SilverStripe.org - Updates to the community showcase

When we relaunched silverstripe.org last month we introduced a new featured showcase section. However, we weren't quite happy with the showcase archive section so we rolled out the new site without it with the intention to carry on the work and get this out in the next release to ensure it was really useful to highlight the communities great work.

Today I'd like to announce that we've released the full showcase archive section and a few extras to improve this area of the new silverstripe.org website.

Return of the showcases

This section under the featured showcases now displays all the showcases submitted by the community.

Filtering

You can filter by a new category and attribute such as most recent, featured, or most popular (based on up votes).

New 'Sector' category

For those of you that regularly submit showcases, we have added a new 'Sector' category tag you can add to your work to let people know the type of work you have done. Note you can also go back and add tags to any of your past showcase listings.

Vote em' up

While this feature was part of the initial silverstripe.org release I'd like to reiterate that if you have a SilverStripe account and really appreciate a piece of work submitted by the community you can go vote it up. We take these into account when picking the monthly featured showcases.

Featured showcases

We've slightly altered the featured showcases based on community feedback (which you can provide to us anytime using the feedback tab on the website) to be able to cycle through a carousel of the latest selected items. We also added a quick link through to visit the featured website and the ability to vote the item up right on the featured item in the carousel. 

What is a featured showcase?

The idea behind the featured showcases is to highlight really great work submitted by the community and to help others in the community learn a bit about how the website was approached and built.

If you provide a case study along with your showcase submission, some good looking screenshots and look to promote it a bit on your own social media channels to get voted up with, this is all taken into consideration when looking to select new monthly featured showcases. 

For a good example of the type of case study approach likely to get selected for a featured showcase check out a few of the currently featured showcases. 

• Mindfully SIlverStripe
• Waikato District Health Board
• Silverstripe provides comfort and support to Formthotics

Ideally we are looking for SilverStripe projects that push boundaries of what can be done with SilverStripe and have a little something special that we would like to share with the world. Going forward, monthly featured showcases will be promoted through the SilverStripe blog, twitter and facebook so it's an excellent way to get some exposure of your work if you put in the time to write up a case study.

We'll be selecting a few more showcases for the featured section this month so if you are intending on looking to go update your showcase listings with the new 'sector' tag, you might like to take the time to upload some new screenshots or write up a bit more information about your work.