In my never ending search for the best CMS for me and my clients, I’ve been recently raving about SilverStripe. It’s great, but it’s a little heavy-handed, and some features flat out don’t work.
Tonight I tried out MODx CMS. So far, so good. A very similar interface to SilverStripe, with a lot lighter CPU load and smarter caching… and the file manager actually works in MODx — a complaint I have with SilverStripe. Unfortunately I’m not seeing the same MVC style framework in MODx as I would’ve liked, but there is still an extensible framework present to extend functionality.
Some day when I find the time I’ll play with it a little more.
In the mass of trying out this and that CMS for blogging and content publishing, I settled on SilverStripe. Overall, I’m sorta pleased with it.
I’m very picky about permalinks, SilverStripe has a completely customizable permalink structure which I’m very happy about. The drag-and-drop menu reorganization was really friendly and made it easy to manage a large menu hierarchy. The CMS is also very manageable and infinitely extensible.
SilverStripe ships with it’s own MVC framework which runs the CMS called Sapphire. What this means for me is that when I feel like extending the base functionality, I can do so with concepts ingrained into me from Rails. Very cool! Then I can choose to release my code back to the community as a module.
Of course, there are some features that are, in my opinion, are totally broken and not value-add functions.
The file upload manager is completely unusable. Sometimes it will upload, other times it will stop uploading completely, or even fail to start entirely. The image cropping and resizing tool is a useless feature and it makes images look terrible with every recursive edit. To me, a simple file upload interface would suffice. Something Flickr-like would be nice, but I think what SilverStripe currently has implemented is overcomplicated and completely defeats the purpose of even being in the feature set.
Other than my gripe with file and image management, SilverStripe is quite a nice start. It was a pleasure to get it up and running on my server and it has the advanced features I require. Even with the borked file management, I give SilverStripe 3 out of 5 stars for trying a new approach.
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