I've started using the SilverStripe PHP CMS framework

Posted February 12th, 2010 in SilverStripe

During the course of this week I've been looking at a number of different PHP CMS systems and frameworks, compared with developing an in-house one, for creating a huge new motorhome travel portal. After some consideration I've decided on using SilverStripe.

SilverStripe CMS

SilverStripe is a content management system by SilverStripe Ltd, a New Zealand based website development company. It's free and open source, and is written in PHP5. As at the time of writing this post the current version (2.3.x) only supports MySQL but the current beta (2.4) supports Microsoft SQL Server and Postgres, as well as a number of other features not yet supported the 2.3 release, such as hierarchical URLs.

SilverStripe is a highly extensible system based SilverStripe's Sapphire PHP framework. There are a reasonable number of modules, themes and extensions available and it's easy enough to extend with your own as well. The admin system looks good as well (which is so often not the case with open source CMS systems (and even paid-for system)) and is easy to use.

I've been so impressed with SilverStripe that I'm considering moving this blog over to it. This won't be a particularly easy undertaking because I have to create an import routine to copy the data over from my existing CMS into SilverStripe (and some other changes to deal with some of my content) and I need to make some modifications to make it work more along the lines of what how I want.

However I believe it will be worth the effort and make my website a lot easier to maintain. Plus I'll finally have a comments system :)

Look for a whole bunch of SilverStripe posts in the coming weeks on this blog containing tips and tricks, how-tos, some issues I've had to deal with, and some mods I will make to get it working the way I want for this blog.

Also check out the SilverStripe book. I've just ordered this now from Amazon so should get it in a week or two. It looks like an excellent resource for getting to know SilverStripe. You can order it from: