What a year it has been

For our last post of the year, we wanted to wish the SilverStripe community a very merry Christmas and restful holiday period.

This year we’ve achieved some huge milestones, most notable being the release of SilverStripe 4 and its early adoption from the community. The launch of our Government Edition product was also a big achievement as we push towards helping more governments start fast and stay fast.

Another incredible year for SilverStripe, all of which couldn't have been done without a thriving and engaged community, passionate partner network and amazing SilverStripe team. Thank you for being with us every step of the way this year.

Note— We’ll be out of office

SilverStripe's offices will be closed from 5pm 22 December 2017 until 9am 8 January 2018.

For our Platform and CWP clients, do not fear, we’ll still be maintaining your sites during this time with support for critical issues remaining handled on an oncall basis with the after hours support line staying available.

During this time however, the support desk will not be staffed, nor will the normal support phone be available to call. All non-critical requests should be raised as usual via the helpdesk and will be seen to as soon we as we are back in the New Year.

A retrospective for 2017

Let’s take a quick trip down SilverStripe lane and reflect on all the great things that happened in 2017.

The year kicked off with some new improvements to SilverStripe Platform’s dashboard, giving developers deeper insights into their deployments, and updates to the platform. We also released a fresh looking website for the Common Web Platform as well as two new themes for CWP agencies.

We continued our Agile series throughout 2017 with some interesting reads around the Agile project lifecycle and the common challenges of moving from Waterfall to Agile.

It's worth noting some of the great posts SilverStripe developers and designers wrote throughout the year including;

• Chris Pitt’s take on coding standards and why they’re so important for quality development

• James Ford’s entertaining reads on the topics of web design, and dark patterns

• Paul Clarke’s deep dive into Content Blocks and how we’re bringing in the module to make it commercially supported

• Nicolaas Francken’s blog on making SilverStripe modules more searchable

• Colin Tucker’s write up on making SilverStripe deployments simple

The SilverStripe team took their stance on some of the difficult but important issues facing our industry including, hiring for all stripes, diversity in tech, equality and unconscious biases, all issues we need to be aware of and talk about more.

We also pulled off the first StripeCon New Zealand event for developers in the hometown of the CMS, bringing the community together to learn about our SilverStripe 4 release and what’s in store for the CMS in the coming year. Staying with events, the European open source community successfully held the 4th StripeCon EU in the picturesque Malta.

From everyone here at SilverStripe, have a great Christmas and New Year! We’ll see you in 2018 for more exciting progress and updates.