, check it out!

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Demo.SilverStripe.Com now showcases the amazing new features of SilverStripe 2.2.0, so go check it out the new features and interface!

One of the major new features of SilverStripe 2.2 is multilingual support.

Romain has translated the demo website to French, and you can also check out the translated back end too, for example by logging in as "french" and "password".

SilverStripe.com has been running 2.2.0rc1 since it came out, and we've been loving the improved interface and how tasks like uploading multiple images, resizing them, and adding them to a page has become a seemless, incredibly easy process.

Other great stuff to check out on the demo:

Crop and rotate images online (movie)
Publish several pages at once using "Batch Actions".
As well as browsing, you can search for pages inside the CMS, to help with large sites.
The updated newsletter system
Improved support for Safari 3 browser

SilverStripe 2.2.0rc2 released

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

With today's release of SilverStripe v2.2.0rc2, we're only a matter of days from releasing the stable version of SilverStripe 2.2.0.

There's been nearly two dozen bug fixes and enhancements since last week's RC1, and a large number of the problems were found and fixed by volunteers of the open source project.

Download SilverStripe 2.2.0rc2
Log problems to our issue tracker.

Check our our earlier post on the new features that SilverStripe 2.2.0 will provide.

Put yourself on the map!

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Ohloh is a quickly growing directory of the world's free software, with a neat twist: it derives interesting statistics and comparisions by inspecting the source code and how it changes over time.

Show your support for the free software you like, by signing up to Ohloh and adding projects to your "stack". This in turn informs other visitors which projects have merit.

While you're there, you can see some interesting statistics about SilverStripe, like the fact it suggests it would take a single person 24 years to write the code. (We've done it in less than 24 months!).

It also creates interesting profiles about the people involved, and a resulting map of supporters.

Tweet Tweet

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Google Summer of Coder Lakshan Parera emailed us today with a widget which you can drag & drop into your SilverStripe blog. It shows your latest twitter status updates.

It also shows how easy it is (50 lines of PHP and 5 lines of HTML) to produce a SilverStripe widget that grabs information from another website. With this, we've launched the widgets download area, and look forward to people contributing more widgets.

SilverStripe 2.2.0-rc1: Redesigned interface and an avalanche of new features

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We're about to lift the world's expectations about building and managing websites even further.

It wasn't many months since we celebrated Google agreeing to pay ten programmers to add ambitious new features to SilverStripe. Today this work has culminated with the first release candidate of SilverStripe 2.2.0, available for the community so we can work towards a stable version which we aim to have out within a month.

Download silverstripe-2.2.0rc1.tar.gz (2MB)
Submit bugs you find. Register to our issue tracker then add your bug report.
Upgrade instructions

Over the following month our aim is to produce the stable version, upgrade demo.silverstripe.com and produce an in-depth tour of the new features. Here's an overview to satisify your curiosity in the interim:

Redesigned interface and workflow

A team effort led by Elijah Lofgren, Sean Harvey and Will Rossiter added hundreds of usability improvements, judiciously removed clutter from the interface, and reduced the steps to perform common tasks. The result: more fun and productivity for the content editor!

Multiple language support

Thanks to Bernat Foj Capell, Ingo Schommer and a number of translators who tested our web-based translation system, the SilverStripe interface has been translated from English into French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Catalan, Croatian, Dutch and Polish.

We'd love you to translate SilverStripe into another language for us.

SilverStripe also now allows you to have multiple copies of any webpage to allow for multiple languages.

Online image editing. Impulsively upload files.

Select multiple files and upload in one step
Crop, resize, and rotate images
Add new folders to keep images organised
... all without moving away from the page you are editing.

Mateusz certainly gets to Pass Go and Collect $200 for the months of work enhancing these fundamental features of SilverStripe!

See image upload and editing demo.

Improved rank in Google

Every SilverStripe website now sports a special file, sitemaps.xml, that ensures Google knows about all of the pages on your site. SilverStripe also informs Google whenever you publish a new page to encourage immediate inclusion.

These features are thanks to Will Scott, who will also shortly be releasing modules Google Adwords and Analytics modules.

Reporting Engine

Quin Hoxie built a graphical reporting system that lets developers produce stunning bar and pie reports for websites built using SilverStripe. SilverStripe 2.2.0 will contain a few reports out of the box, and look forward to futher reports in subsequent months.

Webwide single signon via OpenID

Sick of maintaining a hundred seperate accounts on various websites that you use? Waste time resetting passwords to a system you've not used recently. Worried that you use the same password on a bunch of different sites.

So are we, and OpenID is the answer.

You can now use OpenID to give you a webwide single signon to the CMS, and to the forum, thanks to Markus Lanthaler.

Newsletter module enhancements

The newsletter module got lots of love from Elijah. It's now even quicker to setup, is more intuitive to use, features more reports, allows you resend old newsletters, and handle bounces better.

Developer tools

The geek in you will love the hundreds of new features and bug fixes to the underlying framework underneath SilverStripe. Details are in the changelog!

Thousands sing our praises

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We're delighted to learn this week that we placed as the second "most promising CMS" out of almost sixty CMS packages worldwide, by virtue of thousands of votes made by the public.

Damian Carvill, marketing manager at Packtpub, who ran the well recognised Open Source CMS awards, explains:

"From the feedback that I’ve received and the amount of community support you’re generating, I can see a bright future ahead for SilverStripe. You actually placed second in the vote on the website, behind MODx, which shows the level of community support you received. The general feedback from judges was that SilverStripe came across as a nice, clean site with a good admin interface. They particularly liked the use of AJAX in the admin. One comment was although it is a CMS, it comes across as a framework, which was a bonus."

With SilverStripe being considerably younger than MODx and other finalists, we're impressed by your level of support to give us this rank. However, since there's only been months, not years, for us to produce documentation, localisation, themes and modules, the judges felt other finalists had more out of the box functionality and so were awarded the offical prizes.

This makes sense because we've focused on ensuring the framework and usability of the CMS is awesome to work with. While its true some alternatives have more out of the box modules, a compelling website is generally much more than simply a few modules, and our application framework for SilverStripe allows you to make custom functionality much more quickly.

SilverStripe sports document link icons

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe 2.2 will automatically place unobtrusive icons next to text links that go to files, like Word Documentsand PDF's.

Just add a link in the editor, and if it recognises the type of the file, an icon is automatically added. This helps visitors on websites make better choices when navigating your site.

We're making use of a CSS technique demonstrated by Eric Meyer at his AnEventApart conference in San Francisco last month:

.typography a[href$=".PDF"] {
   padding: 2px; 
   padding-left: 20px; 
   background: url(http://silverstripe.com/../images/icons/page_white_acrobat.png)
     left center no-repeat; 
}

This CSS technique (Attribute selectors) works in Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7. Thanks Sean for contributing this!

Keep up to date with our releases

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We recently set up a mailing list specific for SilverStripe Release Announcements. You can subscribe to the list to receive a few emails a month, when new releases of the core product and modules come out. You'll be the first to know when SilverStripe 2.2 comes out...

Forum Reorganised

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We've made some improvements to the online infrastructure that runs the SilverStripe community.

The Bugs, Contributions, and Feature Request forums were replaced with a proper issue tracker and patch submission system so these forums have now been removed. There's now a prominent explanation at the bottom of the forum overview.

Likewise, the Core Discussion forum has turned into a mailing list, to speed up conversation. Finally, Google Summer of Code has finished for the year.

The result is a simplified forum with four areas:

Website Authors

This a new forum to recognise that with thousands of people downloading SilverStripe each month, there is a community of non-developers using SilverStripe to manage their websites.

Site Builders

This is where all the developers building websites can chat, ask questions, and get answers.
Posts from the old "Bugs" forum have been put here.

Extending & Hacking

When you're doing more than just building a site, but actually extending and hacking SilverStripe, you've now got a high-traffic forum. For this reason, posts from the Google Summer of Code, Themes, Core Discussion, Contributions, Feature Requests and SilverStripe Development forums have been moved here.

Showcase

This continues to be the home of where your cool themes, sites, ideas and code can bask in glory.

Gallery module 0.2.2 released

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Romain has worked on a number of improvements to the gallery module, including;

Image borders and other cosmetic effects look nicer
Easier to install - no HTML template editing required.
Default options improved, making it easier for you to get your first gallery up.
You can choose whether your gallery sorts photos alphabetically by title, or by the date you've uploaded the photos.
A few bug fixes that were raised by the community - thanks!

It literally took me less than one minute to download, install and see the gallery working when I tested this new release, so go and download gallery-0.2.2.tar.gz!

Translations begin

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe 2.2 is due out shortly, and will support languages other than English thanks to hard work by Bernat earlier in the year.

We've had a few people alpha test the system to iron out the bugs and we've already got thousands of words translated. Depending on how much time these initial people have, the translations will make their way into the imminent SilverStripe 2.2 release candidate 1.

If you're keen to maintain a SilverStripe language translation add yourself to be contacted later in the month.

We're looking for people who can undertake both the initial work of translating SilverStripe as well as adding a few new phrases and words each month to co-incide with new releases.

Help out and be rewarded!

