SilverStripe.org Blog

What should be on council websites of the future?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:54:00 +1200

Last month, SilverStripe spoke about what we consider to be the future trends and features of council (local government authority) websites. We also asked council staff what they wanted to add to their websites. You can watch our presentation and read council views below.

All of this took place at an annual conference of council web managers and developers. The same conference also featured a panel discussion on content management systems, and the new website we produced for the council of Gisborne won an award.

What we think

What councils think

During the conference, we asked council staff what they thought should be added to their sites. Staff supplied the information on paper cards, which we have collated, summarised, and grouped below.

Embedded Facebook applications
•    LTCCP submissions (Long Term Community-Council Plan)
•    museum exhibitions
•    library events
Ability for ratepayers to log in to their website and retrieve information
•    access to their rates balance
•    track building consents
•    property information (with links to maps and consent information)
•    licenses (e.g. dog permits)
Applications
• as above (rates, building consents, property, licenses, etc)
• job applications
Real-time information
•    traffic and pedestrian webcams
•    real-time rainfall data and river level information
•    local weather
Consultation and information exchange
•    online consultation (local democratic work)
•    online newsletters
•    obtain LTCCP feedback and submissions
Database publishing
• search on rates information
• cemetery records for genealogical research

Overlap?

In general, we're happy to see that both our presentation and the list above are in general agreement. However, when implementing any website feature, it’s important to put the user’s needs first. Council websites have long had features on their websites for users, but they are often undermined by very poor usability. SilverStripe would like to see this substantially improve and we look forward to helping New Zealand councils make this happen.

Watch panel discuss the suitability of SilverStripe for councils

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:54:00 +1200

You can watch four New Zealand councils provide customer views about the CMS running their public-facing website. The 50-minute panel discussion was a popular session at the Council Web Symposium held in Wellington last month.

The same day at the conference, the SilverStripe-built Gisborne District Council website won an award for best redevelopment. We also presented a talk on the future of council websites which you can watch online.

The panelists in the video are:

Brett Sangster, Greater Wellington, discussing SilverStripe
Tracey Morris, Northland Regional Council, discussing EpiServer
Richard Purvis, Rodney District Council, discussing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
Jenni Worboys, Matamata-Piako District Council, and Lee Tong, Napier City Council, on Joomla!

Learn about SilverStripe and our government work in Washington DC

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:59:00 +1200

Join us in Washington DC! From 7 to 9pm on Thursday, 16th July, we're presenting an interactive case study of the 2008 U.S. Democratic National Convention website.

Powered by SilverStripe, the website delivered content in both English and Spanish, had real-time videos of Barack Obama and other key speakers in HD quality, and received more than 2.6 billion hits over a 96 hour period.

Washington DC-based Tim Chambers from Dewey Digital will explain why SilverStripe was chosen for the project, and answer questions about the website from the customer side. Sigurd will explain how our development team worked on the project, and fill in all the technical details around successfully scaling to such a large surge of traffic.

The event is free and is hosted by the Washington DC Web Content Mavens. You even get a free drink and appetizers!

7-9pm, Thursday 16th July.
RFD Washington, 810 7th St NW, Washington DC (Google map)
You must RSVP at Meetup.com

English book available for US pre-order. Preview the cover!

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:19:00 +1200

Work on the English SilverStripe book is steadily progressing!

Pre-orders of the book have been possible through Amazon.uk since April. As of today you can pre-order the book in US dollars from Amazon.com, too.

The front cover, pictured, has just been designed by our publisher, Wiley. And we're now over half way through translating the material from the German source. As anyone involved with writing a book knows well, this means there is still plenty ahead: typesetting, proof-reading, printing, and so on. But, if you pre-order the book soon, it will only be a few months until it will be in your hands!

Pre-order from Amazon.com (US$43.16)
Pre-order from Amazon.uk (£29.99)
Pre-order from Wiley for any country, such as for Australia and New Zealand.

Two SilverStripe appearances at open source conference next month

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:25:00 +1200

We'll be at OSCON, the world's largest open source software conference, and we'd love to meet you there.

