SilverStripe.com Blog

Making democracy easier

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:10:00 +1200

Many New Zealanders don't vote in local body elections, but with less than two months until the elections, we're hoping a new site we've built for Local Government New Zealand will help increase voter turnout. Elections2010.co.nz makes it easier to participate by providing simple access to information about local candidates, and the site will also feature real-time election results.

Declining turnout numbers are a reflection of the difficulty people have had in the past in accessing information about candidates and issues. Relying on newspapers and voter packs received in the mail to know who they could vote for may not have been enough to allow some people to make an informed choice.

Now, however, with Elections2010.co.nz, voters can find out all they need to know on one easy-to-use site. One of the most impressive features is that we use GIS data and Google Maps to be able to determine which elections New Zealanders are eligible to vote in based on their home address.

From there, they can bring up a list of candidates in their region and find out about each one. Users can also ask a question of the candidates, have a look at previous results, search for a candidate, or browse an A-Z listing of candidates for both 2010 and 2007.

As a project, Elections2010.co.nz was very challenging because of all the data points involved. Across New Zealand, there are a number of elections, each election has a number of candidates, and each candidate has vital information to be shared. On the day, there will be lots of results, with a lot of relationships between different types of data—all of which will need to be available to users.

Of course, that's just the front end. The site is also easy to update. One of the features we're most proud of is the simple way that LGOL staff enter election results as they come in. Vote totals are very easy for them to securely enter or change, and the site automatically generates bar graphs of results.

In fact, when our developers showed it to our team, we were actually worried that maybe we made it too easy to change vote totals on the site, and that an evil genius with his eye on becoming mayor of Auckland could twist it to some nefarious purpose. Luckily, the site we designed only reports the official totals, which are tallied elsewhere. Phew! Democracy is in safe hands!

And on that note, a friendly reminder: If you're a New Zealander, please make sure you're informed and make sure you vote. If you're not from New Zealand, perhaps you should lobby for your country to provide a similar service? We’d love to work with you on it.

Dawn in action

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:29:47 +1200

It's always great to see our stuff being used in action, solving real problems. Today, we've got a "real-world" story to tell about Dawn™.

One of the first sites we've been using Dawn for is a Wellington-based company that has about 120,000 customers, and whose primary revenue source is through its website. We host and support the site, and we use Dawn to monitor it.

In July, about a week after we started using Dawn for the site, we noticed a load spike that should have been manageable but instead caused the server to run out of memory.

We compared the Dawn graphs for memory usage and active apache processes. This helped us determine that the problem was due to the number of concurrent Apache processes becoming far too high. So we set Apache's MaxClients setting (which determines the maximum number of simultaneous Apache processes) to a better value, and adjusted our configuration to cope with load more gracefully.

The data provided by Dawn has helped us quickly identify the source of the problem and take action to resolve it, saving about 2-3 hours of developer time and potential site downtime, which would have cost the client thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Later on in August, we found another problem. Dawn was reporting high load average and Apache process counts. Dawn sent us email and SMS, alerting us to the issue. By looking at Apache's mod_status page, we were able to see that the problem was due to to a large number of requests sitting at the "Reading Request" state, which implied a Denial of Service Attack. We solved it simply by blocking the offending IP address.

Prior to Dawn, problems such as these would often be solved only by a painstaking process of trial-and-error. In both cases, Dawn detected the problem, saved developer time and decreased downtime.

Dawn: Why do we monitor what we monitor? Part 3 of 3 - The SilverStripe Layer

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:30:00 +1200

This article was written from an interview with Sam Minnée

(Continued from part two.)

The PHP/SilverStripe Level

When we were considering what information Dawn needed to gather from the SilverStripe layer, we decided upon two types. The first are errors and warnings generated by PHP. Unlike metric data, this data gives you information about specific points in time, so you can correlate certain errors with different metrics at different times. In addition to the error message, we also collect a full backtrace of the error so you can see where the error has come from.

The other piece of information we collect, which is SilverStripe specific, is the page generation time. This is the length of time that PHP spends executing.

