Make it happen

So after knowing the team at Silverstripe for years and thinking for the same amount of time that I should try out their CMS, I am right now giving up my Saturday to do just that. It suddenly occurred to me that I should blog about it while I do it. Please remember that this is not so much a review as my log of my first encounter, I may well be an idiot (but if that be true, I could hardly figure it out for myself now could I), and by the time you read this, there could be a new version of Silverstripe. I am using 2.01.

I am going to rebuild the Spikefin website. Currently it has no CMS although in truth that is no big deal when you are both the developer and maintainer of a site. Something I expect to change over time as I have been the maintainer of the Spikefin site in name only (the “mechanic’s car” syndrome).

First, lets start with the reasons I have taken so long to give it a go:

1. It’s written using PHP, I don’t know PHP, and PHP is a recursive anagram which makes me think there will be other things about it designed simply to confuse me so that other people can laugh at me.
2. When I first found out about Silverstripe I honestly thought they were a little crazy for trying to build a world class CMS when there are so many others already. Also I didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for using it (even though they offered it to me free multiple times when we shared office space at Creative HQ, I didn’t want to be that annoying “customer” that doesn’t pay properly or at all but still expects top service).
3. I really have been wanting a Java based CMS or some mythical perfect mix of Java and Flash that was custom built for me. Its been a case of not really knowing what I want but wanting something nonetheless, so ending up with nothing.

So why give it a go now?

1. Because it is now open source. To me this signals a coming of age. It is a brave thing to open up your code to criticism from a very critical community.
2. Because Spikefin really needs a new website and I don’t want to be the sole person maintaining it, so might as well use something that nobody at Spikefin knows so that we are all on equal footing when it comes to making a change.
3. Because I am very interested in what other local companies are achieving and would like to whole heartedly support them. Also, I regularly refer people their way and need to validate that the product is any good if I am going to keep doing so

Ok lets get moving.

INSTALLATION

First I downloaded the php-based installer and ran it on a linux server. I was highly impressed when it told me exactly what things were not up to scratch on that machine, namely I need to upgrade PHP and MySQL and allocate more RAM to PHP. These things are not an option right now on that box, so…

Second I downloaded the Windows installer and ran it on my XP laptop. All sweet (of course, I hear you say, but I am always wary of anything that installs servers, dbs and uses ports, presuming that I will end up spending hours scratching my head). I now have a default site accessible at http://localhost:3000/home/. My first question is whether I have to have that “home” bit there for the homepage? I’ll see about that later.

NOW LETS START USING IT

Log in using defaults. Not asked to change them, easy enough to do under Security. Tried to set up a name for my site and basic settings (whatever they might be) like that, can’t find where to do that though.

Everything looks very nice. The fading tooltip in the bottom right looks nice too, but it is a disparate rollover to which I am fundamentally opposed - good for status messages but bad for tooltips.

Went looking for presentation related settings. I guess I was expecting to find some sort of theme chooser. Clicked through the help docs but they don’t mention any presentation related topics in there. Found *a* theme on the silverstripe website and installed it. Having made no content changes the layout was screwy for the example homepage so I uninstalled it again for now.

Ok now following tutorial 1. Pretty much what I’ve done so far. Install the theme provided there. Looks the same as the default?

So I get that Page.ss is the template file. I’d like to have been recommended something to edit/view it with already and told how to configure that something so that I get code colouring. Presume ss stands for silverstripe. I thought it was stylesheet to begin with. I’ve chosen Notepad++ to edit the file for now. Added ss to the User Extensions for HTML under the Settings -> Styler Configurator and reopened the file. Colourful.

Making progress. Good tutorial btw. However, I have a problem. The home page has disappeared from the live site. I’ve made a few more pages and published everything, and visited with ?flush=1 to clear the template cache, but the Products page is behaving like the home page, actually it just seems like the navigation is screwed in general. AHA! I refreshed the whole admin page and found that actually the home page has become a child of the products page and some other page is a child of that in there. No wonder I was confused. How did that happen? Several pages now show as unpublished. Bit more drag and drop and now its ok. Is there no way to publish everything at once?

Getting my priorities straight, I am trying to make a page called Fish Fun where I want to put the Spikefin Slalom Game for now. Have put my swf in the assets folder and clicked the flash icon on the toolbar in the CMS. I’m told to choose a folder from a dropdown box but there’s nothing in the box to choose from. Stuck. Ok sorted for now, have just found the html button and put the flash object tag in there myself and that seems to have worked fine. Onward with the tutorial. New templates…

Having real trouble getting it to use my new template for the home page. Seems simple enough but it just isn’t changing. I’ve flushed the cache. I’ve triple checked my settings and the filenames. Stuck. Ok sorted now, it seems that I need to run the db build each time I add or remove .ss files (not just ?flush=1) which I didn’t gather from the tutorial, I thought it was just php code pages.

Tutorial 1 now complete. Time for a coffee.

Ok Tutorial 2 has gone without a hitch. Great news. Makes me think my father could be using this himself to build his new Mayfield Audio site that he’s been wanting for years… Looking forward to the blog plugin though. It seems a little silly to create a page for each news entry.

Tutorial 3 has been going well, except that I ticked “Email form on submit” which has given a bunch of problems. Guess I’ll leave that for now. Definitely want a contact form to be sending messages through as email though. Racing a bit now. Skipping the poll creation, looks pretty cool though.

Tutorial 4. Site Search.

There we go. I now have the basics of a new Spikefin website. Better write some content!

Conclusions thus far:

1. Silverstripe is very good.