The conference is held in San Jose, south of San Francisco, from July 20 to 24 and attracts thousands of developers and others interested in open source. Come join one of our SilverStripe sessions!

Hear us talk about usability in open source software

We've been invited to present a 45-minute talk as part of the OSCON usability track. We presented a session at the conference two years ago and we're very excited about being accepted to present again. Drawing on our experience of working on the SilverStripe CMS and what we see elsewhere in the market, we'll speak about how to make open source web applications more user-friendly. You'll need to purchase attendance at OSCON to come to this session.

2.35pm, Wednesday 22nd July in Meeting Room B1/B4 at OSCON.
Full details about this talk

Join us for a free, public meetup on our software

Anyone interested in SilverStripe is welcome to attend a free event we're hosting the following night. This event is run as a free Birds of a Feather session at OSCON in the evening after the main daily sessions.

Whether you're technical or not, we'll provide you with an interesting overview of our software and answer any questions you have. The session is designed to let people attending OSCON discuss and learn about SilverStripe. However, the public is welcome to attend at no charge.

7pm, Thursday 23rd July in Ballroom A8 at OSCON
Full details about this event
RSVP at Upcoming.org or on Facebook.

SilverStripe 2.3.2 stable released: Multi-language support is back, and even better than before!

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:13:00 +1200

We've issued a new stable release of SilverStripe today! It restores support for multiple-language websites and includes a small set of usability and performance improvements.

Download SilverStripe-v2.3.2.tar.gz
Important upgrade instructions

SilverStripe has supported multiple-language websites since 2007. The feature which provides this is called Translatable in the codebase, and it lets you create a page with variations in different languages. Translatable is intended for websites whose content exists in a number of languages, while the structure of the site is similar or even identical for all of those languages.

Unfortunately, when we released SilverStripe v2.3.0 in March, multiple-language support was broken. The release contained a number of major architectural improvements to our software in general. However, these changes meant our multiple-language feature needed to be re-architected to continue functioning. We saw an opportunity to improve how this feature worked, which required time. So, instead of just fixing Translatable, we've made it much more powerful and easy to work with:

User interface / CMS improvements

Translated pages can be nested in the CMS tree.
You can bookmark a URL that will load the CMS with a specific page in a specific language.
The concept of a master language has been deprecated. You can now have 100 pages in English and German, then add a page that is only in German, and afterwards add a different page that is only in English. This helps reflect what is needed in the real world. Previously, you had to nominate a master language, and every page on the site had to exist in that language.

Sapphire framework improvements

Added support for locales. Previously you could have a website with pages in German and English. But SilverStripe couldn't support UK English, US English, Austrian German, and German German all on the same site. Locales allow for a language to have country-specific variations, and respect that many countries have multiple languages. Technically, this means labelling each translation in the format "de_AT" rather than just "de".
A new database schema reduces join operations on database tables. This improves performance. Rather than adding columns to tables to support fields in each language, it instead adds new rows and uses a column to represent the language. There is an important side effect to note, however. The old system provided the ability to make individual arbitrary fields translatable (e.g., translate "Page Title" but leave "Content" only in English). Now you can only choose a whole object as translatable (e.g. Page Title, Content, URL, and everything else will have a field in each language).
Extensive unit testing coverage added.
When you have a single-language site, there used to be some multiple-language support loaded anyway. This has been fixed, meaning single-language websites will load faster and use less memory.
Easy language switching with unique URLs and specialised template controls.

We'd like to acknowledge Michael Gall in the community for contributing a lot of time, code, and testing to Translatable!

CMS user interface translations unaffected

Note that the ability for the CMS admin interface to appear in a different language is quite separate. This feature has continued to work properly in all releases since 2.2.0. (We are, by the way, always interested in more people contributing to translations!)

Upgrading multiple-language websites

Other new CMS features

There are many other small improvements and fixes in this release. One example is the ability to delete a page from both the draft and published sites and be able to restore it again later. Very useful! Check out our 2.3.2 changelog for details.