When you request a page, there's a number of things that will happen. The client will talk to the webserver, and take a certain amount of time to get across the network. Apache will then take the request and figure out what to do with it, (and that will be relatively quick), determine it needs PHP, tells ModPHP to process the script, and then the SilverStripe bootstrap (our main PHP script), will kick off. From that point, that's when we start timing.

And then the relevant Sapphire code will be loaded, your page will process, the database will be connected, it will render templates, spit the page out to the user, and then it will get to the end of the PHP execution time. That's when we stop timing. (Specifically, we use a Register Shutdown function to trigger the end of the PHP execution, and then we write to the logfile at that time.

We collect this data in milliseconds, so this is an indication of clock time, rather than CPU time. If there are lots of processes running concurrently, the execution time may go up.

We collect execution time for different URLs but group URLs by "family." If you have a forum installed for example, there are likely many different URLs that all are considered part of the forum. Because it's the same piece of code and likely to have the same performance characteristics, we collect all of those requests under the same URL family.

Minimising the number of URL families we collect helps us with generating the roll-up data, which is averaged every five minutes, and averaged 20 minutes, average hour, average day data, etc. We also ignore all requests to the same URL with different query perimeters - that's all considered to be the same URL family. If we monitored for every URL, we'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of URLs instead of tens of thousands of URLs, for example. And that would start putting undue load on the Dawn services.

Internally at SilverStripe, we're using Dawn to help us monitor various sites we've done. But we're really keen to hear what our customers think, how Dawn can be improved, ways that our customers see Dawn could be used. We want to hear what you think.

Engage Your Community unConference

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:52:55 +1200

On 21 August, SilverStripe will be sponsoring the Engage Your Community unConference, a free learning event hosted by the Wellington Region 2020 Communications Trust (WICT). The free event, styled in the manner of BarCamp, is being held to help community organisations use information technology and the web to engage people in their community.

This will be WICT's first unConference. Traditional conferences tend to be one-way processes where people come and just absorb the information. However, the unConference model encourages sharing and collaboration. At the event, attendees can ask questions, talk to experts about the challenges they face in their workplace. They can even suggest topics, or run a session.

Most attendees will likely be from the IT industry and from community organisations and charities in Wellington.

WICT decided to hold an unConference after getting feedback from attendees of their more traditional yearly conference. Community organisations suggested that what they needed was an opportunity to do a collaborative event for free. Most of WICT's audience is in the volunteer sector, and they have little budget for training or capacity building.

If all goes well, skills and expertise from the IT industry will meet with the needs of various community groups.

WICT also runs monthly workshops for community groups. These workshops are designed to give community groups the background and information they need to take advantage of free web-based tools that can help them with organisation or fundraising.

You can register for attendance at the WICT site, here.

Dawn: Why do we monitor what we monitor? Part 2 of 3 - Apache and MySQL

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1200

This article was written from an interview with Sam Minnée

(Continued from part one.)

The Webserver Level

Apache monitoring in Dawn is done using an Apache plugin called mod_status. (Administrators of Apache will probably be familiar with it.) It gives information about the current Apache processes. We take two metrics from that - the number of working processes, and the number of idle processes.

As you might expect, if you've got too many working processes that might be a problem, but similarly, insufficient idle processes is also a problem.

Apache will basically grow the number of idle processes so that there's a certain number free all the time. Typically, an Apache will spin up and try to keep about 10 idle processes running and ready to serve requests.

If Apache can't spawn the idle process, obviously, the number of idle processes will start going down. So if you're down to, say, three or so, it's a fairly clear indication something is amiss.

If you have zero idle processes, it means your Apache server has no capability to serve another request. So we have a low value warning threshold for the idle processes and a high value warning threshold for the working processes. And this can be configured on a site-by-site basis.

For the working Apache processes, that tends to be a lot more host specific. It really depends on the amount of memory, CPUs, etc. The rough guide we use currently is that we start warning if you've got more than eight processes per core, and consider it critical at 16 processes per core.

In practice, having too many working processes and too few idle processes typically go together; but we monitor both for specifics. If there's a reason other than load that causes too few idle processes to spawn - say an Apache misconfiguration - you'll have a low idle process count even while having a low working process count.

On the other hand, large numbers of working processes impact the amount of memory you use and the amount of CPU utilisation. It is a good measure of overall load. When you see overloading, it will almost always include a large number of working Apache processes.

Because Dawn monitors multiple levels at once, you can see the combination of factors that lead to a quicker diagnosis. For example, if a disk is failing, and it is taking a long time to write to it, you'll have alot of Apache processes waiting for a long time and taking a long time to run - which means that there are many Apache processes starting. In this case, you can rule out CPU issues by looking at the CPU utilisation metric.

Similarly, if you're connecting to a third party service on every page request and it's taking a few seconds to respond, all of a sudden the number of Apache processes you have running is going to go up, even though the amount of CPU usage is fine. Each of these Apache processes, by the way, is going to use an amount of memory, and you might start to hit memory limits, which means you start swapping to disk, which will compound the problem. If you can look and say: "There are a lot of Apache processes running" before it eats up all of your memory, it gives you the chance to address the issue more quickly than you otherwise might.

Another way to look at the Apache processes is to look at the average. If the average is too high, it could indicate a systemic problem with your code. For example, this can happen if you call a third party service that takes too long to respond on every page request.

Then you've got the conditions where you have excess load. Then you're looking not so much at "is this higher than it should be" but rather "are we running out of server resources. Is our server about to break down under the load, and if so, what should we do about that?

The Database Level

Currently, at the database level, Dawn collects data from MySQL, and also looks at the number of MySQL processes.

A time-consuming Apache request usually, but not always, makes a connection to the database, so there's going to be a fairly close relationship between the number of Apache processes and the number of database processes. In unusual situations, however, they may differ, and it's exactly those unusual situations that we're looking to address.

For instance, if you had a high number of Apache working processes but a low number of database processes, that would indicate that Apache is spending most of it's time serving static requests. Which are unlikely to cause nearly as much load as dynamic requests - so if that's causing problems, it would be unusual and therefore warranting investigation.

If you have many more database requests than Apache workers, that would mean there would be other systems using the database, likely backup systems or offline processes. If this is increasing load, you may have to ask yourself, if these being run at the right time, or if there's a way we can run the processes when there is less load?

Either way, having all the data in one place builds a richer picture, and that's the common thread between all these things. Though there's a certain amount of redundancy in the different metrics we collect, by collecting them all and comparing them we have a richer picture of what our webserver is doing.

(Concluded in Part 3.)

Dawn: Why do we monitor what we monitor? Part 1 of 3

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:31:13 +1200

This article was written from an interview with Sam Minnée

Overview

One of the big things we have done with Dawn is to make it flexible. We don't expect that version 1.0 will be exactly right for everyone who wants to use it, and we've built a flexible framework that we can grow as our knowledge of what people need improves.

The current Dawn product is based on our experiences and the experiences of our partners and clients. We chose what we monitor based on how we all have resolved issues over the past few years building, deploying, and maintaining SilverStripe sites. What have we used on an ad-hoc basis to try and resolve issues? Where have we gone, what have we looked at, where have we discovered issues? We added the best indicators to the Dawn monitoring system so that it would be very easy to look straight at that information all in one place.

Over time, other Dawn customers' experiences will be combined to shape how our monitoring works, but for right now, simply collecting all the data in the same place helps immensely. Rather than having one number you can look at, and know something is wrong, but not be sure what, we collect all the pieces of data you need, so you can look at all the metrics visually and figure out what's going on by the relationships among them.

The Operating System Level

At the OS level, we monitor load average, CPU usage, and memory. Load average and CPU usage are pretty closely related, although they tend to present errors in different ways. You can have quite a high load average even when the CPU usage might not be very high. That often happens in situations where something other than the CPU is holding up processes. Quite frequently, if a process is waiting for the disk, then the process may be very slow, and processes may queue up even though the CPU usage isn't really high.

Seeing load average and CPU data side by side gives you that information. If your load average is high but your CPU usage isn't, you know it's not a CPU-bound issue. It's probably related to memory or disk.

We also monitor free memory to determine if there are any issues. Running out of memory is a common pitfall, particularly on a webserver under heavy load. Unless it's carefully configured, the server gets traffic beyond the load it can handle and it runs out of memory and then things start going bad.

(To be continued in Part 2.)