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

With our first release still as recent as February, the community of people around SilverStripe is still fresh and young. There's been awesome community collaboration in the few months since, but there's still plenty of opportunity for talented and committed individuals to become significant, highly visible contributors to SilverStripe.

So whether you're a great coder, designer, writer, blogger, or just wondering how to view and submit bugs, or just have a lot of time and energy, we'd love to see you participate.

Several people have asked what they can help out with, so we've started an overview on how you can contribute to SilverStripe. We are keen to support you in every way possible, so keep us in the loop with any amazing stuff you've done.

SilverStripe 2.1.1 released

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

A month has passed since SilverStripe 2.1.0 was released, and Andrew and others coded a number of small improvements. Go check it out!

Download silverstripe-v2.1.1.tar.gz

Weekly chat with the core developers on Fridays

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Starting in one week, Friday 9th November, we're making a commitment to have several of the core developers of SilverStripe available on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for an hour each week, so that you can ask questions, get support, and find out what's new.

We'd love for people to show up if you need, or can provide, SilverStripe advice!

Finding a good time is tricky. We'll be holding it at 0830 in the morning each Friday in New Zealand time, given this is where the core team is. Dependant on daylight savings, we're around 20 hours ahead of San Francisco, and 12 hours ahead of England, so be aware that this means it will be Thursday afternoon or evening for much of the world...

See TimeAndDate.com's International Meeting Planner for the time where you live.

GMT / UTC / London	1930 - 2030 each Thursday
New Zealand (Daylight Savings Time)	0830 - 0930 each Friday
San Francisco (PST)	1130 - 1230 each Thursday
New York (EST)	1430 - 1530 each Thursday
Sydney, Australia	0630 - 0730 each Friday

How to connect

Just visit http://irc.silverstripe.com and type in a name you want to be known as.

Or if you want to spend a few minutes downloading and installing an IRC program so that you have a slightly nicer chatting experience, try out Colloquy (Mac, Instructions) or mIRC (Windows) and connect to:

#silverstripe on irc.freenode.net

We look forward to seeing you in the chat channel each week, and hopefully at times inbetween!

SilverStripe in the news

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

In a single day we had three major news sites mention SilverStripe!

Matt Asay, Open Source columnist for CNET, wrote about our strategy on using the BSD software license to ensure our success in his story, How to build a business in Hobbit Land - The SilverStripe Example.

We then had the CMSWire and CMSReport websites catch up with recent news with SilverStripe Welcomes New CEO to Open Source Fold and SilverStripe's Sigurd Magnusson on youtube respectively.

What's coming in SilverStripe 2.2?

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

This is our biggest month of traffic and downloads yet, so I thought it would be kind to make it easy on everyone to see what's around the corner with the SilverStripe project.

This was included in yesterday's monthly newsletter (which you get when you sign up to the forum).

With SilverStripe 2.1 released earlier in the month, we've been working hard on 2.2, which will be released before the year is up. As mentioned on the Google Summer of Code Blog, this release will feature most of the fruits born through our ten Google-funded programmers. This includes;

Hundreds of usability improvements, by Elijah Lofgren, such as tooltips and drag-n-drop file manipulation.
Multiple language support, both of the public site, and the back-end administration system, thanks to Bernat Foj Capell. This was previewed in Spanish a few months ago.
You can crop, rotate and resize images, and upload multiple files at once. Thanks Mateusz Ujma!
Will Scott's work on Google Adwords and search ranking
Quin Hoxie's graphical reporting system that uses canvas
Innovative OpenID support as added by Markus Lanthaler
Support for Microsoft and Postgres SQL server is taking shape, thanks to Philipp Krenn. It is a substatantial job so a big thanks to go out to him perservering, now that Google Summer of Code is officially over for the year!
Ofir has promised to produce an update to his Google Maps module
Lakshan is going revise his flickr module with three seperate items that allow you to pull technorati content, youtube videos, and flickr photos onto your SilverStripe site.

I'll provide an individual tour of each of these as their release nears.

Sunny days are here!

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

After setting up our new Sun servers earlier in the month, we're excited to say they are now powering www.silverstripe.com and its siblings (demo, doc, userhelp). Thanks to Sam and Matt for working with me on this!

Since we've named our two new servers Ernie and Bigbird, we've dubbed their home "Sesame Street"; this being a part of a Wellington datacenter connected to Citylink.

As well as these public websites now running faster, many of our paying customers who use us for premium hosting (without their own dedicated machines) will also benefit.

In terms of speed improvements, these new Sun servers are providing an average three- to five-fold improvement over our previous hardware. (This metric, which includes network latency, is much more comprehensive and useful figure than a raw single-shot page load time in milliseconds!).

Anyone else notice the speedup of silverstripe.com at 4pm NZDT?

So far, we're cooking with gas. Ernie is having trouble even occupying one of its four CPUs (a y-axis value of 4.0 indicates a completely busy server.)

So, we're much more prepared for our next burst of traffic when profiled at Ajaxian.com ...

One week left to vote...

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Friday October 26 marks the cut-off for voting for SilverStripe in the PacktPub Open Source CMS Awards.

If you nominated us in past months, thank you very much; you are responsible for making us a finalist in the most-promising category. However, this stage is to rank the five finalists, so you need to vote again.

By gaining a good position you give the SilverStripe project credibility and a prize of thousands of dollars; both of which will take the project considerably forward!

Google Summer of Code 2007 Mentor Summit

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

The chief reason I was in San Francisco earlier in the month was to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. Not only has Google paid for ten stellar programmers to work on the SilverStripe project this year, they paid for my for flights and accomodation from New Zealand! We couldn't be more thankful!

(Photo from Google Code Blog)

The one-day event was held to share the successes and challenges of this years' Summer of Code and construct useful feedback to both Google and to participants on how to make the next year even better.

It went incredibly well. Of any unconference I've been to, the mix of people was amazing. Not only was everyone a leader of some of the world's most influential software projects, the people attending were very relevant to me, and there was a really genuine level-playing field where everyone was able to learn from each other.

It was great, for example, to bump into PHP's Marcus Börger and ask when namespaces were coming: in the next version, PHP 5.3! (PHP6 is still well under construction and there's no reason to hold off on namespaces)

The morning began with breakfast, witnessing Google's realtime projection of search queries, and organising the day.

Weeks beforehand, invitees were given access to a wiki that allowed for the proposal by anyone to present on a topic, and for the rest of the attendees to endorse the idea. (Tip for next time: email 4 days before the event to say that in 2 days all proposals must be online as voting will occur online. This would prevent the last-second rushes).

On the morning, the session ideas were printed out, with GSOC organiser Leslie Hawthorn assigning rooms and times with input from the group--beginning with the most popular sessions and attempting to reduce the overlaps as much as possible by merging related sessions into one.

Encouraging people to be long-term open source contributors

Straight after the day's sessions times were established, I presented a talk on encouraging Google Summer of Code students to become continuing open-source community members. Much of this is explained in a 15 minute interview I did last week:

Ensure you have the right students to begin with. SilverStripe appointed an overall single person accountable for GSOC (me), who got the 40 applications down to the 10 approved slots.
I gave all applicants (the same) code test which was used for comparisons and matching students with appropriate projects. This let me trust the claims students made to me in their applications.
I talked with all good contenders over skype to ensure communication was going to be fine.
When choosing the students, I tried not only to pick the best, but also help tailor their project to their interests/skill level, based on the code test.
I publically profiled the students from the beginning.
I encouraged students to rise to our level of professionalism/accountability (work on hard, rewarding tasks)
I appointed mentors late, once students and projects were decided, to ensure best fit.
I motivated students by promising exposure, then publicly congratulating work widely. By giving students responsibilty of disinct areas, I can thank them personally. (See our new image editing system brought to us by Matuesz, for instance).
I congratulated working, packaged code (not just when its on their environment)
Release early, learn what the issues are before the deadline!
Kept assigning trac tickets to encourage participation, track in Ohloh

Many of the points made caught the attention of the Drupal members present, who especially were keen to use screencasts next year to efficiently illustrate the work done.

At the conclusion of my talk, Philippe Ombredanne of Eclipse and other few others joined me, and we had a very collaborative session to solicit everyone else's ideas on how best to turn people into valuable contributors of an open source project. Ideas included;

Community participation

Get them involved in choices
Frequent public communication
Introduce students early on to the community
Get them on the community resources (IRC, mailing lists...)
Encourage any kind of participation not just code.
Entrust them with responsibilities/give them ownership over things.

Tools

Give them a blog on the project blog.
Add public wiki repository
Common mailing list
Regular reports through IRC, etc.
Treat them like any other developer (not less)
Public discussions
Have well-defined review process.
Give them rights equal to others on the project.
Mentoring program

Committing code

Give them commit access as much as possible (especially when working on their own extensions).
At the same time, have an experimental branch
Have students participate heavily in communication process
Have other members do bug reports, etc.
Track contributions
Reward their contributions early; commit early, commit often.
Have well-defined policy on how to commit code; they won't be bothered working hard to find out.
Use alternative source repository (SourceForge?, etc.) for licensing problems.
For situations where students have to submit patches, make sure someone is fast about reviewing it.

