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Silverstripe CMS meetup: highlights and sneak peeks

20 June 2024

Guy Sartorelli

Guy Sartorelli

20 June 2024

Last Thursday, we hosted a Silverstripe CMS meetup in our Wellington office—the first one since 2021. We had a great turnout with around 20 people from a bunch of organisations across Wellington.

As the Senior Product Developer, I talked about some of the highlights from Silverstripe CMS 5.2, which was released in April. This release included a variety of improvements from new form fields to ORM improvements. Check out the 5.2 release announcement(opens in new tab) for more details.

I also gave a heads-up about some upcoming changes in the CMS 5.3 and CMS 6 releases. CMS 5.3 is set for an October release this year, while CMS 6.0 is scheduled for April 2025. You can see more about the timing of upcoming releases on the roadmap page(opens in new tab) to keep track of and schedule your project upgrades.

You can also keep up with the latest developments or the CMS Squad via the sprint announcements topic in the forum(opens in new tab), where we provide fortnightly updates.

James Ford, Creative Director at Silverstripe, gave a sneak peek of an experimental new look for the CMS. Silverstripe CMS 6.0 will be released with a new look in the CMS, and work has already been put in to design what that might look like and put it in your hands early.

So, we’ve released two experimental modules that let you install the new look in your Silverstripe CMS 5 projects right now:

Betamask - a new look for the CMS(opens in new tab)
Betamask Admin Overlay - a utility bar matching betamask theming for your front-end(opens in new tab)

We’d love to hear your feedback on these modules—that feedback will help us understand what works when we start work on the changes for CMS 6.

James also showed off another experiment—editing content directly in the front-end. However, do note that these new modules are experimental and not supported under our current policies.

A big thank you to everyone who came along and shared your thoughts with us. Your feedback and ideas are invaluable to us.

Stay tuned for more events and opportunities to connect with the Silverstripe CMS community.

Guy Sartorelli

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guy Sartorelli

As a Senior Product Developer, Guy is responsible for resolving issues in Silverstripe CMS and related modules, helping to maintain and improve the stability of the CMS and the surrounding ecosystem. This is all while looking for gaps in the feature-set and implementing new functionality.

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