I’ve known about Silverstripe for a while but haven’t had much of a chance to try it. For past projects I’ve opted for JojoCMS instead, because I know one of the lead developers personally and the way Jojo works makes sense to me (little details like being able to set up my database structure by creating a DB table first and building the admin from that - it’s the other way round in Silverstripe)
However, I recently gained various motivations to try Silverstripe out.
So I started by grabbing the latest version (2.2.2) and a stash of modules of their download page (Gallery, Blog, Flickr and a few others).
The initial setup was very fast and easy, I was up and going in 1 minute.
However when I started looking at the blog module I hit some trouble - given I’m thinking of moving my blog into Silverstripe and using it to build a personal portfolio site - this wasn’t a good sign.
After a couple of reinstalls, lots of trail and error, and some much appreciated help from Hamish Campbell (all.or.nothing.net.nz), I managed to trace the bug to an issue with the BB Code parsing library being broken by the PEAR library which it was originally based on. It’s an issue thats been found by others before, but hasn’t been narrowed down since it depends on the environment and gives no error message.
Now - 2 days and a fair amount of hacking later - I’ve reduced my fix to a couple of lines and submitted a patch to Silverstripe.
And I haven’t even started writing my own code yet!