I have spent this afternoon reading a CMS (content management system) book entitled, “SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development.” SilverStripe, a PHP-based CMS and yet an open source software with its architecture broken into three types of components: models, views, and controllers (MVC) is more than just a CMS, it is a framework that can helps a Web developer to build a wide range of Web applications.
Unlike any popular, and award-winning CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, etc., to install and use it, your Web server must support PHP5. In fact, playing it on my Localhost and reading the book, SilverStripe is “not” an ideal tool for a newbie for developing a content-driven Web site. Although SilverStripe equipped with a powerful blend of features, such as easy to set up, but it does not comes with a robust user-interface, and thus you have to write the script and coding it in order to make it all work. Also, SilverStripe is not easy to modify, not to mention the need to run a single test or to run all tests in the project path.
However, SilverStripe is totally customizable CMS. Since it is largely written in Sapphire, a PHP5 Web framework originally developed to support SilverStripe, and hence it is extremely flexible to extend SilverStripe CMS-powered site to some other Web application such as a full-fledged job board.
Perhaps, you might ask, “So many PHP-based CMS, do we need a new PHP-based CMS?” To be honest, I see the potential of this CMS that based on this kind of MVC Sapphire framework. With SilverStripe, a Web developer can have a bit of freedom to experiment with alternative way to build a content site and not so narrowly focus on building specific document management portal as a whole.