Looking worldwide for web designer

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:17:39 +1200

We're looking for a visual designer or interaction designer to join us here at SilverStripe, and we're going to be expanding our search worldwide. If you want to live and work in Wellington, New Zealand, home of more coffee shops per square kilometre than New York City, or know someone who does, this might be your shining moment.

One of the interesting things about working in Wellington for SilverStripe is that because of New Zealand's remote nature and Wellington's well deserved reputation as a hub of culture, it provides a unique opportunity for those of us in the Web field. New Zealand needs the web to bridge the tyranny of distance, and Wellington is the hub of web development in New Zealand.

We've got a listing up on Trademe.co.nz which explains the particulars - your usual "three years experience," plus, you know, web design skills. We're looking world-wide because we want people who can produce world-class design.

On the visual side we're looking for an excellent visual designer who can create appealing web design concepts as well as translate brands to the web, giving them life with CSS/HTML and Javascript. And on the interaction design side, we're looking for someone who can create and inform design strategy, create static and interactive wireframes, and prepare and interpret usability tests, among other things.

We want people who will thrive in a fast-paced environment, using Agile techniques to work with clients and colleagues to create amazing, fresh, web goodness. We've got a casual environment, work with cutting edge technology, and many of our staff are also ex-pats from one country or another, and we'd like to have even more countries represented here. (Like Pokemon fans or collectors of Hummel figurines, we won't be satisfied until we have a complete set.)

Of course, there's the traditional advantages of living and working in New Zealand - beautiful nature, food safety, equality, laid-back culture, sport, and the highest sheep to Orc ratio of any island in the South Pacific.

Check out the listings, and then apply via Trade Me, or if that doesn't work for whatever reason, e-mail careers@silverstripe.com.

Learning from history

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:45:25 +1200

We designed Dawn not only to measure the status of SilverStripe websites, but also to understand how well they were performing. But how do you define “good” performance? If a site takes half a second to display a webpage, is that extremely fast, or extremely slow?

It’s all relative. Which is one of the reasons that it’s critical in any performance-monitoring tool be able to access the historical performance as well as the current performance. All of a sudden, 500 milliseconds is good if it historically took a second or more, and poor if it took far less time.

Having historical data also allows you to prove the value of changes you make to your website environment. Being able to objectively show how much a change has improved the performance of the website allows you to justify the cost of that change to the people who hold the purse string. It also lets you know when you’ve made a change for the worse, and if you can find out when the website started performing poorly, you’ll likely find the specific change that made things perform poorly.

In many ways, being able to see the past is more important than being able to see the future. Even future extrapolation in Dawn is based primarily on what trends have been continuing over the site’s history. The longer the history, the more data from which Dawn can draw predictions.

And of course, there’s no underestimating the idea that you can draw your own predictions from Dawn’s history; if your website peaks every Friday, you know it’ll likely continue to peak on Friday. Perhaps it might be a good idea to provision extra processing power only on Fridays – instead of spending the money for a full time solution.

In many ways, the power of Dawn isn’t just that it monitors your web environment and alerts you to threshold violations, but that it also gives you the context that you need to make significant decisions to improve your web environment. Because the only thing better than immediate alerts to problems is, of course, making the right decisions so you don’t have the problem in the first place.

Comedy and Curry

Mon, 31 May 2010 13:38:27 +1200

While I'm a writer, not a programmer, there are things I've taken from the open source philosophy. And the main one is: be open to good ideas coming from the people around you. And give them a try.

I study improv comedy - performing on stage, with a group, without a script. It's also responsible for my employment at SilverStripe.

In early April, I had a job in Tauranga that was, for various reasons, a poor fit. So, I accepted that I would have to move back to the U.S., something I didn't want to do, and decided to spend a couple of weeks in the more urban Wellington.

I had headed down to Wellington partially because Wellington had the largest improv community in New Zealand. My friend Andy from my hometown of Austin, sent an e-mail to his contacts in Wellington, and the Wellington improvisers invited me down to rehearse with them - a goodwill gesture of hospitality for a fellow performer.

It was at that rehearsal, though, that I met someone who worked in the tech industry in Wellington, and was also an immigrant from the United States. He suggested that before giving up, I try going to an event known as "Thursday Night Curry" here in Wellington, a sort of networking group for the tech-savvy in Wellington.