Encouragement

Track and promote statistics, e.g. on blogs and ohloh
It's all about "Fame" -- congratulate them publically for every success.
Demonstrate to contributors that their code is being used, is valuable.
Offer prize to "best" project.

After Google Summer of Code

Offer thanks and personally invite them to stick around
Give them more things to work on after (interesting stuff, not just maintenance work).
Make contribution a habit.. doesn't have to be code... could be documentation, etc.
Keep them feeling involved.
Get them involved in helping others, as those they help will provide motivation to keep on helping (e.g. answering IRC or forum questions)

Rewards

Hire students
Provide additional incentives.

Other sessions of the day

When we went to merge in the Google Summer of Code work into our product for the upcoming SilverStripe 2.2 release, we finally hit the limitations of Subversion and understood how a next-generation code versioning system like Git would have helped. Currently, many thousands of lines of code in SilverStripe are incorrectly atttributed as being written by Ingo Schommer because he was the one who merged in the bulk of the Google Summer of Code projects. This makes it hard to for someone to query about that line of code, or for people to gain the recogniition the deserve. Git solves this by letting a line of code to contain both the concept of who author and who committed into the codebase. That's just the beginning.

Many of the hundred other organisations face similar difficulties, but my conclusion is that it will be some time before Git becomes polished enough to be easy and not just flexible. So its great to see Git as one of the members of GSOC. Just as important, however, is for someone to step up to Git's marking challenge. Even in a room full of smart geeks, most people using Subversion and CVS and no one could do a good job of explaining in simple terms why Git is better. (Perhaps open-source author Karl Fogel can run to the rescue?)

Other sessions included;

Getting more programmers from developing nations into the programme, though better marketing, and demonstrating how being involved can provide great life opportunities to people in struggling economies.
Getting universities to have open source projects
Triumping cultural differences and ensuring good communitication between people in different nations
Sharing knowledge on translation systems
Best practices on running good hack-fests
Dealing with webspam
How to improve the open-source gaming scene

Making sense of it all

After several dozen sessions everyone reassembled into one group to debrief Google's Chris Di Bona and Leslie Hawthorn on the epiphanies of the day. Nearly everyone had something useful to chip in with, so we're guaranteed that next year's GSOC will be bigger, brighter and cooler.

I give huge praise to Chris, Leslie and others of the open source programs office: If only other aspects of life, government, and business would be so open to group input and idea sharing, we'd have much more fruitful and pleasant lives! (If either of you ever run for president, you'll have my support!)

Dinner and party-time

After a long but very enchanting day at the Google campus, everyone trekked over to Wild Palms for pizza, swimming, and of course, a lot of chatter over a few beers. Most people were entirely from out of town, which made for some very scintilating conversations...

Google Summer of Code update on multiple database support

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Philipp Kreen, one of our Google Summer of Coders, is still working on his project: a great example of how Google has given us open source volunteers from all over the world who are contributing to make SilverStripe better!

Philipp's project was one of the most awkward to complete: improving the core such that it could run on more than just the fast but simple MySQL database, and extend to the Postgres and Microsoft SQL server, through the use of PHP5 data-objects (PDO).

I got Phillip to provide an overview of some of the neat stuff he has completed. First, the database core was rewritten in PDO using prepared statements wherever possible, which both reduces the chance of security vulnerabilities and improves performance:

$this->stmt = $this->dbConn->prepare
  ("SELECT MAX(ID) FROM \"$table\"");

$this->stmt->execute();
$result = $this->stmt->fetchColumn();

He's also written a lot of documentation on the Database support overview, on using the sqlQuery object and writing SQL that is compatible between MySQL, MS-SQL and Postgres.

There will be cases where you want to issue different SQL depending on server or version differences. He has come up with a simple, flexible, and unobstrusive solution:

$query = array(
        "mssql" => ...,  // MS SQL only
        "default" => ... // All other databases
    );
    DB::query(DB::switched_query($query));

A more complex example would be if you need different queries for PostgreSQL, MS SQL, and MySQL, and that you knew there were bug-workarounds, or optimisations you could make for certain versions:

$query = array(
        "mysql" => array(
            "5.0.5" => ...,  //MySQL 5.0.5 to 5.1.14
            "5.1.15" => ..., //MySQL 5.1.15 and above
            "default" => ... //MySQL 5.0.4 and lower
        ),
        "pgsql" => ..., // PostgreSQL (any version)
        "mssql" => ...  // MS SQL (any version)
    );
    DB::query(DB::switched_query($query));

With all this done we are currently testing and fixing bugs and hope to be able to release a beta version soon! We'd love for people to download the code over Subversion and let Phillip know of any suggestions or bug reports!

Congratulations to New Zealand Open Source Awards winners

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Congratulations to the winners and organisers of New Zealand's inaugural open source awards, held last night.

The awards do a great deal to promote that open source software exists and how it is better than closed source. Just as importantly, they reward those operating in the open source environment, and motivate others to do so.

Winners of the awards included both individuals and organisations: Peter Harrison, Chris Cormack, New Zealand Open GPS, State Services Commission, New Zealand Summer of Code, Vet Learn, Select Parks, The Open Polytechnic, and Michael Koziarski.

SilverStripe remained a finalist in the Open Source in Business category, with our friends over at Projectx, with their popular Zoomin mapping site, taking first place.

The highlight for me was for a central-government Minister David Cunliffe to so openly advocate open source software in his address to the open source awards:

"Just imagine for a moment our world without open source.

More than two-thirds of the websites out there would simply disappear. But then you probably wouldn't be able to find the remainder because most of major search engines use open source. And if you did, you wouldn't be able to use what has become many people's favourite browser, Firefox: a piece of software developed in large measure by New Zealanders and right here in New Zealand.

As IT suppliers you’d be signing non-disclosure agreements before you could see how parts of the Internet worked, limited in what you could do either because it was prohibitively expensive, caught in a mire of intellectual property rights, or just simply out of bounds.

There is simply no doubt that the Internet would not have become so essential to our lives, to our economy, to our future as it is today without open source."

Great stuff!

Interview with Dion Almaer of Google & Ajaxian

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

On Friday, I was invited to speak with Dion Almaer about the SilverStripe project, our decision around PHP5, and how we ensured success with our participation in the the Google Summer of Code program which provided us with ten fulltime programmers to work on our project. The fifteen minute interview is on youtube.

You can also see a longer, more detailed talk I did a few months ago about Google Summer of Code.

Dion works in the open source programs office within Google, especially in the APIs department, and recently spoke at the Future of Web Apps conference in London about Google Gears. He also runs the very popular Ajaxian geek news site.

Getting Deeper

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Hi everyone! I just wanted to make a quick post to say a few things about my new role as CEO of SilverStripe.

First, I do want to thank all the people in and around SilverStripe for making the product and the company what it is today. The founders and the rest of the staff of SilverStripe have done an amazing job to get the product where it is today whilst creating awesome websites for our clients. In fact, it's really the other way around: the work we do for our clients takes first priority and the SilverStripe CMS allows us to create better sites for our clients. And of course a big thanks goes out to the developer community and our Google Summer of Code students who all contribute to the SilverStripe product and community in numerous ways.

I'm humbled and honoured to be in this role. The company truly is in a great position to do some (more) amazing things in the coming weeks, months, and years. By opening up the CMS to the world via the BSD license, we've seen a tremendous amount of support from the global community. That support allows us to improve the product much faster than we could on our own.

So what's on the SilverStripe horizon? A number of things, some you'll see only indirectly: more hosting capacity as we set up our Wellington-based server farm, new media streaming capabilities we can offer to our clients, heaps of improved internal processes around support and project management so we can serve our clients better, Google Summer of Code feature integration into the SilverStripe CMS, user interface improvements in the CMS, sponsorship of events around Wellington promoting best-practice software development, and of course, exciting new project work for some very forward-thinking clients.

What we're seeing now is an increased depth in the way we run our business, the kind of work we do for clients ("web-based applications" is often a lot closer to what we do than "websites"), and the evolution of the open source community in New Zealand and the world in general.

It's a great time to be in New Zealand, in Wellington, and at SilverStripe!

We've a new CEO!

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Today I’m thrilled to announce we have a new CEO here at SilverStripe. Brian Calhoun has been appointed as my successor as the new CEO of the company. With nearly two decades of experience in software companies under his belt (primarily gained in Silicon Valley), and having demonstrated clear leadership, management, and technical expertise, Brian was the obvious choice for appointment to this role.

The appointment also marks a new era in SilverStripe in more way than one. Over the past year, SilverStripe has continued to enjoy strong growth, both as a company (being ranked in the top 500 fastest growing IT companies in the Asia Pacific Region) and with our product, the SilverStripe CMS, which has been voted as being one of the top 5 new content management systems in the world. As a result of this growth, a number of new opportunities for the company have been created which I’m dedicating my time to pursuing under the title of Business Development Director. I’ll be posting more about this in the next few weeks.

This is a very exciting time for SilverStripe and I am proud to pass the CEO duties to Brian. Keep an eye out for Brian’s first blog post here in his new role as CEO.

Drag and drop widgets demo

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

To make your life easier, I made a screencast of the free drag and drop widget system that was released a few weeks ago.