SilverStripe interest fills New York event: listen to the talk!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:24:00 +1200

SilverStripe spoke at a monthly web-developer event in May. Listen to 61 minutes explaining our software and company, and answering a huge number of questions from a very interested crowd:

Overview of SilverStripe with Q+A, New York PHP Meetup. from Sigurd Magnusson on Vimeo.

In May 2009, SilverStripe co-founder and CMO Sigurd Magnusson spoke at the monthly New York PHP Meetup Event.

The talk provided an overview of the SilverStripe software and company, and insights into websites that run on the SilverStripe CMS such as the Democratic National Convention. We also mentioned upcoming features in the software.

Not only did our appearance generate the first-ever full house for this monthly event, our 30 minute slot more than doubled due to the huge number of questions (meaning, unfortunately, that the audio cuts out at 61 minutes).

This video is a combination of an audio recording along with the Keynote slides presented on the evening.

SilverStripe 2.3.2rc4 ready for download and testing

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:09:00 +1200

SilverStripe 2.3.2 release candidate 4 is out. It fixes a number of bugs and means we step closer to a stable 2.3.2 release.

This release focuses on improving multiple language support, as we have discussed earlier. We'd love for you download and test the release so that we can ensure our code is of a high quality!

SilverStripe-v2.3.2-rc4.tar.gz (6MB)

Update: 24 hours after we released RC3, we identified that we had introduced a bug in that release. The bug prevented saving pages with multiple launguage content. RC4 should fix this; the changelog explains what code was changed.

SilverStripe 2.3.2 release candidate 2 available for testing

Thu, 28 May 2009 09:13:00 +1200

SilverStripe v2.3.2 RC2 is now available! This provides the second update to the SilverStripe 2.3.2 beta which was released in early May.

We'd love your support: download, install, and test the code and raise bugs if you find any! Once we're satisfied that neither the community nor the core team can find any major bugs, the code will be deemed stable for general use.

Choosing an open source CMS, confidently

Tue, 26 May 2009 16:19:00 +1200

There's finally a book available that educates people on how to appropriately choose an open source CMS.

Nirav Mehta's Choosing an Open Source CMS: Beginner's Guide reviews about a dozen open source CMS packages; read the table of the contents to see what they are. The table of contents also outlines how the book covers the topic of choosing the right software, be your project a website, blog, wiki, or something else.

Several pages in Mehta's book positively review SilverStripe, with comments like:

When you see it, you will be impressed. When you try the demo, you will be further impressed ... Anyone can get started with SilverStripe in minutes ... the bottom line is, evaluate SilverStripe before you take your decision."

Up to this point there have only been scattered resources on offer to help people choose a CMS. Mehta's book remedies this problem by providing a solid starting point. Armed with a comprehensive set of the basics, readers can more confidently download, demo, and evaluate the software out there, and complete their decision-making process.

Just to note: we had no influence over our inclusion in the book—we only learnt that SilverStripe was featured in the book after it became available for purchase.

Buy the book

SilverStripe 2.3.2 beta 1: Multi-language support is back, and even better than before

Wed, 06 May 2009 09:13:00 +1200

We've issued a beta release of SilverStripe today that restores support for multiple-language websites.

We want people to test this update, and in particular, confirm that our migration script works reliably. Please help by reporting bugs so that we can confidently ready this release for production use.

Download SilverStripe-v2.3.2-beta1.tar.gz

Unfortunately, when we released SilverStripe v2.3.0 in March, multiple language support was broken. The release contained a number of major architectural improvements to our software in general. However, these changes meant our multiple-language feature needed to be re-architected to continue functioning. We saw an opportunity to improve how this feature worked, which required time. So, instead of just fixing Translatable, we've made it much more powerful and easy to work with:

User interface / CMS improvements

Translated pages can be nested in the CMS tree.
You can bookmark a URL that will load the CMS with a specific page in a specific language.
The concept of a master language has been deprecated. You can now have 100 pages in English and German, then add a page that is only in German, and afterwards add a different page that is only in English. This helps reflect what is needed in the real world. Previously, you had to nominate a master language, and every page on the site had to exist in that language.