I went ahead and printed up a copy of my C.V. for Thursday Night Curry, and showed it around. One attendee, Johnathan Brewer, noted that I might be a good fit for a number of companies - SilverStripe being on the top of the list. That night, I sent off my C.V. to those companies.

I was surprised to hear back the next day from SilverStripe - and they asked me to come in for an interview on Tuesday. A second interview on Wednesday led to a job offer on Wednesday afternoon, and I accepted on Thursday, after following advice my parents gave me to sleep on any job offer.

As fortune had it, I turned out to be a good fit for SilverStripe. They were looking for a writer for a while, plus my previous experience at NetQoS writing about enterprise IT network monitoring translated very well to their new initiative in web environment monitoring - which would become known as Dawn.

This all happened over the course of about a week.

Now, there's no doubt that getting the job that quickly was a matter of serendipity and luck. Especially in this job market. But the thing about it was that I remained open to the possibilities and didn't shut down good ideas when I heard them.

Printing up resumes and attending networking events less than two weeks before my flight out of the country smacked of a last-ditch, desperate effort. But I very well could have just not made that effort and I'd be writing this to you from Austin. Or, actually, I wouldn't be writing this to you because I wouldn't be working for SilverStripe... I think you know what I mean though.

Site Editing Overview Screencast

Fri, 28 May 2010 14:29:28 +1200

Anyone can try out our live demo to see for themselves what SilverStripe has to offer, but if you just want a very basic overview of what content editing is like, or you'd like to show a client to get them interested, there's nothing quite like a video screencast. We've recently updated our screencast to reflect the changes in our new 2.4 version. Take a look for yourself. If the embedded video doesn't work for you, you can download a high resolution MP4 version. (31MB)

Announcing SilverStripe Dawn

Wed, 26 May 2010 10:00:00 +1200

We're very pleased to announce the release of SilverStripe Dawn^TM!

Dawn is a web environment monitor. And by that, we mean that Dawn monitors the entire "web environment," including the operating system, web server, database, and SilverStripe website.

We've been working hard over the past year to create Dawn. Now it's ready to see the light of day.

We originally built Dawn to meet our needs managing the SilverStripe sites we build for our clients. We realised that if we found Dawn useful, so would anyone responsible for the performance and upkeep of a SilverStripe based site.

Dawn is Software as a Service. There are a number of reasons why we chose to release Dawn as SaaS, but the main reason is that we believe monitoring a web environment is best performed as a service.

After an initial setup, all you need to do is log into a web page to see the current status of your web environment rendered in a beautiful easy-to-understand display. If you want more detail, with one click you can drill down to see heaps of useful information about the status of not just the website, but the web server, database, and operating system. We think it's pretty cool.

Part of managing a site is planning for future needs. What if you could look into the future to see how your site will perform a day from now, a week from now, or even a month from now? Dawn allows you to do just that: predictions of future state based on past behaviour.

We built Dawn on the principles of awareness, transparency, and notification. Dawn provides the tools to reliably answer questions about how a website is performing. Through notifications, graphs, and reports, you'll have a robust picture of your web environment and you'll be able to act accordingly. Finally, you can be confident about the performance of your website.

Dawn is a powerful new tool adding to what SilverStripe Ltd. can offer. We're still focused on building great sites for clients and we're still focused on open source, but Dawn helps us do those things better. And we think Dawn can help you do your stuff better, too.

Conversation

Mon, 24 May 2010 15:42:25 +1200

Hello. I'm Brian Boyko, and I'm one of SilverStripe's newer hires. They brought me on board in mid-May as the company's full-time writer. I'm responsible for anything that involves the written word. And since blog posts, forum notices, and tweets all involve the written word, I'm working on those things as well.

Which is why I'm making this post. I wanted to introduce myself the community, and let you know my goal.

SilverStripe's CEO, Brian Calhoun, asked me to strengthen the two-way communication between SilverStripe and the community. Not just keeping you guys more informed about what's going on in the company—but also listening to what you have to say and making sure that we're focusing on what you need from us to make your jobs easier.