Tour and feature overview
Online interactive demo (login: admin/password)
Download the module (requires SilverStripe 2.1 opensource CMS)

View drag and drop widget demo.

AnEventApart San Francisco: Day Two

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Day two of Alistapart's web conference was just as satisfying as the first day, full of a mixture of technical, business, and design inspiration.

Doug Bowman: Design to Scale

In keeping with presentations of the past, Doug Bowman used his humanity-scale metaphors to explain how the audience should challenge their way of working. The only thing different, was that this time, his tenure at Google encouraged him to showcase a company's achivements rather than his own.

About two years ago Doug announced his move to Google. With the world, and I, forever curious as to how his incredible talent was being focused, he opened his presentation with an explanation. Most software companies, and most obviously, Apple, have a very polished visual brand, which propagates into a consistent and loved graphic style in their products. Google, on the other hand, does not, and needs Doug as a driving force towards consistency between their homegrown and aquired products, as well as finding Google a more beautiful rendition of their minimalistic, geeky theme.

Doug's background, for those who don't know, included progressing through Hotwired, the web's first real magazine, until it got too big (See Jeffrey Veen's screenshot-embedded account), before going off on his own to redesign influential sites like Blogger. With so much going well for him, it I don't envy being in his situation to abandon StopDesign for Google, although it does seem like a natural, but tough, detour.

So, to get your mind off that news, I'll mention Doug's creative use of showing a fingernail. He showed the picture here then zoomed out to demonstrate it in a different context: as a newborn finger clasping a parent. It was an artful way to get back to the topic at hand: scale.

Doug initially summarised how cities inspire and adapt to growth via railways, freeways, skyscrapers, city planning, and even lanes that change direction to cope with rushhour and drunk drivers.

Having introduced the point, he crossed to websites and apps to demonstrate the correlation. Cities and companies know how to grow quickly, and the lessons from these should, and can, be applied to websites;

Expect and fuel growth. Find the railways that will coax the millions of visitors to your land, but be organised and anticipate their needs so you can cope with the demand. Moreover, given the growth of our world population, and the advance of China and other nations, your website or product will need to handle popularity.
Ensure flexibility; people are different and so your product needs to allow for their idiosyncracies. Let users use different browsers, font sizes, and window dimensions. Allow for menu items and text-based labels so that they can be translated, knowing that not only is German often longer thanEnglish, but that menu tabs in Chinese may only be a single character and yet need to be findable and clickable.
A popular website needs to be fast, simple, and not burden its infrastructure. If a task can be done in a few pages, not only does it make for a better user experience, it lessens your server requirements. If that task is a sign-up process, then the simpler it is, the more likely your entire business will succeed, as Doug demonstrated with Blogger.
Extending his point on infrastructure, Doug also mentioned the notion of downtime in 9s (without the myths), and reminded us that for a popular system, a few kilobytes shaved off a webpage equates to 100GB of traffic when you have 20 million users; often the case for Google.

Doug also scored a few points for his slide design...

Jina Bolton: Interface cosmetology

Design 101. Jina brought us back down to earth, to focus us on her obsession of design, beauty, the world, and herself... which all makes perfect sense when you discover she's a designer for Apple, and co-author of The Art and Science of CSS

As someone who appreciates but never "learnt" design, it was an edifying hour. I'm sure those who did know design were still impressed and motivated by the array of awesome website work showcased.

I liked her play with the phrase "you need to know the rules before you can break them". I'll have to use that next time people don't want to learn rules!

Some of her Design 101 material included;

Making use of curves, which is hard with CSS; you need to use images. E.g. sylvialoh.com
Use 2 to 4 typefaces, often balancing a serif with sans serif. Altering letter-spacing can be used as create subtle differences without creating a page full of too many typesfaces.
Do worry about typesetting, in other words, the placement and spacing of letters, words, lines, paragraphs.
Favour left aligned headings and paragraphs, although justified text generally favours centered headings.
Capitalise on whitespace and real punctualtion (emdash, elipsees) to enhance ledgibility and a feeling of polish.
Be decorative and use ornamentation, e.g. begin sentances with a drop cap or smallcaps. Want inspiration? See ilovetypography.com
Use photography or illustration but share the mood, motivation and palette with the webpage. Online fashion store Urban Originals shows how a photo and webpage blend together for a consistent effect.
The rules of photography apply also to illustration. Case in point: DannyBlackman.com (do scroll up and down lots)
Use volume and depth, and perspective
We all know colours strike different moods (anger, relaxation, sterile, etc). Remember that when coming up with colour schemes.
Use pattern and texture to provide enhance the mood created by colours.
Simplify. If you put a website in our showcase that obviously shows you've sequentially added each of the above attributes one by one, it will probably look as tacky and overdone as a MySpace page. Contemplate "Its not how the work looks, its how the look works".
Have others critique your work.
Use websites like cssremix.com and horde well-designed things to inspire

Kimberly Blessing

A person's first slide is very defining. Kimberly Blessing's showed me I'd never hire her as a designer. However by the end of the show, I don't think I know of anyone better to evangelise and produce website-building standards and have them successfully spread for the true good of an organisation. So, your first slide really shows whether or not you a master of your topic.

Kim brought standards to AOL, which at that time was everything from whether you used <UPPER> or <lower> -case elements through to file-naming conventions, etc. ID and class names, cgi variables. While she apologised that her standards back then weren't the ones that eventually became best practices or the W3C rules that the web developer community believes in, she was breaking real ground back then, and I'm sure it was far easier to modernise those standards than deal with the outfall of having no standards back then.

So why standards? The consistency and uniformity makes people work faster, waste less time on the mundane and unrewarding basics, and ultimately be more profitable. This applies to both companies concerned with their internal teams as much as it does to webdevelopment agencies billing out to clients.

While it'd be hard to argue that being consistent in the way you build a website saves time personally, as well as across a team, I was impressed with Jessica's quick progression onto dealing with complaints. She'd obviously spent considerable time managing them.

Standards are out of date or not completely relevant.
They don't address a certain topic.
They're too difficult to read or remember (aka I'm too busy)
Management told me to skip them
They limit my creativity

To overcome these complaints you need to properly create then manage the standards:

Standardise the fundamentals to begin with
Study work done and in progress to look for conventions and model standards after them, in other words ratifying rather than changing the way you work.
Consider future needs (need I remind you of Doug's salient points?)
Set a definitive review schedule. For instance, each three months review the standards. Look at work done in the period and see if standards are being followed. If not, why not? (Poor standards or poor adoption of good standards?). What non-standardised aspects of the work are sensible to standardise. Sidestepping proper reviews will ruin your entire standards system, so do it well!

Training & Communications is key to making standards work in an organisation. First of all your must gain satisfaction. Everyone needs to get on board to learn about them, and get their buy-in. Standards must be mandatory; Jessica made a real point of demonstrating how even the top level management needed to be apart of training. If anyone doesn't turn up to training or the announcement about standards, they can shrink away and undermine your efforts to getting your team behind the standards.

Offer training and communicate regularly, and incorporate adherence to the standards part of your project life-cycle. Make it clear that a project is not finished unless its proven to have adhered to the standards. Not only does this ensure your work is better, checking off the project gives you the insights into what to tweak with your overall standards.

Accountability of the standards. You must appoint a single person who is in charge of standards (or different people for different standards). This person trains people to supports the standards (e.g. coach the junior guys who are excited and passionate about such things). This person has to be vocal, in your face, around all the time, not at their computer. They need to yell at anyone when standards are not followed, which includes their boss. On the flipside, like I do with our Google Summer of Code student work, genuinely thank, showcase and congratulate those who do what you want.

So to make a good standard, it needs to do more than just dictate how you do something, otherwise people will often not see the point of doing it. (I know I challenge rules that may be perfectly sound, if I don't have a justification) You must both explain the reason and need of standard, and justify the solution. If people know the intent, such as to improve download speed, or allow your CSS file to work in two different projects, they see the greater good and will like your standard. Have use case, examples to help with both convincing the standard is worthwhile, as well as demonstrating how to use it.

I knew Jessica was on the right track when she began to talk about verbs. I found that our newer staff write documentation with gentle language like "it is good to do x, y and z", and then noticed how flimsy it felt and how no one else would bother to heed the instructions. So in Jessica's words, instead use "may" and "must", not "should always"! Don't be afraid to lay down the law by saying things like "Never use selector hacks" or "Always set font sizes using ems and percentages".

So to tie it off, Jessica explained you need a single "standards person", who writes good, justified standards; makes sure every understands them, and regularly checks, updates then, and congratulates or scolds the team as appropriate.

Eric Meyer: The state of CSS in an IE7 world

Eric did a repeat of the previous day, showing off some neat tricks and explaining for those who've been too busy, about what IE7 has, and hasn't done, and suggested what we should about it.

The main problem with IE7 is IE6. While IE7 didn't resolve all we wanted fixed, the larger issue is that with so many users of IE6 lurking around (exasperated sigh about how intranets are made to be IE6-only compatible, preventing upgrades), the web industry has been shy to eschew IE6 compatibility. For instance, on silverstripe.com this month we have;

FireFox	64.2%
IE7	17.5%
IE6	9%
Safari	3.8%
Other	5.5%

As Eric point's out, though. You shouldn't care. Look at your own, as they might be completely different :P

Eric continued by demonstrating the advantages of IE7, before showing us a neat trick to let us actually use them.

As Eric points out, IE7 has working fixed positioning and number of other CSS concepts.

For instance, the > characters selects the direct child, but not anything deeper:

body > div {
  border: 1px dotted red
}

e.g. <body><div>would select this</div></body> yet <body><div><div>not this</div></div></body>

A menu formed from a list often desires styling the first menu item differently. You can do this now:

<ul>
 <li>about us
 <li>products
 <li>services
 <li>contact us
</ul>

li {border-top: 1px solid black; list-style: none}
li:first-child {border-top; none}

You can also now use adjacent sibling selector (the plus symbol). Things really got interesting with Eric's summary of attribute selectors, which are clearly explained over at W3C, e.g.

style TEXT input but not other input elements
input[type="text"] { 
  width: 85%; 
  border: 1px solid #555; 
  border-width: 0 0 1px; 
}

If a text box has the value required, emphasise it
input[value="required"] { 
  color: red;
  font-weight: bold;
}

Magically put a PDF icon beside downloads
a[href$=".pdf"] { 
  padding-right: 18px; 
  background: url(http://silverstripe.com/pix/pdf-icon.gif) 100% 50% no-repeat; 
}

Or like this
a[title*="(PDF"] { 
  padding-right: 18px; 
  background: url(http://silverstripe.com/pix/pdf-icon.gif) 100% 50% no-repeat;
}

So, now that you're about to personally hunt down each IE6 user and physically upgrade them to [well, I'll leave the IE7, FireFox and Safari debate to you], Eric pointed out Dean Edwards' IE7 javascript support for IE6. Not only does it make IE6 work like IE7, this script was actually out well before IE7, and was the inspiration for the IE team on what could be easily fixed. (E.g. why else would they have added the <abbr> element?)

To answer's Eric's question, unfortunately, no, it seems that attribute selectors are read once at loadtime, and not in runtime. It would have been awesome to be able to do this:

input[value="required"] { 
  color: red;
  font-weight: bold;
}

input[value="easteregg"] { 
  color: blue;
}

And have something change as you typed in different values. But I've tested it, and it doesn't work. Try it yourself.

Lastly, Eric talked about how to deal with browser hacks. Eric mentioned both the "html > body" style hacks as well as Conditional Comments, which work reliably to put your hacks in a single, obvious, maintainable, location. Eric didn't push for conditional comments although I certainly believe that approach easier to manage and more likely to be reliable as browsers update.

So, since IE7 is more on par with FireFox and Safari, without further ado, read up on CSS selectors once more, and make some websites that would have traditionally have broken in IE6! (Let me know if you put them in our showcase)

Aaron Gustafson: Learn to love forms

Aaron Gustafson led a very detailed, methodical tutorial on how to write good semantic HTML for forms, and how you should style it. I felt much of the content was fairly widely known, although I was a little distracted by our SilverStripe demo site being down thanks to a city-wide internet outage. Aaron's website, however, does have lots of interesting content for you to read.

Read Luke Wroblewski's summary

Jeffrey Zeldman: Selling design

Jeffrey runs the rather successful HappyCog webdesign agency and finished the conference off with a very edifying hour of lesson's he's learnt, most of which went well beyond the jurisdiction of purely how to sell design. This was an excellent session so:

Read the liveblogged transcript on Joe Clark's Blog!

An an example, he raised a very valid point challenge about refuting the conventional business wisdom to agree to clients who run to you with a rushed, last minute, nearly-overdue project:

"Listen for bad-date vibes. When someone comes running like a house on fire, we run away from them. “Your emergency is not my problem.” Here’s what it means: The business wisdom is you can dictate terms. It really means that they knew they wanted to launch on September 1, but they couldn’t agree to a strategy, with committee after committee, like things are like at a university, and then finally it’s almost September 1. When they’re in a rush and they’ve been indecisive and that’s why they’re in a rush, they’ll still be indecisive when they’re your client. They’re the same people."

It doesn't just stop there!

As if the speakers, the venue, the networking, and being in a foreign city weren't enough, AnEventApart had dinners on both nights with sponsored food and drinks. A big thank you to Eric, Jeffrey and the rest of the team who put this on - I know how much work it is.

I see next year's dates are already posted at aneventapart.com. I'd certainly suggest attending (and to keep you excited in between, you can pop down to New Zealand in February).

Update: I put up a write-up of the following day's Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit...

Google Summer of Code Statistics

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Ohloh has produced statistics for the ten Google-funded programmers who have worked with us over the past few months to produce fantastic new features, some of which are already in the current download, and most of which will be released in the upcoming 2.2 release.

Student	Project	Lines of code	Commits
Bernat Foj Capell	Internationalisation	2972	53
Elijah Lofgren	Usability and more	1579	198
Laktek Pererra	Mashups	290	15
Markus Lanthaler	OpenID, Security	18176	113
Meg Risen	Safari support	10	2
Mateusz Ujma	Image editing improvements	4957	66
Phillip Krenn	Multidatabase support	1054	18
Quin Hoxie	Reporting	6104	17
Will Scott	Search engine optimisation	110	8

AnEventApart San Francisco Day One

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

A day into Alistapart's intimate web conference, AnEventApart San Francisco 2007, and its clear where the industry is focusing: with the battle for web standards now entrenched, consideration can go into content (aka copy) strategy, as well enlightening the rest of us busy souls of some interesting coding and design tricks.

A big thanks to Eric Meyer and Jeffry Zeldman for organising a quality-over-quantity conference held at the beautiful Palace Hotel. A stark contrast to the 18+ tracks of OSCON, AEA had only a single lineup of speakers, making it a very palettable way to deal with the effects of a 12 hour flight from New Zealand, and a lovely way to prepare for the Google Summer of Code Summit, that SilverStripe was involved with.

Eric Meyer: Secrets of the CSS jedi

Eric woke us up by demonstrating CSS genius which has long been possible: turning a <table> into a pretty bar graph (Read explanation and see demo or download source). Why bother? Because a table of say, financial data, especially with proper headers, is the best, most semantic HTML possible, meaning that Google, other websites, and blind-readers can interpret it perfectly. It also prevents you from duplicating the code for both semantic meaning and artistic flair.

The epiphany Eric had back in 2005 (yep, it's been under the radar that long) was discovering that the CSS display attribute for the <table> element is neither display:block or display:inline, but display:table. You then set a table to display:block, then position the table headers, rows and cells into a pretty graph that even works in Internet Explorer 6.

Amoung the other tricks Eric pointed out was how Firefox's default styles reside in actual, standard css files that you can read, interpret, and edit. Want to see exactly what the size, padding and line-height your H1 is in an "unstyled" document?

E.g. On your mac, go to Finder > Applications > Firefox (right-click to "Show Package Contents") > Contents > MacOS > res, and you'll notice half a dozen CSS files....

For instance, quirks.css illustrates all of the "quirks" of FireFox, which are primarily deviations from "correct" behaviour to mimic Internet Explorer.

The last time I saw Eric speak he was out-battled by very charismatic speakers with idealogical topics, so I was delighted by his confidence and how engaging the talk was, given I have a lot of respect for Eric's life-long work.

Jason Santa Maria: designing your way out of a paper bag

Jason then gracefully guided the conference tone from Eric's edifying dispersal of geeky tricks, to a calm, beautifully illustrated narrative: imparting wisdom on what designers can do to be more creative, motivated, and satisfied in themselves, and additionally; how to produce astute work.

Horde anything that is inspiring, whether it be webpages, photos, typefaces, magazine pages, or your own sketches. Use these as cues to reawaken inspiration.
Give yourself time for research, as Jason managed to do in Ireland!
Begin your design process with broad strokes, focusing first on form, devoid of colour. If something looks good in black and white, you then have a basis for adding colour, much like photography.
Be clear on the brand and ensure it speaks through each decision you make in the design. It helps to think of branding simply as your gut feeling about a product, service or company, rather than overintellectualising the concept.
Base your design on a grid; then break out of it with careful, artistic license. Anyone who's navigated large cities appreciates the predictability formed by town planning, because you can travel efficiently without getting lost. So be it with your website. It is convienient to form your page around 12 vertical sections, so your content and photos can be half, quarter, third, one-sixth, or a twleve of the page width, and look tidy.
Simplify your work through focusing on whitespace, heirachy of objects, and focal points, and polish, polish, polish...

In the Q&A section, he reminded us that large ads in news articles can destroy your hard design work and it is up to us to educate clients and managers to ensure ads don't dilute your site and therefore your brand.

Jason led us through his workflow on rejunvenating both Alistapart and and his own company's site, and Happy Cog, demonstrating both his speaking and design prowess--We look forward to him coming over to New Zealand early next year for Webstock!

Jeffrey Zeldman: Writing the user interface

The difficult timeslot leading up to lunch was given to Jeffrey Zeldman, who is responsble for both AnEventApart and Happy Cog's existance. Fortunately, given the distraction of our stomachs, he was entertaining, and his premise was pretty simple: with few exceptions, content is actually more important than design, so find a budget for it. If news websites like slashdot were twice as pretty, but half as interesting to read, they'd be considerably less successful.

