SilverStripe Main Blog

SilverStripe for Councils

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Having recently received quite a bit of interest from New Zealand councils, we attended the ALGIM conference, an annual get-together for council IT managers and staff.

A flurry of meetups

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Over recent weeks there's been a flurry of great meetups. These have provided us with a great sense of what people are doing with SilverStripe in London, Germany, and (pictured below) in Wellington.

SilverStripe v2.3.0 release candidate 2 is now available

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

An update to our previous blog post...

SilverStripe v2.3.0 release candidate 1 is now available

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe v2.3.0 is nearly here! The first release candidate has been announced, and we expect that a stable version of 2.3.0 will be available in the next few weeks.

Coming 2009: Das SilverStripe Buch

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

German readers can now pre-order SilverStripe: Das umfassende Handbuch from Amazon, due to be published February 2009.

youtube.com/silverstripe

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We've now acquired the youtube.com/silverstripe address!
Fom now on it replaces our old channel.

Wellington meetup and v2.3 pre-release party

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Join us on Monday 17th November from 6pm at the Southern Cross bar!

SilverStripe 2.2.3 released - recommend hot fix

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We have a new release of SilverStripe available: 2.2.3

SilverStripe "Most promising open source CMS"

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

PostgreSQL support prototyped

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

While MySQL is an extremely versatile and hugely popular database, we have been wanting to give users of our software choice in using other databases—this is very helpful, for instance, where you might have existing applications or software running PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server and where you want tight integration.

SilverStripe's advisors

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Behind the scenes of SilverStripe, three experienced business experts have provided our company with years of valuable external perspective; offering ideas, challenges, experience, and inspiration.

100,000 downloads!

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Today we passed 100,000 downloads of the core SilverStripe software. Much more comes from 2008 so far than from all of 2007; just one of the metrics showing our growth.

Improving our public developer documentation

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A key part of making it easy to learn how to use SilverStripe, or any other software project for that matter, is having great documentation. The PHP language, for example, now enjoys widespread adoption and is easy to learn in large part due to free and comprehensive documentation.

Meet us in Berlin, Munich, and London

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

SilverStripe is hitting Germany and the U.K. this month, with Ingo Schommer and Tim Copeland keen to meet developers and businesses interested in our software. You will get to learn the story behind SilverStripe, influence our upcoming decisions, ask pointed questions, and get a preview of new features!

SilverStripe takes home NZ Open Source Award

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Last night, Brian, Sig, and I attended the NZ Open Source Awards. We were finalists in two categories: Open Source Use in Business and Open Source Software Project. State Services Commission was also a finalist for the National Broadband Map, which we developed.

New Zealand Open Source Awards

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Over twenty finalists have now been announced for this year's New Zealand Open Source awards.

3.2 million visits in 4 days

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Interest in U.S. Politics set a new traffic record for a SilverStripe-powered website last week. DemConvention.com, the official website for the four day U.S. Democratic Party's National Convention, set some impressive stats:

Virtues of the public development model

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We are frequently asked (primarily by business people) why SilverStripe is developed with an open development model.

You got us into the CMS award finals. Now vote!

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Thanks to everyone who nominated SilverStripe for "most promising open-source CMS" in the Packtpub CMS Awards. We're excited to say that (like last year), we're one of the finalists!

Scaling SilverStripe with Caching

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

When you are dealing with the levels of traffic seen on sites like the Democratic National Convention, it's not enough to dynamically serve every page view. You need to change your approach.

TUANZ Innovation Awards 2008

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Each year, the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) runs a prestigious awards ceremony to recognise outstanding innovation in technology.

Powering 4 days of political history

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

3 days left to nominate!

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Help us to gain exposure and money to further our software in the Open Source CMS Awards!

Join our website showcase!

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We've created a new RSS feed so you can be a part of the steady stream of new SilverStripe powered websites added each day:

Auckland meetup on Aug 27

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Aucklanders interested in SilverStripe are invited to an informal after-work meeting at the Empire Tavern in the CBD (map, directions?) from 6pm on Wednesday the 27th of August.

Up and coming features for developers

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Here's a blog post for all you hard-core developers.

P.C. World SilverStripe tutorial online

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

SilverStripe adds a touch of design, and a whole lot more...

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

In keeping up with the demand for services from commercial SilverStripe clients, and in doubling our office space today, we have recently employed five new staff in our Wellington office.

SilverStripe moves up in the world

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We all knew that the internet is overtaking television, but finally there is proof! To accomodate new staff, SilverStripe's offices are moving from the third to the fifth floor of our building (Symes De Silva, 97-99 Courtenay Place, in the Wellington CBD.)

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.

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).

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!

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!

�?u 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

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.

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 2.2.0-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.

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.

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.

Forum Reorganised

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We've made some improvements to the online infrastructure that runs the SilverStripe community.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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...

Google Summer of Code Fruit #1 - FlickrGallery

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

Our Google Summer of Coders have all been working hard and with their mid-payment resting on showing progress next week, I'll be showing all the great new work that's being done.

Coworking, copy-writing and Abba

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

What do coworking, copy writing and Abba have in common? Well, yes, they're all some of the most interesting and humourous videos I've seen in the past 24 hours, but it demonstrates the power of visual communication and story telling. Coworking was a term I first heard from Tara Hunt to the only style of working environment I identify with (SilverStripe has been sharing offices with like-minded individuals for years), but this is the first time I can confidently tell both my grandma and a hardened capitalist businessman on its virtues. What's interesting is that the one story is versatile enough for such different audiences. I challenge you to do this with text alone!

2.0.2rc1 released

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We're proud to say that after a few months of hard work you can now download SilverStripe 2.0.2rc1 (2mb .tar.gz). Please try it out and submit bugs so that the stable release can come out shortly. This version provides an aesthetically pleasing theme out of the box (BlackCandy), and also provides the ability for the forum and mashups modules to work, amongst hundreds of other incremental security improvements, bug fixes, and small new features as prescribed in our changelog.

Super Happy Dev House

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Aotearoa now has a SuperHappyDevHouse, a regular get-together inspired by San Francisco's SuperHappyDevHouse, a monthly hackathon event in the US, combining serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. The first get-together this Saturday is invite-only but all interested are encouraged to register their interest for when it becomes an open event. (Please also let them know if you have a good, large, fun venue for the future).

Meet SilverStripe at OSCON, Portland

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Sam and I will be attending one of the world's biggest software conferences, O'Reilly OSCON, at the end of the July in Portland, Oregon. We'd love all in the area to come to a free session open to the general public on Monday 23rd July from 6.30. We will provide an overview of what's happening with Open Source in New Zealand, a background to why and how we started the project, and provide an overview of the SilverStripe product. We're hoping a number of the Google Summer of Code students will be there too...

American Visit

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Two of SilverStripe's founders will be in America soon to help build the open source community around SilverStripe. Sam Minnee (CTO, and the architect of how SilverStripe was put together) and Sigurd (CMO) are jet-setting from our home town of Wellington, New Zealand bound for;

Forum nearing release

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The forum module is nearing release and as a preliminary step we've made the code available at dailybuilds.silverstripe.com so that developers can see how a module is constructed, and help with our testing process. Brief installation instructions exist. The forum module will be released as a stable download once documentation and remaining bugs have been fixed and tested.

Get informed!

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +1200

A great example of SilverStripe graphic design flexibility and back-end prowess is inform.co.nz. It contains a vibrant website full of useful information about life and other personal insurances. Once you sign up online and get a personal insurance recommendation, you can then view and edit all your policy details much like online banking.

Safari enters the Windows jungle

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Apple has now released their previously Mac-only webbrowser, Safari, for computers running Windows. This is a bold move that will spur competition with both FireFox and Microsoft and drive innovation with what's possible on the web, and in other areas of computing. The new version of Safari has also resolved many issues (e.g. the WYSIWYG editor) that prevented making it easy for SilverStripe's administration system to work, so volunteers are sought to resolve the now few javascript and CSS issues. Use our forum to list Safari3-related bugs and supply patches.

Demo Updated

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Will has updated demo.silverstripe.com based on his BlackCandy theme...

More full-time support!

Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We're pleased to announce the arrival of Kiel Smit, who will work full time to support our community of SilverStripe developers and website owners. Welcome aboard!

Build a website in 24 hours for national pride

Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Wellington Events

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

It's a great time to be a geek (or around geeks) in Wellington at the moment... with all the lousy winter weather setting in, everyone's putting on events. The Unlimited Potential event, and the new website we created them, went very well last week, and now there is...

