Announcing Module Standard 1.0 and Commercially Supported Modules

There are over 1,300 SilverStripe modules supported by an active open source community, delivering many additional functionalities to SilverStripe CMS such as blogging, user customisable form and workflow. We have taken these modules one step further with a newly proposed SilverStripeModule Standard 1.0 and Commercially Supported Modules.

Module Standard 1.0
The SilverStripe Module Standard defines a set of conventions that high quality SilverStripe modules should follow. It’s a bit like PSR for SilverStripe CMS modules and is of course optional (though very much recommended). The Module Standard will become part of the SilverStripe developer docs (there is a pull request under discussion at present). Future suggested improvements can be raised as a pull request once the initial standard is merged.

Bringing a module up to the Module Standard has several benefits:

• It gives developers and clients the confidence that these modules will continue to be compatible with future versions of SilverStripe core.
• It will help developers select quality modules from the add-ons website.
• Good documentation and tests will help higher adoption of your module.
• Shared community maintenance as modules get widely used and relied upon (more eyeballs over the code).

Coding and documentation guidelines for Module Standard 1.0 can currently be found on our website and of course (as always), these are up for further refinement and discussion.

SilverStripe Commercially Supported Modules
The Module Standard has come from the work of SilverStripe Ltd. looking at providing commercial support for a subset of modules. We thought we would share the standard we are adopting so others can use this as a guide to build better modules. Commercially Supported Modules means that SilverStripe (the company) has a dedicated team of developers actively maintaining them. We've made a commitment to actively look after a set of modules, bringing them up to the Module Standard over time and providing ongoing support for these. By using a Commercially Supported Module, you also get assurances on the dependencies too.

SilverStripe Commercially Supported Modules have:

• Compatibility with the latest SilverStripe CMS stable release
• Semantic Versioning
• Security patches applied asap
• Major bugs resolved quickly
• High level of testing to ensure quality
• Issues and pull requests responded to in a reasonable timeframe
• Extensive user and technical documentation

Keep an eye out for further information about the list of Commercially Support Modules as we work towards raising the bar for quality SilverStripe modules and features.

Photo credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/coltgroup/5209520766/