New CMS demo for a better evaluator experience

Silverstripe CMS offers a flexible solution for your website or application. To provide a comprehensive hands-on experience, we’ve launched a new demo, packed with a more robust set of features.

Silverstripe CMS offers a flexible solution for your website or application. Its open source and modular DNA provides the best of both worlds for developers and CMS users, with a framework that can be easily adapted to suit your organisation’s needs, and an intuitive user interface that empowers teams to deliver great content.

So you can easily evaluate what Silverstripe CMS offers, we’ve just launched a new demo that includes a robust set of features, providing a more comprehensive experience than the old open source demo.

Try the new demo now

The best of both worlds

Silverstripe CMS offers a flexible base that in a sense, wraps around your own content model. This empowers developers to build flexibly while allowing content teams to take full advantage of features without being encumbered by the technology.

A tradeoff to this flexibility is that it can be difficult to fully describe the capability of Silverstripe CMS. We often hear from users who have experienced another installation of Silverstripe CMS and have been surprised by the range of functionality at their fingertips. The new Silverstripe CMS demo fills this gap.

Out with the old and in with the new

To give users a hands-on experience with Silverstripe CMS, we previously relied on a fairly minimal base installation in the open source demo. But in the real world, agencies and developers building on Silverstripe CMS each have their own preferred “recipe” of modules, allowing them to customise the base installation, adding desired functionality for their specific use case.

Similarly, our Silverstripe project delivery teams have their own preferences and go-to modules. We’ve built and open sourced many of these ourselves, but often turn to the wider ecosystem of open source modules. You can check out all the add-ons here.

To provide a more comprehensive demonstration of Silverstripe CMS, we’ve launched a new demo that includes some of the go-to modules that we use when building websites for our customers. And unlike the old demo which works on a shared instance, the new demo allows you to spin up your own, personalised instance.

Perhaps most exciting about this new demo is the fact it’s built on content blocks, utilising the fantastic Elemental module. Content blocks introduce a more structured approach to managing content in your CMS without developer intervention.

Jump into the new Silverstripe CMS demo now

Keen to get started? Jump straight into the full-featured demo here. You may also like to read 10 tips to master Silverstripe CMS in which our Lead UX Designer, Paul Clarke describes some of his favourite CMS functionality.

More about the open source project and demo

While we’ve open sourced this project and theme, the collection of modules does not represent a new supported “recipe” by the Silverstripe project, but it is a good example of how to put things together in a useful way. Over time, as we discover new modules or replace old ones, we may update the collection.

Here are a few points on the new demo and answers to some frequently asked questions.

Personalised and sandboxed demos are created on request through a Kubernetes cluster in AWS
Demos expire after two weeks, but can be extended by continuing to log in
Every demo runs the latest stable release available on demo creation. This makes it a great way to check out new Silverstripe releases
The theme supports multiple colour and font variations configured through the CMS (see SCSS, fontpicker and colorpicker). This is all open source and built in a way that you can adapt in your own theme

The demo incorporates modules from a number of different Github organisations including:

You can check out the current suite of modules in the composer.json file.

Silverstripe funded the development and infrastructure of this new demo. We expect it to co-exist with the open source demo, and we’ve created a new landing page where you can decide which demo suits your needs. The page is designed to accommodate more demo variants.

If you’re an agency keen to show off your own set of recipes on your own demo, please contact us to get that linked up. If you’re interested in maintaining and extending the old demo, it’s open sourced here.

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