Angels and Demons

Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Unlimited Potential, who produce the best free events in the Wellington ICT community, are tonight hosting an event dubbed "Angels & Demons", which gets some of the best local speakers to discuss investment and investors...

Vote for Greer

Tue, 15 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Parents Inc is a non-profit organisation that is helping New Zealand parents be better, and help raise a wonderful generation into the country. We recently helped by building them a great parenting-resource website and you can help too by voting for Greer Robson on the Dancing with the Stars TV show. Use your phone to text "Greer" to 8981 because if she wins tonight, proceeds will then go to her nominated charity, Parents Inc. (See full competition details).

Tara's in town

Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The Wellington web scene is in for a treat. Tara Hunt is in town. She's well known for her HorsePigCow blog, and a list of passions too numerous to list here. Here's an attempt: BarCamps, Coworking, Creative Commons, EFF, Microformats, and defining marketing in a way I wish everyone exercised. She's flown from San Francisco to be a keynote at GOVIS, and should you be willing, to meet you at Vivo Wine Bar tonight at 9pm... :)

Support Lead Wanted

Tue, 08 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

SilverStripe is an established web development company based in Wellington with a reputation for developing next-generation web applications. We have an exciting opportunity to work in the heart of our company in a very important client support role.

We continue to grow and are looking for a fantastic support person to join the SilverStripe team. We currently have an opening for a stellar Support Lead.

NZ Summer of Code 2007 announced

Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

New Zealanders who missed out on the Google Summer of Code can, starting Friday, apply to be a part of the second New Zealand one, run during our summer! Last year SilverStripe choose two students, Andrew, and Jeremy, who continue to be paid to work on our open source project.

We were on TV; you could be too!

Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Making our software free is a key part of SilverStripe's philosophy, along with making it easier for people to build and manage websites.

April PHP meetup photos

Wed, 02 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Last month SilverStripe hosted the Wellington PHP meetup. Sam Minneé and Sigurd Magnusson demonstrated how to build a SilverStripe-powered website. Lots of questions were asked, and beers and chips consumed. Here are some photos from the night.

SilverStripe helps Parenting

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +1200

As a parent, I'm glad to announce we've helped relaunch the Parents Inc website, dedicated to making parenting easier, more fun, and rewarding for the whole family. The website provides thousands of parenting tips, a comprehensive online store for parents and kids, subscription to their parenting magazine (pictured) and a family coaching service. They also run hundreds of regular parenting courses around New Zealand, which I personally recommend. (Oh, and the site's also a lovely demonstration of a full-featured, vibrant website powered by SilverStripe)

On Free Software Foundation Directory

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We've had the stamp of approval that we're as free as we can be! The Free Software Directory, a joint project between the Free Software Foundation and UNESCO, has added SilverStripe after verifying the credibility of our software and ensuring SilverStripe is free and can run on free operating systems.

WellyLUG tonight

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

A quick reminder that we're hosting the monthly Wellington Linux User Group meet up at our offices tonight from 6pm...

User Help Released

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

We've released userhelp.silverstripe.com, which contains over a hundred pages of user documentation--how to use a completed SilverStripe website: adding pages, uploading images, sending newsletters et al. This is available as browsable website and as a downloadable 8MB PDF. We've separated this from the developer documentation so the two can have language, tone and complexity tailored for each audience. Thanks to Jeremy and Karen for putting this together! We'd love to have feedback ...

Themes Available

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

Back in mid February we announced we were working on a number of templates for skinning SilverStripe. Most of these are close to completion, so we've created a themes download page and themes forum. We've also released the first theme, BlackCandy. We're planning to make BlackCandy the default SilverStripe template, included and running when you install a new version of SilverStripe. Thanks Will for all the design, HTML and CSS work!

SilverStripe 2.0.1 released

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

We're proud to announce a bug and security oriented release, 2.0.1. Much of the focus has gone into fixing the most common installation problems people mentioned in our forums in the past two months.

Google Summer of Code students announced

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

We're delighted to announce the ten students working with us over coming months, thanks (very much) to Google's Summer of Code program.

Release Candidate Six

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

Thanks to the Easter bunnies testing our last release candidate we've been able to further improve stability of SilverStripe and are released v2.0.1rc6. Please download and test, and if no critical issues are found, then this will directly become 2.0.1 stable.

Welly LUG

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

We're happily giving the Wellington Linux User Group a home in the CBD for their monthly (free) meet ups. Anyone interesting in learning or teaching introductory or sophisticated tasks, or socialising with other open source geeks is invited to our offices at 6pm on Monday 23rd April. Also put in your calendar Tuesday 22nd May and Wednesday 20th June. Note that WellyLUG also has monthly meetings in the Hutt Valley.

New Beta

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Andrew's taken your feedback and released 2.0.1rc3 (and shortly after, 2.0.1rc4). Please help us test it and we can then label this as the 2.0.1 stable. (Download / Release Notes)

SilverStripe tech presentation today

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

A reminder that the Wellington PHP user group has invited SilverStripe to host and present a technical overview of our content management system and framework after work today (Wednesday). PHP Developers all welcome to come...Details and RSVP here.

Daily Builds

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

You can now download the bleeding edge version of SilverStripe from http://dailybuilds.silverstripe.com ... see instructions. This is mentioned on our download page, for future reference.

Come chat on IRC

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We now have an IRC channel to chat, lurk, and get support on! Swing your IRC client over to #silverstripe on irc.freenode.net, or by visiting http://irc.silverstripe.com. (IRC information)

2.0.1rc2 released

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We've added a beta section to our downloads page, and added 2.0.1rc2 for it. Those from adventureous walks of life are encouraged to download it and confirm that we've only fixed and not added new bugs in this release, and help us form the 2.0.1 stable release.

Change of watch

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

We've recently had three new additions to the SilverStripe team, and have said farewell to our first employee (who's the second person in five years to leave, giving nearly one and a half years notice!)

Google Summer of Code deadline today

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

If you want to be a part of the Google Summer of Code and add fantastic features to SilverStripe, you need to be quick. The deadline for submitting your proposal for the Google Summer of Code is 5pm (Pacific Time, i.e. California), Monday 26th March 2007.

Featured on opensourcecms.com

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

I thought I was hearing the download counter going a bit more than usual today...turns out we're now on opensourcecms.com, the world's most popular and relevant website for choosing an open source CMS such as ours! Its currently accounting for about 1 in 5 visits to our website.

SilverStripe to host PHP meetup

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Thanks to discussions on the New Zealand PHP Mailing List, and being included in Google Summer of Code, Neil Bertram who runs the PHP user group has invited SilverStripe to host and present the next Wellington PHP Meet Up. This will cover:

We made the morning news!

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1200

NewsTalkZB was keen to talk to us about the our involvement with Google Summer of Code. Here's the transcript from the interview.

Google Summer of Code 2007: We Are In!

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We are proud to say that Google has accepted SilverStripe to be one of only 113 open source projects globally suitable for the the Google Summer of Code 2007. This will see Google pay USD4500 to top students worldwide to participate in the open source programming community and add great new features to SilverStripe. We're also very excited at being the first New Zealand organisation to make the cut since Google began running this in 2005.

Google Summer of Code 2007 project ideas

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Update: Google has endorsed us to be a part of 2007 Google Summer of Code. Read on for the list of exciting projects ideas for Summer of Code students, which see you get paid USD4500. Projects revolve around extending our open source content management system and application framework, SilverStripe. The projects are designed to be a part of the standard distribution of SilverStripe, and involve architecting and programming (Object Oriented PHP5, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, Javascript), with a strong focus on usability, innovation and fun!

February in review

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +1300

As promised, here's an overview of SilverStripe over February...

Updated tutorials

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Andrew has recently finished writing the developer tutorial on building forms and adding a search to your site. We want your feedback on what to write the next tutorials about...

Temporary outage due to orcon power failure

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Unfortunately several of our websites and mail service went down for much of this morning after someone crashed their car and took power away from the Orcon datacenter. This outage affected thousands of websites and only a small percentage were SilverStripe related. We treat this a serious problem because this is the second time in a year that Orcon diesel generators have failed--so in addition to us reminding Orcon of their contractual obligations we are we are working with Nucleus to spread our services across networks.

Surfing a big wave!

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We threw an impromtu party on Thursday after SilverStripe was featured on Ajaxian, which led us to being popular on Del.icio.us and then smattered all over the place on various blogs, including in Italy and Germany, giving our server a real thrashing!

