Contributing to Silverstripe CMS - StripeCon 2023

In September 2023, the 10th edition of StripeCon Europe took place with some fantastic talks. A couple of the talks revolved around contributing to Silverstripe CMS, which is a topic very important to me.

A beginner’s guide to creating Silverstripe CMS modules

James Cocker (you may know him as purplespider) talked us through his ‘Beginner’s Guide to Creating Silverstripe CMS Modules’. He covered everything from how to start your module, publishing and maintaining it, and how to customise existing modules.

His talk follows and expands upon the official documentation, and is a must-watch for anyone interested in contributing to or making their own third-party modules for Silverstripe CMS.

Watch James’ talk on YouTube.

Contributing to Silverstripe CMS - a (relatively) comprehensive guide

As a maintainer of Silverstripe CMS, I find myself in an excellent position to talk about contributing to Silverstripe CMS—so that’s exactly what I did.

In my talk, I covered the current state of community contributions and some of the improvements we want to make to the contribution experience. I then jumped right into the types of contributions you can make and how to go about it. If you’ve ever encountered a bug in Silverstripe CMS or wanted a feature that isn’t there, this is the talk for you.

There’s also a valuable FAQ at the end of the slides that I didn’t get to cover in the talk itself, so make sure you check that out as well.

Updates since September

I spoke about some things we want to improve to make contributing to Silverstripe CMS easier, and I’m happy to say we’ve made some progress on that front. Here are some of the things we’ve ticked off that list or are actively working on:

• We’ve updated the Maintainer Guidelines documentation to include the new community contributor roles and are actively working to put processes in place for those roles before filling them.
• All commercially supported modules now have templates for GitHub issues and pull requests.
• We’ve updated the contributing documentation - if you haven’t read it in a while (or at all), please take a look as a lot has changed since that documentation was last touched.

Watch the community contribution talk on YouTube.

You can also download the slides for both talks from the StripeCon website.