Sapphire framework improvements

Added support for locales. Previously you could have a website with pages in German and English. But SilverStripe couldn't support UK English, US English, Austrian German, and German German all on the same site. Locales allow for a language to have country-specific variations, and respect that many countries have multiple languages. Technically, this means labelling each translation in the format "de_AT" rather than just "de".
A new database schema reduces join operations on database tables. This improves performance. Rather than adding columns to tables to support fields in each language, it instead adds new rows and uses a column to represent the language. There is an important side effect to note, however. The old system provided the ability to make individual arbitrary fields translatable (e.g., translate "Page Title" but leave "Content" only in English.). Now you can only choose a whole object as translatable (e.g. Page Title, Content, URL, and everything else will have a field in each language.)
Extensive unit testing coverage added.
When you have a single-languge site, there used to be some mulitple-language support loaded anyway. This has been fixed, meaning single-language websites will load faster and use less memory.
Easy language switching with unique URLs and specialised template controls.

We'd like to acknowledge Michael Gall in the community for contributing a lot of time, code, and testing to Translatable!

CMS user interface translations unaffected

Upgrading multiple-language websites

We've automated the complex work of converting your site to the new schema. Please note that this script does not migrate previous versions of a page. Only the current draft and published state of a page is moved—see upgrade instructions. As noted above, this is a beta release. This means you shouldn't try it on a production site without thorough testing. Report bugs, or if it works well, leave a comment below.

Other new CMS features

We have a changelog of many other small improvements and fixes in this release. One example is allowing you to delete a page from both the draft and published sites, and be able to restore it again later. Very useful!

SilverStripe partners with Mollom to reduce your website spam

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1200

You can now depend on SilverStripe to intelligently reduce spam appearing on your website.

This is because we've now officially partnered with Mollom. This means that the Mollom anti-spam module we released last month will see continued improvements. It also means our company will provide commercial support for the code.

Dries Buytaert, founder of both Drupal and Mollom, invited SilverStripe to become Mollom's second official software partner. He writes,

We have been working with Sigurd Magnusson and others at SilverStripe Limited to meet technical and commercial requirements, and have been pleased at how easy this has been. SilverStripe's CMS also looks to have a bright future: while young, it now has over 150,000 downloads to date, a great user interface and underlying architecture, and last year won Packtpub's most promising open source CMS award. Therefore, our partnership with SilverStripe certainly meets our goals, and we're happy to have them onboard to help the Mollom ecosystem grow.

Mollom has proven to be very effective on SilverStripe.com and SilverStripe.org. Together, those two sites have had more than 400,000 spam attempts in the past 6 weeks. Only about one in 10,000 spam appear to be getting through; we'd be overwhelmed with spam otherwise! The effectiveness of Mollom is largely due to Benjamin Schrauwen, a co-founder of Mollom who is responsible for its machine-learning capability. This capability means that as more people use (and abuse!) Mollom, the more it learns good from bad, and its ability to block inappropriate material improves.

Therefore, we're quick to suggest you should download the SilverStripe Mollom module and begin protecting your website from spam!

To learn more, watch our 3 minute screencast, containing:

High-level instructions on how to install Mollom
A demonstration of Mollom protecting SilverStripe blogs, forums, and forms against spam.

English book coming August. Pre-orders open!

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:51:00 +1200

Our first English SilverStripe book is in progress and you can now pre-order it! We anticipate it will be published by the end of August.

One of the world's largest book publishers, Wiley, has agreed to license our 450-page German SilverStripe book (pictured) from the German publisher and translate it into English. The effort of updating and translating the book is being done by our core developers, including Ingo Schommer who co-authored the initial book.

The book is targeted at professional developers with existing knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and object-oriented PHP5. It provides insight into our web development philosophy and explains the theory underpinning our Sapphire framework and our CMS. It balances this with frequent practical code examples, all of which will be offered for download to make learning quicker.

The aim of the book is to teach the reader how to create websites with rich, slick, and sophisticated features, customise the CMS administration interface heavily, and create extension modules.