SilverStripe 2.1 template preview

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

We're busy working on a dozen stunning templates for next month's 2.1 release so that you can hit the ground running with SilverStripe. With our content management system, you are in complete control of the templates because you can completely hand-craft the XHTML and CSS, but we felt having a few out of the box will help your understanding and creativity! Big ups to Will for working on these!

SilverStripe 2.0.0 released - no more betas!

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +1300

I'm pleased to announce that SilverStripe 2.0 is no longer in beta. Version 2.0.0 was released today.

What would you like to see in version 2.1?

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We're currently planning what we're going to put into version 2.1 of SilverStripe, and we'd love to get your feedback.

We're hiring!

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +1300

We're growing and are looking for two fantastic people to join the SilverStripe team, we've got an opening for a legendary web developer and support and communication manager.

Holiday reading material

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Andrew, one of our awesome new interns who joined us with the "Summer of Code"-programme, just finished some tutorials targeted at SilverStripe-beginners. They should give you an insight on creating a basic site and custom pages, and keep you busy learning SilverStripe over the holidays.

CSS is 10 Years Old

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has just had its 10 year anniversary, and celebrated the occasion by creating a site to mark its involvement in the web development world. CSS itself hasn’t been relatively popular until more recent years. w3.org even upgraded the CSS validator

SilverStripe Usability Review

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +1300

We recently put SilverStripe under the microscope, and got an expert usability review of the content management system from our friends at Optimal Usability.

2.0 Beta 2 released

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +1300

We're pleased to announce that SilverStripe is now up to beta 2.

2.0 Beta 1 released

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +1300

We are pleased to announce a new build of SilverStripe as we get closer to a final 2.0 release. The latest version contains a number of bug fixes, and general interface improvements over the previous release.

Of note Ingo has done some great work on the “details view” for members, newsletters and "files and images". We are now using a “light box” as opposed to a “bottom” frame to display the details of a specific record – this gives us more usable space to work with and generally allows us to support more complex interfaces. We’ve also added support for paging (so you can easily change between items in the list), and an Ajax auto-complete.

Coming in October

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +1300

In follow-up to Tim's post yesterday about the launch of our new site, I thought I'd post a quick note to let you know what we've got planned this month.

SilverStripe CMS Opensourced!

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +1300

We’re pleased to announce we’ve released SilverStripe CMS under an open source license for all to enjoy.

The SilverStripe CMS is a modern, object orientated platform written in PHP5, which is great for developing websites and web application with. The key points of differences are;

Free Code: "Unobtrusive JavaScript" Tree Control

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Here's a tree control that uses semantic HTML, unobtrusive JavaScript, and is easily reusable in a bundle of applications.

Here's the first of what will hopefully be a bunch of code that we donate to the web at large. I made this a few months ago, but it's been serving me well.

There are a lot of tree controls out there, but most of them are tacky, heavyweight relics of the"DHTML" era. I felt it was time for a change. In particular, I wanted to adopt "unobtrusive javascript" techniques. Among other things, the script has these notable features:

New Zealand E-Government Guidelines

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +1300

at standards-schmandards.com

What I read: Minding the Planet

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +1300

From time to time I showcase blogs that I like reading. These often have very little to do with content management and the web, but you might find them interesting.

Minding the Planet is a blog I read fairly regularly. In addition to musings about the "semantic web", Nova, the author has plenty of really interesting posts out of left field. It's a refeshing source of curious facts about the world with Nova's unique perspective.

What's the semantic web? Well, maybe I should let Nova tell you.

A great perspective on Web 2.0

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +1300

at headrush.typepad.com

Kathy Sierra knows what she's talking about. "Creating passionate users" is an excellent blog.

This is one of the best articles about Web 2.0 that I've read. Kathy Sierra knows what she's talking about. "Creating passionate users" is an excellent blog.

In short, it says that the best thing about Web 2.0 is that no-one knows what it means. It forces people to fill in the blanks themselves, and come up with their own vision of what "the next iteration" should be.

The best examples of these are the side-passes that involve a lot of people saying "Web 2.0 isn't that, it's actually this". Fact of the matter is all of the ideas are becoming part of the mix of new ideas that are being thrown around. Even the naysayers complaining about the nebulous hype are keeping the discussion grounded in real benefits and preventing us from partying like it's '99.

So, I guess we should keep the discussions going.

Why I switched to Google Reader

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +1300

A brief review of Google's new RSS agregator.