Sure, we've got a discussion forum dedicated to answering technical questions. We also have sales staff and our support team, etc., but I'm going to help facilitate and coordinate those kinds of communication. The goal is not only to answer questions but to get people with "part of a good idea" talking to the people who have rest of the parts of that idea.

As I write this, I'm at SilverStripe HQ, and everyone's engrossed in the various disciplines that go into making SilverStripe better. Which is great, but when people hunker down to work on something extremely tricky, they tend to focus on it like a laser. I don't know if it's human nature or just the nature of the techie subset, but when we get on a roll, it's hard to pull away. It's usually more personally fulfilling to start working on "New Cool Thing" than it is to talk about "Old Thing You Just Finished."

Which is okay—SilverStripe is a company focused on innovation, making "next" a high priority for us. But this also creates a problem because, like any open source project, we're not building alone. Our success depends upon the ideas, insight, and, yes, code, of the SilverStripe community.

Building and maintaining communication is absolutely essential, and that's what I'm here to do. Feel free to contact me at boyko_(at)_silverstripe.com. I'll also be posting to this blog and on the forums, sometimes in a more formal manner for big company announcements, and sometimes a bit more conversational and informal to let you know—or to find out—what's up.

How do humans win?

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:30:00 +1300

Webstock is here! We've been in heads-down mode for a while, working on sites for councils, Air New Zealand, and American clients too. So now is the time to celebrate the local scene and be proud of Webstock!

This year we are the main sponsor and we're honoured to support the Welly web scene.

On our business cards we have our mantra: "Be more human." This is a reminder to us that we are solving human communication problems and that we're not in business to solve technology problems. It's a reminder about how to deal with each other as employees, how to deal with clients, and how to deal with the people who use what we create.

For Webstock 2010, the theme is: How do humans win? How do we as people focus on what matters?

Our booth at Webstock is all about the wall. The wall is where people put cards that talk about how humans win. The wall is about human interaction with a big, wide canvas.

The website http://bemorehuman.org is where you can submit pictures or submit your own answer to the question of How do humans win? On the site we collect Flickr images tagged with bemorehuman and we collect Tweets with the #bemorehuman tag. Staff at our booth will print compelling responses that come in and put them on the wall.

The site will live on beyond Webstock as Webstock is just the introduction of the How do humans win? concept. We want the conversation to continue because the idea of humans winning is something that a lot of us care about.

More importantly, the answer to the question doesn't come from us. How do humans win? is a dialogue. We don't have the answers. You do.

See you at Webstock, and mind the goats!

Brian

SilverStripe 235th fastest-growing tech company in Asia Pacific

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:30:00 +1300

Not only has SilverStripe ranked 37th in the Deloitte New Zealand Fast 50, but Deloitte has also recognised our growth within the Asia Pacific region.

SilverStripe has been ranked 235th in the 2009 edition of the Deloitte Asia Pacific Technology Fast 500. This ranking is based on our revenue growth (190% over the 24 month evaluation period), and places us in comparison to other technology companies throughout Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Read the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2009 Ranking

SilverStripe partner network expands

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:50:00 +1300

We're very excited to announce that we have several new partners in Europe, Australia, and the USA:

Bluehouse Group (USA)
EOS Uptrade (Germany)
Kamikaze (Norway)
Hive.net (Australia)
mira4 (Austria)
Spiro (Sweden)

With over a dozen SilverStripe partners around the world, organisations deploying SilverStripe solutions now have even more choice for certified local support of the SilverStripe CMS.

SilverStripe makes the Deloitte Fast 50!

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41:00 +1300

We made the Deloitte Fast 50 list for 2009! This means we are one of the 50 fastest-growing companies in New Zealand. Specifically, we're the 37th fastest-growing company, with 190% revenue growth over the past couple years.

This is a big deal for us because it shows that the things we believe in: open source, excellent web user experience, and a focus on the humans who use web technology, are all qualities that are appreciated by the business community.

Across the 50 companies, the three most popular inspirational companies mentioned by the 50 company leaders were Google, Apple, and Xero. Here at SilverStripe, we get a lot of inspiration from Apple in particular.

One point I find significant is that the entry criteria to make it onto the list, 145% growth, is only 6 percentage points lower than the peak of 151% in 2007. So even in this global recession there's still a lot of Kiwi companies growing fast. That's wonderful news for the New Zealand economy as a whole.

We'll celebrate the recognition a bit before hunkering down again to meet end-of-year deadlines.

Thank you to our clients, the open source community, and all the employees of SilverStripe. Those are the three pillars of making it all happen.

Cheers!

SilverStripe proudly sponsoring Webstock 2010!

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:31:00 +1300

We are very proud to be the Gold sponsor of Webstock 2010! We have massively enjoyed attending all the prior Webstocks and we've gotten a lot out of the sessions, the speakers, and the hallway conversations. It's really surprising how much you can learn from talking to someone whilst waiting in the queue to get a coffee.

And of course, being a Wellington-based company ourselves, we are delighted to support the Webstock crew in furthering Wellington as a globally-recognised centre of excellence for all things web.

In addition, early 2010 marks the tenth anniversary of SilverStripe as a company so that's another reason to celebrate and show our support of world-leading web creativity and development.

For us, Webstock is about pushing the boundaries of what the web is, and how we as humans interact with the web. Hundreds of like-minded people under one roof, figuring out how to shape the web and learning about others' experiences in doing so. Just awesome.

See you at Webstock!

Tell us about your experiences

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:30:00 +1300

Are you responsible for managing your company or organisation's websites?

In the recent SilverStripe newsletter we announced a survey for website managers.

Whether you're running your site on SilverStripe technology or not, we want to hear about your experiences – particularly any problems you might have with performance and robustness of the sites you manage. We're listening!

We are looking for the best place to focus our efforts next, and we'd appreciate if you could take a few moments to answer some quick questions in a survey. Initial results are encouraging with the majority of respondents reporting no or infrequent problems of performance and robustness, although noting that when something does happen it can have a major impact.

When filling out the survey, you can be as anonymous as you like. Any questions you answer will help us a lot.

If you haven't already filled it out, you can start the online survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=_2fCLUylyq3MEwKgx3rz_2bEyg_3d_3d

Thanks!

SilverStripe Australia Now Open for Business!

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:48:00 +1200

We are very proud to announce the opening of SilverStripe Australia Pty Ltd! We have had many people in Australia tell us that they would love to have a SilverStripe team local to them to help out with their SilverStripe website development efforts. We listened and now SilverStripe has a Melbourne office.

SilverStripe Australia is headed up by Shane Weddell. Shane is an Aussie who has deep knowledge of the CMS market and technology in Australia. He has well over a decade of project management experience dealing with complex projects. His extensive PM experience coupled with his recent sales leadership roles combine to make him the perfect person to head up SilverStripe Australia. Owen Windsor and Marcus Nyeholt bring heaps of deep site development and system architecture experience to the Melbourne office.

Shane will continue to build up his team in Melbourne by adding developers so they can deliver sites locally to Australia. Our Australian partners will rely on the SilverStripe Australia office for assistance, and likewise, SilverStripe Australia will rely on our Aussie partners for help as needed.

You can continue to count on us here at the Head Office in Wellington for all the great web application development and website work we're known for. If you're in Australia, feel free to contact Shane in Melbourne when you want a local SilverStripe team to help out.

Welcome to Shane, Owen, and Marcus! We'll try to keep the Aussie jokes to a minimum, or at least we'll make sure they're really funny.

SilverStripe welcomes San Francisco-based partner, Quinn Interactive

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:38:00 +1200

If you're based in the San Francisco Bay Area, you now have local access to professional SilverStripe services!

Quinn Interactive is a 15-year-old company specialising in website development. Quinn has a talent for both design and CMS implementations, and has worked with organisations like LEGO and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). Quinn's skills and experience make them an excellent addition to our SilverStripe Partner Program. We have worked with developers at Quinn to ensure that they have an appropriate level of knowledge in our software. We encourage you to contact them if you want a San Francisco company to build a website or web application on the SilverStripe platform.

Phil Quinn, president of Quinn Interactive, met with us recently. He took the opportunity to explain why he felt SilverStripe is such a good choice for his firm and his customers.

Welcome Quinn!