The book will sell for £29.95 (a little over USD40.00) online and in major bookstores worldwide.

You can be guaranteed to have one of the first copies shipped to you by pre-ordering it now from Amazon UK. Recall that our German book sold out on Amazon shortly after launch!

SilverStripe selected for Web Idol competition

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:00:00 +1200

SilverStripe will be showcased in an upbeat annual CMS competition at next week's Janus Boye CMS Conference in Philadelphia!

The Web Idol competition is modelled after American Idol and is designed to be both entertaining and informative. It features quick-fire competitive performances and a panel of pithy judging. We get 6 minutes to have a heap of fun—and explain to a voting audience why SilverStripe deserves an outrageously large trophy. Stay tuned!

Microsoft SQL server module in alpha

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:34:00 +1200

SilverStripe can now run entirely off a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database!

This allows SilverStripe to easily connect to existing databases and fit into environments where you don't necessary want MySQL. It allows SilverStripe to be used in as many situations as possible, in much the same way as supporting multiple web browsers and operating systems does.

SQL Server Support is provided by installing the SQL Server Database module, currently in alpha. This module works only with our daily builds currently, and is little more than one powerful PHP file and is quite easy to install. The current state of the code lets you carry out the tasks you would expect: install SilverStripe; add fields through invoking /dev/build; use the CMS; and, to the best of our knowledge, run all our modules.

The main known limitation currently relates to automatic column type changes. If you create a field (for example 'TShirtSize') as numeric field and then decide you need to change it to a text field, you would normally change the type in PHP and run /dev/build to update the database. In MySQL this would adapt the field and preserve the data as much as the new column allows. However, such a feature is less easy to implement in SQL Server so you currently need to perform schema changes manually. This issue also applies to changing field precision, for example changing VARCHAR(10) to VARCHAR(40).

Other than that, we're using the code with success internally, and know others in the community are too. We're mentioning this SQL Server milestone in the blog to let you know that the feature is well on its way, and to allow careful developers a chance to try it out, provide feedback, and files bugs before we mark it as a publicly stable module.

See list of bugs and feature requests listed against SQL Server Support
Report a bug in Microsoft SQL Server module (register or login before clicking)

Organisations wishing to make use of it in production today can contact us for commercial support, or wait some months for this to be part of our standard release.

Something you might not know is that Microsoft has long provided SQL Server 2008 Express, a free version of SQL Server. The only limitation of the express edition is that it will only utilise up to 1 physical processor, 1 GB memory, and 4 GB storage on a machine, so it won't scale well beyond trial, development, or low-end production environments.

The Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, demonstrating SilverStripe running on SQL Server 2008:

Meet us in Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, London

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:23:00 +1200

SilverStripe staff are hitting the USA East Coast and UK in May. We're keen to meet developers and organisations interested in our software and our business.

You'll get to learn the story behind SilverStripe, influence our upcoming decisions, ask pointed questions, and get a preview of upcoming features!

Philadelphia. Monday 11th May 6pm.
Presentation followed by discussion at IndyHall event space, 32 Strawberry Street (map.)
Kindly hosted by Indyhall and Philly PHP. RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming or Philly PHP Meetup.
Washington DC. Tuesday 12th May 6pm.
Case study of Democratic National Convention website and SilverStripe overview, discussion.
Held at the office of Dewey Square Group: Floor 5. 1325 Pennsylvania Ave NW (map.) RSVP on Facebook.
New York. Thursday 14th May 6.30pm.
Presentation followed by discussion at Suspenders at 111 Broadway (map.)
Kindly hosted by the NYPHP community. RSVP on Facebook or on Meetup.
London. Wednesday 27th May 6pm.
Chat with us over dinner at Meza Bar in SOHO (map.) RSVP on Facebook.

Please join us, and spread the word; key SilverStripe staff are not in these cities every day! If you have specific things you'd like to learn or share with us at the meetings, provide details as a comment below.

