SilverStripe.org Blog

You're invited to the Wellington Web Meetup!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:53:00 +1300

Wellington web designers and frontend coders have recently formed a monthly post-work event, the Wellington Web Meetup.

SilverStripe is supporting this month's meetup, which will be held at 6pm on Thursday, 12 November at our offices on Level 4, 97-99 Courtenay Place.

We like the idea of web fanatics from different companies getting together into the same room and, based on the quality of the presentations at previous events, this event is well worth attending.

These monthly events are run by Wellington web designer Dave Keyes, with this month's line-up featuring:

Hamish Friedlander from SilverStripe.
"JavaScript lover Hamish presents his new baby, the Concrete library for jQuery... and shows us the tidy code & visual results!"
Alastair Bruerton from Provoke
"Renown Dux-er (or Dux-ist?) Al is keen to give a visual design presentation which leads into a open chat on visual processes."
Bob Medcalf from Simplar
"UX martial artist Bob will take us through 'How to karate chop a marketing executive and other useful tips for web creatives.'"
TEDx Movie Film

There is no cost to attend, and some food and drink will be provided. However, you will need to RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/wellingtonweb/members/10568475/

Have you voted for SilverStripe?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:26:00 +1300

Friday 30 October is the last day that you can vote for SilverStripe CMS in the PacktPub Open Source CMS Awards.

We'd love to get your support, because winning will raise awareness about SilverStripe CMS, and will provide a monetary prize to fund product development work!

If you voted for us in the earlier, nominations stage—thank you! Please vote for us again in the finalist stage.

The form (pictured) is super simple, and voting puts you in a draw for an iPod Touch.

SilverStripe CMS on Windows 7

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:00:00 +1300

With the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system released last week, we thought we'd take SilverStripe CMS for a test drive on it. We used Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install SilverStripe. This approach has now been used about 36,000 times by the world to install SilverStripe.

We found the installation to be quick and easy. The CMS and public-facing website ran straight away and worked robustly in Internet Explorer 8. The installer automatically enabled Microsoft's new wincache bytecode cache which, despite being new, didn't appear to cause any problems. All of this demonstrates Microsoft's recent work to streamline installing PHP applications on the native Windows stack.

We're confident that SilverStripe will install and run smoothly for you—but if you identify a problem please raise a detailed bug report at open.silverstripe.com so that we can squash it quick! For this test we used MySQL to act as the database, because the current stable version of SilverStripe (2.3.3) doesn't yet support SQL Server. (We do have SQL Server 2008 support as a module that works with our dailybuilds, and this support is used to run production websites powered by SQL Server. Once the SQL Server support is included in a stable release, we will bring this into the Web Platform Installer.)

Announcing the release of Concrete, SilverStripe 2.4's jQuery webapp library

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:03:00 +1300

We'd like to announce the release of the Concrete and Selector libraries for jQuery.

Developed by Hamish Friedlander, and partially sponsored by SilverStripe, this library will provide the architectural underpinnings for JavaScript in SilverStripe v2.4.

Although initially developed for use with client sites, the library has proven so useful that it's been spun off into an independent project. It lets developers write frontend web-application code in a clean and extendable manner—which is important in SilverStripe to ensure that, when the system needs extending for a particular site, the architecture doesn't get in the way.

For the techies in the room:

Concrete provides a brand new model of JavaScript code organisation; a replacement for object oriented programming that is focused on adding functions to DOM elements based on their structure and content. It’s a merging of the model and view layer that initially seems weird, but can give very powerful results.

We’re taking ideas from Prototype’s Behavior and Low Pro libraries and jQuery’s Effen and Live Query libraries. However, we're extending the concepts of those libraries to provide a complete alternative to traditional OO design; self-aware methods, inheritance, polymorphism, constructors and destructors, namespacing, and getter/setter style properties, all without a single class definition.

Compared to jQuery.plugins and jQuery.UI widgets, Concrete provides:

code clarity — the code structure leads to more readable code
extensibility — specificity-based method selection allows the injection of logic almost anywhere without monkey patching
greater organisational capabilities — syntax promotes modularity
reduced name clashes — powerful refactoring-free namespacing eliminates name pollution

A key component of Concrete is Selector - a CSS selector engine developed in conjunction with Concrete to give it maximum performance. For the use patterns it is designed for, it can out-perform jQuery's native Sizzle selector engine by an order of magnitude.