Jeffrey provided a great number of anecdotes, but should have pushed harder at how foolish the industry has been to give such prominence to graphic design and other aspects of website building. In other words, it would seem a travesty to reduce the importance of design like this:

"Well, let's come up with three broad-stroke ideas for the content of the homepage, get your feedback, then work for days while we refine it to a final polished masterpiece. Oh, and if we have time on the last day, we'll come up with a rushed design, or while I think of it, what do you reckon about just directly reusing the design of the old site?"

Yet we often treat content as the poor cousin of design. Design is still useful; it's just generally pointless without good content. Once you have good content, people like Jason can then use artistic mastery to elevate your site to a truely outstanding success.

So Jeffrey subtly guided us along a walk through the hall of content appreciation, stating;

Your site is supposed to be read (by humans, no less)
Use design to help people read less
Every word must be useful. Not only must it contribute, tie it back to the desired tone, audience, and brand.
Rewriting copy is cheaper than overhauling design and code and often more effective
If you can't budget it, absorb the serious effort of content-writing into other project areas, like usability report writing.
When editing wordy content, don't think of dumbing it down. You'll do harm if you are condescending. Instead, abbreviate to make it easier to understand.

Joe Clark: Why I hate online captioning

After an entirely delcious lunch, Joe Clark bemoaned how the situation for deaf viewers to interpret video on a computer was in a complete shambles, and was seeking personal funding to help research to fix it.

Technology on televisions has for years allowed viewers to see captions on TV (it's been mandatory in the USA for years), he suggested how we can take these lessons online.

The vocabulary lessons of the day included captioning, or a full description of all audible sounds, including speach, the phone ringing and the dog barking. This is a huge improvement on transcription, which lacks the non-speach parts, or worse, subtitles, which give deaf viewers even less understanding by editing down and summarising the speach.

Joe listed doznes of problems with online captioning, with a critical obstacle being there are too many captioning formats, and that the different video viewers don't support them with any degree of reliabilty. Naturally, big companies like Microsoft are pushing for closed, proprietary "standards" which will not let the proliferation of online video content ever be understood by deaf (or other-language) viewers...

This meant that closed captioning, where captions are hidden inside the video content but can be enabled for viewers who want it, is inherently broken.

Being someone who always strives for a technically elegant solution, I found his solution hard to accept: Accept failure somewhat and use open captioning, i.e. render captions into the picture itself. Then for every video you post online, have one without captions, and one with.

More on Joe Clark's site

Erin Kissane: Content Strategy to the rescue

Erin, editor of Alistapart, continued Jeffrey's theme on content. While not as forceful as him she underscored the importance of content. This time, she defined content strategy (a narrow and deep relation to brand strategy) and explained the process for coming up with the copy, and that everyone involved in making a website is responsible for ensuring its good.

Not only should content be given its budget, it needs to be fleshed out while design and development are being conceptialised, because they all affect and embellish each other.

She pointed out that designers and developers often get content requests or work that affects how well content will work, and need to step up to think strategically about content. No more will a desiger make menu labels that only fit 8 characters, or page designs that don't allow an extra menu item. Project managers will also talk with clients so that uninformed questions like "Can we have a blog with a wiki" don't pop up half way down the development path.

Just as Rataouilli saved the day by stepping in to add the missing ingredient to the soup, Erin pleeded with anyone involved in building websites to speak up when noticing poorly made content decisions.

Salient points which resonated with me;

Ignoring content strategy causes problems which pervades all parts of the site team (designers, developers, etc). Content is a deadline killer, as you can't repurpose old site content.
Anyone can do it. Just think through the content needs stategically, before you get entreched with development or graphic design work.
Define the level of informality, humor and the person behind who is writing the content. Also consider accesibility and SEO, or in using words that people will type into Google to find your website.
Come up with agreements like "this box should describe product X in 30 words, conveying idea a, b, & c"
You will be asking busy people for content. How do you make it happen? (Ask for it early, and give templates/examples/guides, like one perfect product description, for them to emulate

I shouldn't need to tell you that Erin's articles on Alistapart provide substantial further reading...

Jarod Spool: Why good content must suck

Jarod Spool finished the day on a very humerous note with his premise that Good Content Must Suck. As in, pull people in, that is.

As raised by Peter Perolli you can link people navigating websites (as "informivores") to a fox hunting a rabbit. Both are looking for a scent, and we need to ensure that the trigger words we use in menus, titles, graphics, headings and buttons are very carefully chosen to be what the visitor is looking for.

In other words, design your content for scent; and your content will suck.

Going further you can also design your content to suck down the page. (Eliminate horizontal rules, left and right columns ending together, etc, and people will happily scroll down the page to find what they want. Just give them the cue on what is below the fold).

Jarod worked in a study claiming that the optimal number of words in a link is around a dozen, because it meant the word or phrase the user was looking for, is most likely to be in it. This represents a big problem with menus and navigational panels, and means you really need to work hard on your menu naming scheme. The worst thing you can do is have two or more menu items that overlap in meaning, or are meaningless: make each item explicitly different, clear to understand, and what the users are looking for!

Jarod left us with a funny quote (Comparing someone we can't mention, as a "Monacle and persion cat away from a badie in a james bond movie") and a challenge: Replace your homepage with the sitemap page and see how promptly customers remark on how your site overhaul is great...

Read Day Two of AnEventApart ...

demo.silverstripe.com updated

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

In anticipation of SilverStripe 2.1 being released, demo.silverstripe.com has been upgraded.

It now shows off the blog, ecommerce, and gallery modules.

SilverStripe 2.1 released

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

After 3 release candidates, we're satisfied that SilverStripe 2.1 is stable. So, go and download it, and make use of its fantastic features! (See full changelog)

Please note that beginning with this release, SilverStripe warns you that you need PHP 5.2 or higher. While it should work with some earlier versions, this allows us to move to requiring PHP 5.2 in future versions (See explanation).

Also note that the Forum and Ecommerce modules need to be upgraded to work with SilverStripe 2.1.

So, what's new?

Sunny days ahead! 18ms page loads

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We're really fortunate to have acquired two brand new Sun X2200 M2 AMD64 servers, at a major discount thanks to them supporting us as an open source development initiative!

We're waiting for a bit more of the gear to arrive (extra processor, to bring it up to four cores, and more RAM) before we commission the server. But curiosity got the better of me, so I came in on the weekend to set up the machine with SilverStripe for benchmarking.

The AMD Opteron dualcore 1.86ghz (with 2GB ram) loads the homepage of the default SilverStripe 2.1rc3 in about 37ms, or capable of over 50 pages a second given the two cores. This is with SilverStripe's partial caching system, that still produces several database calls. This illustrates how we've been been able to favour development of new features rather than caching and speed so far, although security, speed and memory overhead will be looked at later in the year.

ab -n 100 -c 2 http://ernie.silverstripe.com/apache2-default/silverstripe-v2.1.0-rc3/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking ernie.silverstripe.com (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname:        ernie.silverstripe.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /apache2-default/silverstripe-v2.1.0-rc3/
Document Length:        2338 bytes

Concurrency Level:      2
Time taken for tests:   1.896831 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      294600 bytes
HTML transferred:       233800 bytes
Requests per second:    52.72 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       37.937 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       18.968 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          151.30 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.0      0       0
Processing:    33   37   3.9     36      53
Waiting:       30   37   4.2     36      53
Total:         33   37   3.9     36      53

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     36
  66%     38
  75%     39
  80%     40
  90%     43
  95%     46
  98%     49
  99%     53
 100%     53 (longest request)

Once we get the extra RAM and CPU, and I tune it the default settings of PHP, Apache, MySQL setup, we'll be humming!

Currently www, demo, doc, and userhelp.silverstripe.com and about 100 other websites all share an ex Weta Workshop server previously used to render Lord of the Rings. With www.silverstripe.com alone accounting for more than 100GB of traffic last month, it will be great to get the SilverStripe sites on their own dedicated machine!

Given Sun sends everything in efficient to deploy packages, it won't be too long until all this is up and running. (I was certainly impressed with the hard-disks already being mailed in their hotswap containers; heck, as pictured, they even put power cords in their own air-cushioned boxes)

Google Summer of Code Update: Image editing glory!

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Check this out! The image editor and upload improvements have come a huge way since we last showed Mateusz's work back in July. The code is currently publicly available for download via Subversion and will be released in SilverStripe 2.2.

Beautiful, powerful image editor

Will collaborated with Mateusz to provide a slick design to the image editor, which allows image rotation, cropping, resizing, and undoing your actions... (all using HTML, CSS, AJAX, PHP5; not Flash)

Allow multiple file-uploads, with progress bar

I often find when managing the silverstripe.com that I need to upload serveral files at once. Uploading them using a normal HTML INPUT field is slow and tedius so Mateuz used a tool we found on Ajaxian to add a bulk-file upload feature to SilverStripe, including progress bars...

Streamlining uploading photos into the WYSIWYG editor

Past time constraints had meant the means to upload photos into the WYSIWYG page editor required you to jump into the Files and Images section, and that made it a longer process than necessary. It was just a case of finding a volunteer to improve it, so I'm incredibly thankful to Mateusz who squeezed this great improvement into his busy schedule!

You'll note the new add folder option, as well as being able to upload multiple files at once.

Usability and garbage collection

Mateuz also fixed a number of usability issues with the Files and Images section, such as improving pagination. He also put considerable work into a feature that allows you to determine which images you don't use on your website, so you can delete them with confidence!

If you like it, vote for us at the Open Source CMS awards, and help us win a monetary prize that funds SilverStripe development!

SilverStripe 2.1.0rc3 released

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Announcing the third (and most likely final) release candidate of SilverStripe 2.1.0. This contains the following changes from rc2.

Fixed conflicts with BBCodeParser and pear
Fixed BBCodeParser files being autoloaded when they shouldn't
Removed gallery module specific code from the core
Adding missing ?flush=1 after rewrite test is forced
Fixed installer styling

You can view the full list of changes on the SilverStripe ChangeLog.

Download silverstripe-v2.1.0-rc3.tar.gz
Download SilverStripe-v2.1.0-rc3.exe (for windows)

Gallery module bigger and brighter

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Romain has just released an updated version of the Gallery Module (v0.2.1; 400kb download). Its looking fantastic, and is full of features. Like our new blog module with drag-n-drop widgets, it requires SilverStripe 2.1.0rc2 or later.

The update offers a huge amount of extra configuration within the CMS, and as always, you can use the SilverStripe developer framework to easily customise and configure it much further. The installation instructions are very simple, and you can quickly begin configuring your gallery:

The above settings allow you to choose the size and number of images, which by default look like:

Romain has made use of the Lightwindow 2.0 pop up library to provide a very professional, intuitive and usable browsing process... I especially appreciate having previous and next links while in pop-up mode...

More than just a photo gallery, you can specify the file types to list. Now you can create professional lists of videos and office documents...

In fact, you can configure your own file types, such as adding support for showing Excel Files...

This results in a "gallery" of office documents. You can upload and specify your own icons for the file types, too.

So, demo or download out the gallery module, and let us of know of suggestions and any issues for Romain to work on!

SilverStripe a New Zealand Open Source Awards finalist

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We've just been informed that SilverStripe has been judged as one of the finalists for the New Zealand Open Source Awards from more than 130 nominations.

Given we are one of New Zealand's most prominent organisations not only advocating, but evangelising and pushing for open source, we're delighted with the result, and hope that our nominated category (Open Source Use in Business) encourages more organisations to make open source a genuine part of their business. The overall winners will be announced an evening event on October 17, so wish us luck!

New Staff at SilverStripe

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

After four months at the SilverStripe support post, Kiel Smit has taken up an exciting opportunity to run his own courier company franchise. During his time in our office, Kiel's been immeasureably helpful with managing requests from our paying client base, so we'll miss him but wish him the best of luck with his exciting new venture!

We're delighted to announce some recent additions to our team, too. Kirti Nanji has come in as an extra project manager, and Geoff Munn as a new SilverStripe core developer.

O'Reilly Ruby Blog sees the light

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

O'Reilly blogger Derek Sivers yesterday wrote an opinion post, 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails, and in doing so, reiterated the architectural decisions we made in SilverStripe over a year ago.

Ruby on Rails has been hyped as a programming language for a few years, and while this is laudable for creating a critical mass of programs, programmers, tools, and book sales, I'm glad to see that the environment has matured such that people are:

more likely to use Ruby on Rails for what it's good at, rather than use simply because it's the new, fun kid on the block
realising most "exciting" features of Ruby on Rails have been in languages like PHP and Python for years, but that very few people have used them. Your programming discipline, and using the right tool, is what gives you mileage.

Derek's article reminded me of the presentation Sam did at the OSCON software conference a few months ago, Ending Rails Envy in PHP5. Just like Derek, SilverStripe benefits from exactly the same benefits of good program design, where you can benefit from the heightened sense of Ruby On Rails-like object oriented code including reflections and separating your code between models, views and controllers.

This is why we give you a powerful framework, and at the same time, give you the ability to hit the ground running by having fully-featured, entire modules like blog, forum, ecommerce, gallery, and flickr mashups.

It is also why we endorse the GoPHP 5.2 campaign, and why SilverStripe 2.1 will now have a warning if you have less than PHP 5.2: earlier versions of PHP keep you writing ugly, unmaintainable code and simply do not allow contemporary programming practices.

SilverStripe 2.1.0rc2 released

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Andrew's been busy over the past week, patching bugs you've helped us indentify, and released an update, SilverStripe 2.1.0rc2. If no major problems are found, this will become the official 2.1.0 stable release.

Barcamp Wellington

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Last Saturday I (Brian) went to the NZ egov barcamp here in Wellington. It was a wonderfully informal event attended by about 80 or so of the New Zealand website creation crowd and government representatives who care about how government websites get built.

I gave a talk on the RFP process, while others spoke about Agile techniques, microformats, identity management, open source issues in government, accessibility, multi-output rendering based on single document source, risk management theory and practice, and more. Here's a mindmap of many of the ideas presented.

It was inspiring to see very clued-in government people aware of and eager to fix issues around "how to make e-government better in New Zealand". There are a number of follow-up items for myself and others to further ideas brought up during the sessions.

I love Wellington. :-)

Oh yeah, there are already rumours of a follow-on barcamp based on some of the common themes presented... stay tuned for more.

2 weeks to America

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Thanks Google! Two weeks from today I'll be going back 19 hours in time, having been invited back to San Francisco for the Google Summer of Code mentor summit. This is all so we can discuss how to improve the extremely generous and very fruitful open source program that Google let us participate in this year. It's awesome to see a strong contingent of fellow New Zealanders coming, including Penny, Geoff and Robert.

It's less than two months since my last visit to Google, where I did an hour long tech-talk (video) and had an awe-inspiring tour of the Google campus, so I look forward to meeting up with the same great people (and the free food!)

For those around San Francisco during my stay of Tuesday 2nd - Sunday 14th October, holler out to track me down, or come find me at...

Tues 2nd: Silicon Valley NewTech meetup (I presented there 2 months ago)
Wed 3rd: San Fran NewTech meetup
Thu 4th & Fri 5th: An Event Apart (put on by Alistapart)
Sat 6th: Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit
The following week is packed with stuff! Decisions, decisions. I'll see how I go, but there's a 3-day Facebook conference overlapping a 3-day PHP conference, and a bunch of smaller but just as interesting meetups such as Netsquared (Tues 9th) and the Creative Commons Salon at Shine (Wed 10th).
Sat 13th: SuperHappyDevHouse, which I went to, and loved, last time.

SilverStripe releases blog module with drag'n'drop widget system

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Productive times! Brian, Jeremy and Andrew have been working over the past weeks to produce a free blog module for download. This is in parallel with Andrew releasing SilverStripe v2.1 and Ingo working towards v2.2 with our Google Summer of Code students, so it certainly feels like Christmas around here!

Download blog module (requires SilverStripe 2.1)
Visit demo.silverstripe.com/blog

Tour of the blog module

Blog comes out of the box working without any customisation necessary. You can easily and completely change the look and feel by making your own theme...

Note the "tags" and "archive" widgets on the left hand panel; these can be completely customised in the administration system mentioned below.

Replying to a post is fun and quick, thanks to AJAX. It's just like the page commenting feature that you can demo already...

Writing posts

Writing a new blog post is also quick and easy, and offers bbcode formatting, just like our forum module. To ensure you spend your time writing and not manipulating the system, we've made it so you can write the post from within the site as well as inside the main CMS administration interface.

Drag'n'Drop widget system

One of the key features of any blog system are widgets, or small, easily installable features to personalise your blog. The module comes with tag clouds, archives-list and RSS feed out of the box.

One of the real gems of this module is the drag-and-drop system to manage it. Available widgets are shown on the left of the interface, and when dragged to the right, are enabled and can be configured. For instance, you can tell the RSS Feed widget to use feed://feeds.feedburner.com/ajaxian and your blog would always show the latest AJAX news.

You can also drag the widgets up and down to reorder them on your site.

We'd also like to make a call for widget developers. We already have Lakshan working on a few to compliment the flickr, technorati and youtube work he's done as part of Google Summer of Code. Check out the widget documentation and add them to the contributions forum.

Spam: Akismet, Math Question & Moderation

To battle the comment spam any popular blog gets, you can set up Akismet. This automatically prevents comment spam most of the time. Alternatively you can set up Math Question, which forces people to answer questions like "What is four plus five?", again reducing the spam your blog gets.

The comments area of the CMS lets you review all your comments, and mark items as spam or not.

Summary

Today marks the initial release of the blog module. We'd love for you to download it it and tell us what you think and help us prioritise features, and if you're feeling up to, contribute patches, widgets, and themes yourself!

Google code on its way!

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

With the release process of SilverStripe 2.1 now underway, a really exciting development has begun over in Germany. One of our core developers, Ingo, has started on the SIlverStripe 2.2 release, which will include the hundreds of new features by our ten Google superstars: Bernat Foj Capell, Elijah Lofgren, Lakshan Perera, Mateusz Ujma, Markus Lanthaler, Meg Risen, Ofir Picazo, Philipp Krenn, Quin Hoxie, and Will Scott.

