In this guest post, a developer from Webbuilders Group, Ryan McLaren, discusses why you should upgrade your SilverStripe website to version 4.x.
Long Term Stability (LTS) commitment
SilverStripe 4 is actively improved by a community of dedicated global contributors adding new features and improvements every month.
SilverStripe has committed full support for the 4.x release line until late 2020, with security fixes through to the end of 2022. You can expect continuous improvement to your SilverStripe 4 project for years to come (as shown in the support timeline). This means new features, bug fixes, and security patches for the technology powering your website.
Richer and faster user experience
The CMS now uses a technology called ReactJS, developed by Facebook. It hasn't been woven into every aspect of the CMS, but will be an ongoing effort throughout the development of SilverStripe 4.x. The CMS is also now fully responsive meaning you can more easily use the CMS from your tablet or phone. Great for content authors on the go!
Enhanced versioning support
If you've used SilverStripe at all you should be familiar with the ability to draft and publish pages. SilverStripe 4.x has moved beyond pages with the concept of ownership and introduced the new Ownership API which allows for recursive publishing of dataobjects. This gives you more fine tuned control over what gets published. You can learn more about that here: SilverStripe 4.x ownership API.
Better filesystem abstraction
Remote filesystems like Amazon S3 are becoming increasing popular, especially for large organizations that need to store a lot of assets. SilverStripe 4.x out of the box has much better filesystem abstraction than previous versions meaning it is easier to program the capability of using assets in a remote filesystem.
Campaigns
The new Campaigns feature makes it easier for teams to work together and publish content. You can learn more about campaigns here: Campaigns in SilverStripe 4.
Content blocks
Content blocks are going to be a whole new way to manage content in the CMS. While there are already some content block modules available for SilverStripe 3, none received support from the SilverStripe team. SilverStripe 4.x will see the first content block module developed by SilverStripe. If you're interested in learning more about content blocks check out this blog post: don't reinvent the block.
Conclusion
SilverStripe 4.x is jam packed with great new features and the new CMS looks beautiful as well! We believe SilverStripe is the best CMS available, and version 4.0.0 and beyond are going to be even better! If you would like to try a SilverStripe 4 demo, you can get it here!
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Comments
The API docs for those classes are up to date? http://api.silverstripe.org/4/SilverStripe/AssetAdmin/Forms/UploadField.html
> 2. As for the new version I would expect some new extra functions for the site admins like easy full site search implementation (solr server for the small-sized project?! no, thanks) or automated thumbnails. I agree that under the hood there has been many changes, but where are benefits for the End-User like Site Admin? It feels a bit outdated from the functionality point of view.
There's a lot of good options for search out there now, e.g. Swiftype. They're not dependant on CMS functionality. And for built-in search, there's both the SearchContext API, and crafting your own SQL queries on FULLTEXT indexes.
> 3. Mobile Interface for the Admin still buggy.
Can you reference an issue on Github?
> 4. We have now all modules in the vendor folder - and by all, it means ALL modules - silverstripe, extra modules, custom built modules etc. I would prefer here somehow to split them into SS modules and any other modules... and in most cases vendor folder is in gitignore, which also doesn't help if you move sites across servers without running composer.
That's unfortunately not up to us, it's how composer is designed. You could ask the composer open source project to add the ability to view packages with their "type" in "composer info".
> 5. Auto-Update via Admin - in small and medium size projects I would prefer to update project via admin interface. Now if there is security update or similar, site admin can't update it without running composer or similar. Not all site admins are geeks :) And I'm also not so keen to do small updates to all clients each time when security update shows up :)
That's been a long-standing request, unfortunately it's not that easy - you'll at least need the ability to run composer on your server. I would encourage you to raise this on silverstripe.uservoice.com and get community support for the approach.
Posted by Ingo Schommer, 26/03/2018 10:48am (6 years ago)
The link below will connect you to the list of developers in France that use SilverStripe and are in our developer directory, so that would be a good first place to try :)
https://www.silverstripe.org/community/developer-and-partner-directory/?BrowseByCountry=france
Another place to ask though would probably be in the SilverStripe Community slack channels, as that is where a large number of SilverStripe developers congregate. There you may also find some developers/development companies using SilverStripe that are based in the North of France :)
https://www.silverstripe.org/community/slack-signup/
Posted by SilverStripe, 09/02/2018 9:42am (6 years ago)
looking for someone in North of France who knows SilverStripe to update and develop our website.
Thank you.
Bonjour,
recherchons qqn dans le nord de la France qui connaisse SilverStripe pour mise à jour et développement de notre site internet.
Merci.
Posted by Olivier Segard, 02/02/2018 6:20am (6 years ago)
Recently I tried to build a new small-size project on the SS4 and here are my notices:
1. Documentation and even API description hasn't been updated for the v.4, e.g. DropdownField or TreeDropdownField
2. As for the new version I would expect some new extra functions for the site admins like easy full site search implementation (solr server for the small-sized project?! no, thanks) or automated thumbnails. I agree that under the hood there has been many changes, but where are benefits for the End-User like Site Admin? It feels a bit outdated from the functionality point of view.
3. Mobile Interface for the Admin still buggy.
4. We have now all modules in the vendor folder - and by all, it means ALL modules - silverstripe, extra modules, custom built modules etc. I would prefer here somehow to split them into SS modules and any other modules... and in most cases vendor folder is in gitignore, which also doesn't help if you move sites across servers without running composer.
5. Auto-Update via Admin - in small and medium size projects I would prefer to update project via admin interface. Now if there is security update or similar, site admin can't update it without running composer or similar. Not all site admins are geeks :) And I'm also not so keen to do small updates to all clients each time when security update shows up :)
There are definitely more things to say. Sad but at the moment as SilverStripe Developer from ca. 2007 I'm thinking to switch to CraftCMS.
Posted by Mindaugas, 30/01/2018 9:19am (6 years ago)
Posted by Big Data Training Institute Chennai , 24/01/2018 8:13pm (6 years ago)
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