A taste:

$('div').concrete({
    highlight: function(){ 
        this.effect('bounce');
    }
});
$('div.important').concrete({
    highlight: function(){
        this._super();
        this.animate({background: 'white'});
    }
});
$('#namediv').highlight();

As well as the source and a tutorial, there is an 18-minute screencast available to help introduce the new concepts:

Book sells out on Amazon.com; restocked now.

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:06:00 +1300

Copies of the SilverStripe book are selling like hotcakes! It took just four days for Amazon.com to sell all of their initial stock of SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development.

The screenshot below shows Amazon down to their final copy, and was snapped during the weekend. Amazon.com has since restocked the book—so head off and buy a copy!

Guitar Hero website relaunched using SilverStripe CMS

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +1300

We're proud to announce that SilverStripe is the engine behind the very cool and recently relaunched Guitar Hero website.

The site is filled to the brim with video and social functions, and is a community-focussed base for fans of the popular console game. The website integrates with the game itself, publishing a global leaderboard and facilitating online tournaments.

BLITZ is the company behind the design and development of the site. Noah Gedrich, Director of Technology at BLITZ, tells us about their experience building the website:

“With only a six week production cycle for the new guitarhero.com, we needed a CMS that would give us control over our content and let us localize it, without getting in the way of our creative. SilverStripe was the perfect fit, giving us not only that control and localization support, but because of the Sapphire framework underpinning the whole thing, it also provided us with a development structure for all of the additional programming required by the many social functions of this very complex site.”

You can learn more about the website in a blog post by BLITZ—but really, you should go and visit the website!

Amazon.com now selling SilverStripe book

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:56:00 +1300

Amazon.com has the SilverStripe book in stock!

As of a few hours ago, SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development is ready for shipping from Amazon.com, and priced at USD31.49. To purchase the book, visit Amazon (and feel free to share this link with your colleagues and friends):

http://www.amazon.com/SilverStripe-Complete-Guide-CMS-Development/dp/0470681837/

There is a permanent page with information about the book at silverstripe.org/silverstripe-book.

Amazon.com appears to be the first place our book has become available. If you want the book soon, we suggest buying from there. We expect to hear news that bookstores and other online stores have the book in stock as October progresses.

A big shout out goes to those who have already supported us by pre-ordering the book off Amazon—you should have a copy of the book within a few days!

The English SilverStripe book is now in print

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:05:00 +1300

Two advance copies of the English SilverStripe book have just arrived at our office. This is exciting stuff—months of effort have gone into writing this book so it's wonderful to finally see it in print!

Our publisher, Wiley, informs us that shipments of the book are already on their way to stores around the world, so if you pre-order it on Amazon.com you might have some bedtime reading later this week.

Pictured: translator Julian Seidenberg and co-author Ingo Schommer, the SilverStripe staff responsible for the English version of the SilverStripe book.

SilverStripe into final of 2009 CMS Awards. Vote now!

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:51:00 +1200

We're excited to announce that SilverStripe is a finalist for the best Overall Open Source CMS in this year’s PacktPub CMS Awards.

Thanks to everyone who nominated us, we received enough votes to appear in the top five. This is a fantastic result, and one that we’re very proud of.

With over 12,000 nominations, the vote was a lot closer than expected.

We now need you to vote for SilverStripe again as a finalist. If we get into the top three, we'll get a monetary prize that will be used to make our product even better! Voting ends on October 26th.

Join us at Software Freedom Day 09

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:34:00 +1200

On Sunday, 20 September, Wellington will play host to Software Freedom Day 09. SilverStripe is very proud to be one of the sponsors of this important event.

Software Freedom Day is an annual worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The principles that underpin FOSS are expressed in four essential freedoms: the users' freedom to run, study, distribute, and improve the software.

Software Freedom Day in Wellington has lots of events for you to participate in — there will be a barcamp, tech talks, an installfest, a hackfest, and a makerfest. So whether you want to talk, listen, or play, there will be heaps going on throughout the day.

As part of the installfest, SilverStripe's Will Rossiter will be demonstrating how to set up a SilverStripe site, and Rainer Spittel will be participating in a panel discussion.

You're welcome to bring your kids along: Children and students will have the opportunity to participate in a variety of activities including programming, testing OLPC laptops, brainstorming, games, and a treasure hunt. (Please remember that children will need to be accompanied by a parent or guardian.)

There will be free WiFi courtesy of cafeNET, and lunch and afternoon tea will also be provided. Please register if you would like to attend — be quick to avoid disappointment!

You can follow Software Freedom Day 09 on twitter @WLGSFD. Tag your tweets #sfdwlg09.

This is going to be a fantastic day for all, and we look forward to seeing you there!