As Ingo mentioned, the code being poured in is available via Subversion, and you can see his work in real-time thanks to IRC (Elijah set up a script so that every addition to SilverStripe is automatically messaged into the #silverstripe chat channel).

SilverStripe 2.1 testers wanted!

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The road to SilverStripe 2.1 is well on its way now! You can now download the SilverStripe v2.1 release candidate 1. We'd love for people to download it and give us feedback! Your feedback, suggestions and bug reports are to integral to our process of ensuring a stable release is just that: stable.

Read the SilverStripe 2.1rc1 Changelog

Aside from hundreds of incremental fixes, much of the benefit of the 2.1 release is under the hood and relies on updating our documentation. So, between now and the stable 2.1 release, Andrew is now working on documenting all the great new stuff, which includes;

Support for the blog module which also about to be released.
Secure-page support, thanks to Markus from Google Summer of Code
Changes to the core that improve how themes can be built and managed, with a set of exciting and innovative conventions that will make your life building sites a whole lot more enjoyable.
The introduction of widgets, small useful pieces of code to use on your site (documentation)

We also sneaked in one of my favourite contributions by Elijah Lofgren, which was the Save and Publish button in one:

Keep coming back as we detail more of the great stuff that is making the SilverStripe 2.1 release!

On ReadWriteWeb, Del.icio.us

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Today we were privileged to have Richard McManus from ReadWriteWeb write a great summary about SilverStripe that then put us on the front page of del.icio.us (keep us there!). This produced a deluge of new visitors even greater than the traffic surge from being a finalist in the open source awards (you have remembered to vote for us, right?)

In other news, I noticed a large number of people to our site were coming from Google that were typing in "Downloads". Turns out that for New Zealand, we're the best ranked site for that phrase:

CMS Awards creating SilverStripe growth

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Wow, barely a day after the PacktPub 2008 CMS Awards named us one of five most promising open source CMS projects for the world to vote on (please vote in the final stage!), our traffic (bandwidth) shot up massively. With about a thousand downloads yesterday, it nearly beat our record, however with only a moderate increase in visitors and page views, this suggests the traffic coming from packtpub.com was a steady stream of people keenly interested in SilverStripe, rather than a deluge of tyre-kickers. So a big welcome to all of you!

This is great since none of the major industry sites like opensourcecms nor cmswire have mentioned the PacktPub award finalists. It illustrates a considerable following and credibility behind this open source CMS competition.

Internet People

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

While I get a horde of links, videos, photos and nigerian scams to deliberate upon each day, I really felt I had to share this pure genius. That is, until the finale of advertisements undid the whole thing; a real pity. Continuing in the spirit of memory lane, but coming in a close second, is this MSDOS 5 advertisement.

Webstock, Wellington, Feb 2008

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

For anyone who is deliberating on when to visit New Zealand, the decision is now really simple: February 2008! Not only does our late summer finally kick in, but Webstock 2008 is on, and it will warm your soul!

It will be will be a bigger and better repeat of our previous conference for the website industry, featuring an impeccable line-up of international speakers and workshops over a week. We're also auctioning off the first ticket, which gives you dinner with the speakers.

SilverStripe into CMS award finals. Now vote!

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Thanks to everyone who nominated SilverStripe for "most promising open-source CMS". We're excited to say that we're a finalist; meaning from over 60 projects, we're in the top five. That we placed fourth is a fantastic result: our launch in February makes us significantly younger than the other finalists.

We now need your support to vote for us. If we get in the top three, we'll get a monetary prize which will be used to build up the project! Voting ends October 26.

Feel free to circulate and use this banner!

Comparing the interim full results with the list of finalists is interesting. It's a surprise to see the immensely popular blogging tools Wordpress and Moveable Type did not fare well; I had figured Wordpress getting votes in each category would make them a sure finalist. Likewise, the smart guys at (enterprise-end) Alfresco didn't get included.

PacktPub, who run the competition, and thus can see the numbers of votes will be able to draw factual conclusions, but I wonder if this is the result of the communities around these products not identifying themselves with the CMS market? For TypePad and Alfresco, it also speaks of the real challenge of building communities when targeting the enterprise. It also reiterates how the CMS market is just so broad and fragmented, and that results like this should be expected--if you were to say there were more sports car drivers than truck drivers, that's just a comparison of the size of those markets, not that one is better than the other.

Government support

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We're delighted to announce that the New Zealand Government has just awarded SilverStripe a substantial marketing grant.

We now have access to some tens of thousands to help our efforts in getting the rest of the world to learn about and use the SilverStripe product (demo).

We are nearing the exciting finale of our USD50,000 grant from Google, which added a huge number of useful and innovative features to SilverStripe, so our improved ability to promote SilverStripe couldn't be better timed!

We also hope this encourages more New Zealand companies to consider open source as the most compelling way to build a globally-used product and successful business.

SilverStripe 2.1 preview - new security features

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

It being the month of September I thought I'd start to throw up some screenshots of the SilverStripe 2.1 release that will come later this month. In addition to his OpenID forum and OpenID CMS work, one of the other tributes to Markus Lanthaler is making it really easy to lock off website pages from the public, and you can set up 'lesser' administrators to edit certain regions of your site.

As requested, each page of your website will have fine-detail security options, as shown below. You can make as many security groups as you want.

If you mark a page as being visible to only certain people, it will automatically drop off your website's menus. If you directly visit the page's URL, it will present a prebuilt login screen, thereby making it really easy to set up extranets using SilverStripe.

In addition, you can mark pages as not being editable in the CMS. This means you can give partly-trusted individuals access to edit certain regions of your site. They pages they are not granted access to are visible but readonly:

In 15 seconds you can make SilverStripe more popular and raise money...

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

All you need to do is type "silverstripe.com" with your name and email to help us win the title of most promising open source CMS. Nominations close at the end of this month, before moving into a voting phase.

You even go into a draw for an iPod!

Summer of Code changing season

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The times are getting very exciting! With August coming to an end, so does the main phase of coding by our ten Google Summer of Code superstars. This means its time for debugging, documentation, and making it available to download! The code from the ten projects will be staggered over a quick succession of two or three releases.

Lakshan Perera from Sri Lanka has written a wonderful overview of his experience working with us. The culmination of his work will be ready in a few weeks--but don't forget the initial release of the flickr module was put up last month (demo).

Ending Rails Envy in PHP5

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Sam's presentation at OSCON, last month's major software conference held in Portland, Oregon, went very well. There are several language features hailed in Rails but little-utilised in PHP5, and Sam did well to explain them.

You can see the slides at rails-envy.pdf (924 kb). Feel free to ask questions by commenting below...

Attending SuperHappyDevHouse

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

SuperHappyDevHouse is a day-long, near-monthly chilled gathering of Sillicon Valley's active geeks, and I was at SHDH19 back on the 11th of August.
(Yes, this is to be partly confused with SHDH Aotearoa, the Southern Hemisphere's subsequently spinoff).

Going to SHDH in America means you find yourself hiring a zipcar with Chris Messina and the lead developer at twitter and having an idyllic navigational haemorrhage. You're also on the pulse of unfolding events, and meet heaps of interesting people and learn of curious projects.

I was honoured by one of the organisers, Joel Franusic, to be able be present to the crowd as part of the event's 5 minute lightning talks. You can see my slideshow of my super quick overview of New Zealand, my involvement in Lord Of The Rings, and ofcourse, SilverStripe and our Google Summer of Code involvement.

SilverStripe at Silicon Valley NewTech meetup

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

One of our biggest and most attentive audiences I presented to while in the states was at the Silicon Valley New Tech meetup in the south of San Francisco. A very full room listened to presentations by me and others; see pictures and read write up by Brian Solis. I was grateful to the people who listened attentively and asked intelligent questions, mainly to do with how SilverStripe compared with other systems out there. Thanks for keeping me on the spot!

Those in the bay area should definately RSVP for the October event, now that I see next month's is already booked out!

On a side note, the event really showcased the Silicon Valley investment culture (craze?) at work. In New Zealand, investors would be out of place at a technical showcase, but despite it being hosting at an investment firm, I still was taken aback by the large congregation of bone fide investors attending. It was a nice glimpse into how it was possible for so many American startups to find their first millions...

SilverStripe OpenID update

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Markus has produced a new movie detailing the culmination of his Summer of Code project. The vision was to simplify the process for new users signing up to a SilverStripe-powered forum. Thanks to OpenID, you can grab all your personal details, putting a sweet death to the prospect of filling out another registration form, and dreaming up yet another password... I'll let you know when the update is ready to download!

This is addition to his work allowing OpenID to login to the SilverStripe CMS...

Back from the US!

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

After 5 frantic weeks of conferences, presentations, meetings, and general sight-seeing adventure, I'm back at my usual desk in Wellington, so you can expect a hive of activity back here at silverstripe.com detailing all the great stuff Sam and I got up to...

Google Tech Talk

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Yesterday we were invited to do a tech talk at Google as part of their open source speaker series. I gave an overview of New Zealand and the software that has come from our country, naturally including SilverStripe. We also showcased the work done from the money Google gave us, and provided lessons and ideas for others managing software projects. You can watch the presentation on google video.