150,000 downloads

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +1300

It took two years to reach 100,000 downloads, but less than six months to reach an all-time total of 150,000!

In recent weeks we've produced SilverStripe v2.3.0 and v2.3.1, releases that have seen attention from Slashdot, Ajaxian, and a multitude of CMS industry websites like CMSReport. Consequently, we've seen a rush of people downloading and installing our software and, wonderfully, joining our community and producing amazing websites!

We're also pleased that heaps of people are trying out the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install SilverStripe on Windows: about 45% of our downloads so far in April are using this, so we're seeing real demand for this.

(Note: The 150,000 figure was determined by counting downloads from the main SilverStripe website. It excludes downloads of dailybuilds, subversion, or from external websites like Sourceforge. It also excludes the tens of thousands of copies that have been bundled on magazine cover discs and with the SilverStripe book.)

SilverStripe 2.3.1 eases installation and provides protection against website comment spam

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:30:00 +1300

Hot on the heels of SilverStripe 2.3.0 comes an update that resolves some bugs, adds support for six more languages in the CMS, and launches two great new features.

This release also contains important security fixes so we encourage you to upgrade.

Download silverstripe-2.3.1.tar.gz or,
Install a fresh SilverStripe 2.3.1 install using Windows Platform Installer. (Learn what this is.)
Changelog
File bugs at open.silverstripe.com and post general feedback as a comment below.

Mollom support to combat website spam

Mollom is a smart and cheap way to reduce unwanted comments and other website spam. It uses a combination of bayesian filters and CAPTCHAs to protect forms on your website. This release allows you to install Mollom code that protects:

Page comments in the core product
Blog comments in our blog module
User Registrations in our forum module
If your forum receives a lot of abuse, you can optionally enable Mollom to protect all forum posts.
Hand-written (PHP) forms can be protected with a new field type called MollomField

To make use of Mollom, you must use SilverStripe 2.3.1, and install the just-released spamprotection-v0.1rc1.tar.gz and mollom-0.1.0rc1.tar.gz modules. The existing blog module will work as is, but to use it with our forum, you must upgrade to forum 0.2rc2. See our Mollom installation instructions. Please try it out and tell us what you think! This code has just been released, so if you find problems, be sure to write up bugs at open.silverstripe.com.

See screenshots of Mollom in action
The blog comment forms on silverstripe.com and silverstripe.org are now running this Mollom protection. You will notice it doesn't ask for a CATPCHA unless it thinks your comment is spammy!

(Note: The user forms module will be released later with Mollom support.)

Installing SilverStripe without a URL rewriter

A very common problem raised in our Installation Forum is trying to get a URL rewriter working, such as Apache's mod_rewrite. This is what provides SilverStripe with one of its popular features: human readable or "friendly" URLs. In the past we have been stringent about enforcing this, because we disagree strongly with websites that have complicated URLs. Without a URL rewrite, a SilverStripe address would look like website.com/sapphire/main.php?url=about-us.

Sam, however, recently committed some code that provides a great fallback strategy which means you can still get pleasant URLs without a URL rewriter. This will mean that a URL rewriter remains strongly encouraged, but is no longer a requirement.

With a URL rewriter	Without
website.com/	website.com/
website.com/about-us	website.com/index.php/about-us

This means you can now install SilverStripe on Microsoft IIS 5.1 and 6.0 (which don't have native URL Rewriters). It also helps those having difficulties with the free URL rewriters on Apache and Lighttpd.

New languages

Thanks to the great work of our community of translators, this release updates most of the CMS interface translations. In addition, it adds these new languages:

Catalan (Andorra)
English (United Kingdom)
Spanish (Mexico)
Indonesian (Indonesia)
Bokmål (Norway)
Serbian (Serbia)

(Note: As with v2.3.0, this release does not complete our work allowing public facing website pages to be in multiple langauges. Our roadmap currently has this solved in v2.3.2.)

Again, thanks to the community for raising bugs and providing help with this release. If you're interested in helping out with upcoming versions or our community, read our contribution guide.

