SilverStripe Main Blog

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The July issue of New Zealand P.C. World includes a full page interview about SilverStripe, and a multiple page tutorial on how to install SilverStripe and do basic website customisation.

200th translater joins SilverStripe

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

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?

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!

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).

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.

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...

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.

Interview with kiwi GHOP contestant Simon Welsh

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

I'M IN UR CMS MESSN WIT UR PAGEZ

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

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.

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!

Ĉu 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.

Happy new year!

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

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

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.

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.

More goodies!

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

We've just released:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Highschoolers! Add Google to your CV!

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Tweet Tweet

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

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

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

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 documents.

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.

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.

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;

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.

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.

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!

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.

SilverStripe in the news

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

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

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.

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!

One week left to vote...

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

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?)

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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!

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.

Google Tour

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Our visit to the Google office in Mountain View was certainly like being a small boy in a toystore. Lots of fun! Our fantastic tour guide Leslie Hawthorne showed us...

SilverStripe in Infotech

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Open source firm reaps Google benefits

By TOM PULLAR-STRECKER - The Dominion Post | Monday, 30 July 2007

Keep Nominating!

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

As mentioned a fortnight ago, we qualify to be internationally awarded for "most promising open source CMS" (having released within two years), giving us a potential $2000 prize and lots of recognition!

SVN access and Bug database

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Those of you who are observant would have noticed our downloads page was updated a few weeks ago to explain how to download SilverStripe via Subversion. This lets you have the latest SilverStripe code available easily, and to provide us with patches. It all seems to be working fine, so we've announced it here.

Summer of Code meet up!

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

This week we have been most grateful to the Google Open Source office who are with us in Portland, USA. Leslie has shown me what a great laugh she and the Google team is... thanks for the T-Shirts, dinner and great conversation!

SilverStripe on the iPhone

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

One of the great fortunes of the Apple iPhone is that it is bundled with Safari 3, meaning the SilverStripe administration screen loads up and works a treat... of course, without a mouse and a keyboard it would hardly be productive, but certainly impressive nonetheless.

OSCON Birds of a Feather presentation

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

A small but very interested crowd, including our Summer of Code student Will Scott, turned up to our evening OSCON session to learn about New Zealand, SilverStripe and our progress with Google Summer of Code. You can download a PDF of the presentation (2mb). Since Keynote doesn't export the animations from my presentation, refer below:

SilverStripe to be at Silicon Valley NewTech

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We just got confirmation that we have a spot at the popular Silicon Valley New Tech meetup in Palo Alto on Tuesday 7th August. The free event (rsvp here) runs monthly and is one of the prime ways interesting emerging technology is showcased to the tech scene in Silicon Valley. Update: The event is now fully booked.

Updated overview brochures

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

In preparation for our trip to America next week, we got our two brochures updated! Thanks to Will for staying up late last night, and to Nathan at Fullstop for telling Illustrator who is boss and getting them printed pronto!

Ending rails envy in PHP5

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We're excited to announce that Sam Minnee, SilverStripe's CTO and the architect behind our framework has been invited to speak at the OSCON software conference next week in Portland, on "Ending Rails Envy in PHP5":

demo.silverstripe.com updated

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We've updated demo.silverstripe.com to demonstrate v2.0.2, and the free forum, maps and gallery modules ... Thanks to all that helped out!

IRC meetup

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Based on the positive feedback we've received from our Summer of Coders and others who have been in the IRC channel, we've decided to run a group meet at 0800 this Friday (NZ time). Check what time this is in your timezone.

Showcase your sites!

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We've just made it possible to members of the forum to add websites to their profile, so that we can build up a SilverStripe site showcase. We look forward to seeing some great work up there which we can showcase on our blog and newsletter...

Google Summer of Code Fruit #10: OpenID support

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Markus Lanthaler has been working on OpenID support from Italy. His work means you can log into the CMS with an a single sign on, which I for one, will absolutely love. I have hundreds of accounts on websites all over the place, and keeping track of passwords gets tiresome, and I waste heaps of time continuously logging into to each of them each day.

International Open Source CMS Awards - Nominate Us!

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Its certainly nominations season! Last we mentioned the New Zealand Open Source awards, and this week UK-based publisher, Packt, has launched the second Open Source CMS awards. Thousands of dollars went to last year's winners Joomla!, Drupal and Plone, and this year, with the prizepool doubled to $20,000 and new categories added, we'd love for you to nominate us. We qualify for the "most promising" category (having released within two years), so the best way we can win an award is through this category, giving us a potential $2000 prize and lots of recognition!

Google Summer of Code Fruit #9: Safari3 Support

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Although Apple has installed their Safari browser as the way to access the web on all new Macintoshes for a few years, the percentage of visitors is still dominated by other browsers.

Making free tutorials and demos with Wink

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

In response to being asked how we created the animated Flash demonstrations showing some off the work done by our Google Summer of Code projects (e.g. Usability work and Google Maps), we thought we'd pass on the knowledge to everyone reading the SilverStripe blog. They've been made using a free program called Wink. It takes lots of screenshots a second then lets you edit the footage, including adding sound and text boxes.

Google Summer of Code Fruit #8: Reporting System

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Quin Hoxie in the hot American desert has reported in with a much-needed system for building tabular and graphical reports in SilverStripe. So far the fruits of his work are very interesting. For instance, only a single line of PHP code is needed to produce the following graph (which plots the growth of forum members, and new pages, to a site):

Google Summer of Code Fruit #7: Google Maps

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Ofir Picazo in Mexico has been working to incorporate Google Maps into SilverStripe, and a preview's available. Ofir is now working towards improving the code and features, so we'd love feedback for the stable release that will come out in a few months.

SilverStripe v2.0.2 released

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We're excited to announce the 2.0.2 release of SilverStripe. This brings a theme out of the box, support for our forum, google maps, and flickr modules, and hundreds of small fixes and improvements.

Google Summer of Code Fruit #6: Multiple-database support

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

While we freeze in New Zealand, I struggle to conceive Philipp Krenn (pictured) working on his Google project in Austria in anything but blizzard-ravaged Alps... Supposedly it is summer holidays there; our only proof is the progress he's made on allowing SilverStripe to work with different types of databases!

Nominate SilverStripe for the NZ Open Source awards

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The New Zealand open source awards are on soon so we'd love your support! We believe strongly that open source is a better way of producing and releasing software, and see the awards as a fantastic way to educate New Zealanders of this.

Google Summer of Code Fruit #5: Google Adwords and Sitemaps

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Will Scott, working from Seattle, has made good progress on his Google Summer of Code project of focusing on search-engine optimisation, which can hopefully be released in a few months.

Google Summer of Code Fruit #4: Image editing tools preview

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Over in Poland, Matuesz has been adding powerful image manipulation tools in SilverStripe, based on the photo editing website he previously helped build. The major manipulation features are done (crop, rotate, undo, etc), with the remaining half of the project mainly devoted to wrapping it all up in a lovely-looking, streamlined user interface, possibly in collaboration with Will, who designed our BlackCandy theme.

Google Summer of Code Fruit #3 - Usability improvements

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Elijah Lofgren is one of our hardest working Google Summer of Code hackers, obviously not distracted by the heat in Alabama. He's been vigorously working through our Usability Report and refining the way the user interface of the CMS functions. These will find themselves into SilverStripe v2.1, being released later this year. With us only being halfway through the project, the end result is going to be amazing!

SilverStripe supports GoPHP5!

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

A few days ago a campaign, GoPHP5, launched to encourage software producers and webhosting companies using the widely-used PHP language to upgrade from version 4 to 5. Version 5 is several years old, works great, but the industry has been lazy to upgrade.

I think GoPHP5 is great, because we've been tirelessly justifying why we cannot support PHP4 and explaining the virtues of PHP5 since before we released... quite simply: supporting PHP4 is equivilent to the extra work, hassle and restrictions developers used to face supporting archaic browsers like Netscape4. The world sighed relief when Netscape4 support was dropped, and it will again with PHP4.

Google Summer of Code Fruit #2: Internationalisation

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Big ups to Bernat! We're half way through the Google Summer of Code project, and thus far he has nearly completed the ability for the CMS to be translated into multiple languages. Given he's based in Barcelona, he has also supplied much of the Spanish translation...

Forum module v0.1 released

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We've been busy working on the forum code recently, adding new features and making it work out of the box.

SilverStripe community forum updated

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The forum running on our website has been updated to reflect the fact we're about to release it as a SilverStripe module. Now you can...