SilverStripe Progress Report.

Just got a great email blast about my favorite client-usable CMS SilverStripe, and it is best described as “heart-warming.” The guys at SS have been working with Google to draft clever kids and make some great stuff in just two weeks. I’m not anything close to a developer, but I have a deep admiration for the kind of spirit behind an effort like this.

In the past six months, I’ve seen SS explode with awesome, and it now has a better UI than ever, a fancy Blog setup, and great modules for photo galleries, forums, and even eCommerce. If you want to deploy a super CMS that clients will love, I think SS is your best friend.

Okay, so I’ve only launched two sites with it, but I can still profess geeky fandom, right?

I want to log a few quick notes, though, for Googlers and potential installers:

• SS modules take up more system memory than you’d expect (they’re pretty powerful), so many installations with the big modules might return a memory_limit error. On some hosts, you can find your own php.ini and up the memory_limit, but on others (Dreamhost), you might just be out of luck.
• Due to SilverStripe’s root calls (I confess: I don’t know what that is), a few hosts will throw errors randomly. The big one I hit Hosting was a BigMath.php error inside the OpenID Authorization folder. To fix this, you can simply delete the openID_auth folder and rebuild the DB, and it should clear up ASAP
• To this day, I can’t figure out a good way to switch from the initial theme to the theme in my MySite directory. I have no idea why this is, but the only way I’ve figured out involved copying a _config.php file into the mysite directory and making some (relatively obvious) changes.

Hope that was of some help to someone (like it would’ve been to me a few weeks ago when I was Googling all those terms). Now: LOST TIME.

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