SilverStripe is proud to announce the immediate release of beta 1 of the SilverStripe Framework 3.0 and SilverStripe CMS 3.0.
For several years the SilverStripe 2.X line has provided a flexible open source CMS platform which has proven itself as a strong, competitive, feature rich and user focused option for content driven websites.
It has also proven itself as a valuable platform for developing websites with broader scope than traditional content driven sites in SilverStripe Ltd’s commercial website development endeavours
However, technology and user expectation moves on, as does what we strive to attain with this technology. With this in mind, SilverStripe has spent the past several months working on SilverStripe 3.0. SilverStripe 3.0 is a full re-examination and refresh of the SilverStripe CMS platform, with the primary goals being:
- Separate Framework from CMS, so that Framework is usable on its own, making it a fully fledged stand-alone entity rather than primarily a support framework for the CMS product as in the 2.X line.
- Refresh the CMS administrative interface with a more modern design and user experience, and a more technically solid javascript underpinning.
- Replace or improve developer APIs that have reached the limit of their expandability in their current form for backwards compatibility reasons, or are considered difficult to maintain.
With this Beta 1 release we have now completed the majority of this underlying refactoring. We now believe we have a feature complete and API stable platform to build from. Though not considered production-grade, there remains several known issues, and more are sure to be found through further testing. This release is now ready for developers (both of websites and modules) to begin integrating with their existing codebases.
Therefore we invite developers, community members and organisations currently using, or considering using, the SilverStripe platform to try out this release. In specific, we see this release as useful for people who would like to:
- Test upgrades of existing sites to the SilverStripe 3 system
- Upgrade existing modules to be compatible with SilverStripe 3, so that they can be released concurrently with SilverStripe 3.0 Stable
- Test and raise bugs, to help improve the quality of the final stable release
- Begin developing websites that have a scheduled release mid-this-year or later
- Just generally check out the changes in the CMS administrative interface
However, there are some things that you should be aware of when trying out this beta version.
- There are known issues of medium and higher severity remaining in the code base. This could include bugs that cause data loss, although we’re not aware of any. You should back up your assets & database before upgrade and regularly during use
- Although we have similar goals for eventual browser support in the SilverStripe 3.0 admin interface as we do in SilverStripe 2.4 (with the notable removal of IE6 support), there are currently known issues in older browsers that do not support newer HTML 5 features which affect both performance and general operation (details).
Because of these issues, we do not consider this beta release suitable for non-technical public use or developing websites that need to go live earlier than mid-this-year.
For a detailed list of all the features and changes in this release, please check the change log and our upgrading guide. For a list of known issues, or to raise new ones, you can view the current bug report on our trac.
We hope you enjoy working with this release, and look forward to community feedback. See you all at beta 2!