Installing on Windows now easier thanks to Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:00:00 +1300

At MIX today, Microsoft released Web Platform Installer (WebPI) 2.0 beta—new software that makes it much easier and more compelling to install PHP applications on the Windows IIS web server.

SilverStripe has been selected as one of ten PHP and .NET web applications to be bundled with the launch of WebPI. This means the easiest method for installing SilverStripe is now Microsoft's WebPI, and for many people, this will be much easier than installing SilverStripe using WAMP or on Linux.

WebPI automatically downloads, installs, and configures free software dependencies like the official Microsoft IIS webserver, PHP, and web apps like SilverStripe.
WebPI works on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Vista, and Windows Server 2008. It takes care of the architecture differences so that installation remains a simple wizard process.
We've solved the two most commonly listed Windows installation problems from our forums: getting a URL Rewriter to work, and setting up the correct file permissions (for installation and to facilitate file uploads in the system.)

SilverStripe's inclusion in the web application gallery is not only fantastic for our profile or as a way to make it easier for you to install SilverStripe—but, as our case study explains (available in PDF too), it also serves to illustrate that SilverStripe works well on Windows, which was supported through having access to technical Microsoft staff.

Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe) with Nigel Parker (Microsoft)

What does the new installation process look like?

Step 1. MySQL

Currently WebPI does not install MySQL. You must install this first. Fortunately, this is an easy process: download either the 32bit or 64bit version of MySQL 'Windows Essentials' (about 30MB.)
Move through the simple installation wizard, memorising the username and password that you create for the database server (e.g. "root" and "mynewpwd.")
Microsoft have a guide on installing MySQL on Windows if you need details.
NB. We aim to have Microsoft SQL Server support in the future, which WebPI can automatically configure, so the manual step to install MySQL will become optional in the future.

Step 2. Web Platform Installer (WebPI)

Download and install the Microsoft Windows Platform Installer:

(This link will download WebPI. However, if you have WebPI installed, then this same link will launch WebPI and select SilverStripe to install. Share this button and the URL it links to!)

Step 3. Install SilverStripe using WebPI

Web Platform Installer retrieves the list of applications listed at microsoft.com/web/gallery (This list will grow as developers add their web applications to the gallery.)

Choose SilverStripe (listed under Content Management), and click Install:

Having inspected your machine, WebPI will list the software that SilverStripe depends on. It's a much smarter way to have a web platform on Windows, because it saves you downloading a wholly separate WAMP server.

WebPI will download and configure the dependencies, and it will prompt to you to install IIS if needed. You will also notice it downloading SilverStripe directly off our SilverStripe.org website.

Step 4. SilverStripe configuration

WebPI then only asks a few simple questions, such as:

Whether you want SilverStripe installed as your entire website or in a sub-folder
The existing username and password to access your MySQL database
A new username and password to be used as your initial SilverStripe CMS administrator account

Once you see this screen, you have successfully completed the installation:

Step 5. Evaluate SilverStripe and build something with it!

The default theme of SilverStripe lets you navigate your new website immediately.

And the content management system is ready for content entry and customisation.

See video of SilverStripe in action.

Give us feedback!

Given 40% of SilverStripe installations already occur on Windows, we jumped at the chance to be a part of WebPI because it could make those installations smoother. We would love to get your feedback, as we are certain there are things to be improved—please use this chance to articulate them!

Web Platform Installer - Official Forum
SilverStripe Installation Issues Forum
Raise a SilverStripe bug report: Register then add bug report.
Or comment below...

SilverStripe 2.3.1rc2 - test the update!

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:35:00 +1300

Thank you to those who tested SilverStripe 2.3.1rc1! You identified a few easy-to-fix bugs that we felt were important to solve before issuing the final release of SilverStripe 2.3.1.

We're keen to have developers download silverstripe-2.3.1rc2.tar.gz and confirm that it's a good release. If no problems are found we'll mark it as stable this week!

In particular, as described in our 2.3.1rc1 blog post we're keen to test the mod_rewrite work-around that helps support IIS 5.1/6.0 (without URL Rewrite), and Apache (without mod_rewrite.)