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

Posted by Sigurd on 28 November 2007

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.

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