Hi
I am the lead developer from Hive.net.au a certified Silver Stripe Partner (Thought I would get the disclosure done first, I am not a sales person). We spent months deciding on a CMS solution to provide to our clients, which at the end we came out with Silver Stripe. We had two main drivers that had to be meet.
- The 1st was our most important - End User ease of use.
- The 2nd was a need for rapid development to help create better efficiencies and margins for our business
I will explain why we picked Silver Stripe over other leading CMS solutions.
After spending much time with each application we found that the framework, “Sapphire”, which the Silver Stripe CMS is built on, was extremely powerful, allowing you to extend the CMS to your will in a short amount of time. The PHP is OO (available from PHP5) which makes our life even easier, although for people use to classic PHP it’s a little bit of learning curve if you have not used a OO language before. These two factors can allow you to build a simple and small managed website right through to a full on web application. The flexibility is amazing.
With many features out of the box and in add-on modules from the community there is much you can do without much programming. To allow for a simple end user experience Silver Stripe keeps the configuration and customisation at the programming level (although very easy with sapphire) and leaves just the simplified CMS editing features which through customisation can do some very sophisticated things. The reason for this is to allow the end user just to edit content and not have to be confront with an array of configuration and add-ons that they have no idea about and can become overwhelming.
The level of sophistication you can produce from silver stripe is amazing especially once you first use it seems very simple, this is the reason it is fast becoming a choice for many organisations as an enterprise CMS. Some examples include,
http://www.demconvention.com http://thelowdown.co.nz http://californiawomen.org
The power of the programming architecture and light use of resources can be proven through the use of Silver Stripe on the
http://www.demconvention.com serving over 2.6Billion hits by 3.2million visitors in just one week.
http://silverstripe.com/2008-democratic-national-convention/
They are just some of the reasons we chose to base our business on just one CMS. As for your particular requests I have made the following comments to how Silver Stripe CMS can perform what you want.
Modularity, being able to reuse snippets of code, PHP/HTML prefferd
As Silver Stripe is based on Sapphire Framework which is PHP OO based is very easy to do this through classes and objects.
User-System, we have several different types of users who have access to different types of resources/information and so a role or level based user system with a login and registration is required
The current version of Silver Stripe allows for support for setting granular security permissions on pages. Users can be a member of one or more groups, and groups can be configured to have various system rights, and various view and edit permissions to a page by page basis. This provides a great deal of flexibility. The next release of Silver Stripe 2.4 (Currently in alpha) will allow for even more flexibility through user roles.
We also are planning to implement a system that changes the information on a page and navigation based on what industry a viewer selects
Like mentioned earlier Silver Stripe is based on the Sapphire framework and one of it features is being able to extend classes with ease, you could easily extend feature to archive what you are after by setting up a page type, look through the Silver Stripe tutorials. (or buy the official Silver Stripe Book)
Form creation/validation - we want to be able to create forms easily with custom validation if necessary
Silver Stripe has a module called UserForms this allows for the generation of complex forms including validation through the CMS it self, or if you require an even more complex form you can use sapphire to develop a form with validation. Validation is performed with JQuery so client side out of the box, great stuff.
Workflow - this is key, our department has several different content people and developers as well, but we also need to have our manager or ceo give the final go ahead to release a new update to live
The Current Workflow module for Silver Stripe allows you to achieve this with our much effort, however there is a new version of the Workflow module which has even more features to make the management of a workflow even easier.
Through the use of Silver Stripe I have become very passionate, because I strongly believe that this piece of software can do wonders for an organisation, the feedback we get from customers when we develop a Silver Stripe based site is always great, especially if they have come from another CMS, content editors cannot believe how easy we can make doing their job.
Well I hope this information has help it is by no means a sales pitch, I am just very passionate about Silver Stripe because I have seen it do amazing things. If you do decide on a Silver Stripe implementation and need assistance with it, we can help (it’s what we do) please email me if you need further assistance.
Cheers
Adam
P.S. If you do decide to go ahead with Silver Stripe I also recommend purchasing the Silver Stripe book (from Amazon), it covers everything I mentioned above in depth and simple to understand language.
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