Show your support by nominating SilverStripe CMS in PacktPub's annual software awards!

Your nomination will help us to secure our position as a finalist, which in turn allows us to secure money we can devote on furthering our open source project. Gaining a good position in the PacktPub awards also helps us to spread awareness of SilverStripe CMS, which fuels adoption and encourages growth in our developer community.

For the past four years, PacktPub have centered their awards on open source content management system software. This year the awards have been expanded to all open source software, with two categories remaining for content management systems. The appropriate category for SilverStripe CMS to be nominated for is 'Open Source CMS'.

In the past years we won 'Most Promising CMS' (2008) and placed second for 'Best Overall CMS' (2009).

Nominations close September 17: spread the word and help us to get a good number of nominations. Thanks!

You asked for it, you got it. SilverStripe has a new version of user help which is compatible with the current 2.4 version of the CMS.

It was a big job, but we had help from many of you! We put up a beta version of the user help document and asked for your feedback while we were writing it. So first off, we'd like to thank all the people who helped us make user help better: Fred Condo, Anita Graham, Nigel Vining, Stephen Metcalfe, Marcus Dalgren, and the users going by the names of Martijn, Mike, Sunnybex, Fil, and Stefdv.

As promised, we've shifted the focus away from features and take an approach we believe will be more useful to the content editor - explaining how to get things done in the SilverStripe CMS.

You can access the user help page at userhelp.silverstripe.org, and it's also accessible by pressing the "Help" button when you're in a 2.4 version of the CMS. For those using an earlier version, the old version of the help is located at 2.3.userhelp.silverstripe.org.

In addition to the basic functionality, the user help also covers blogs, content review/workflow, subsites, forms, and forums. We figured these were the modules most commonly used and we didn't want to clutter up the documentation with information beyond this.

Of course, the great thing about hosting SilverStripe's user help on a SilverStripe CMS-based site is that we can easily go back and edit the content if we think an update needs to be made in the future.

Once again, we want to thank everyone who helped us with this project, and hope you and your users find it useful.

One of our developers, Andreas Piening, has been working on creating a module to get SilverStripe to work with Oracle databases. And while there's key functionality that isn't working yet, we've been able to get a "Hello World" SilverStripe website on the 10g version of Oracle.

It's nowhere near ready to go into production, but we're looking for people who are interested in testing the module. If you're using Oracle, and are willing to take what we've done for a test drive and contribute feedback on this pre-alpha build, it would be appreciated.

Here's what's working:

• We can get the backend CMS running, and we can get the front-end website to display.
• We are able to change the content in the CMS
• We're able to build the database.

But here's where we're having problems:

• We haven't yet identified the best approach on how to support full text searching.
• Our test framework, which relies on creating a duplicate database to test on, separate from production, isn't working. Because Oracle doesn't create different databases (instead, it just creates different table spaces in the same database) it prohibits you from creating a table with the same name for the same user in the same database - making our normal testing procedure difficult to implement. We might be able to do it with a different user account, but we haven't tested this.
• Identifiers are limited to 30 characters, so if you have a table name with a many-to-many relationship with another data object, the table names are concatenated. That could easily go over 30 characters. We think we have this resolved, but it needs more testing.
• Oracle doesn't have auto-increment. We've had to solve this problem through sequences and triggers, but it's complicated and adds a lot of overhead - just to increment a number.
• Oracle has only one datatype for large amounts of characters. These values are stored in different files, so the columns cannot be used in group-by clauses. (Many group-by clauses do not care about the datatype, but Oracle does.) That's a show-stopper for many of the queries we usually use. We might be forced to rewrite our database logic to never use group by clauses on large fields.
• Right now, we've only got this tested with Oracle 10g. We have no idea if it will even run on Oracle 11g. 
• Then there are the dreaded "unknown unknowns" (as Donald Rumsfeld put it). We could have major problems that we just don't even know to test for yet.

We can't make any commitments on timeframe, availability, or if we'll even manage to complete it. But if you're interested, you can check it out, and discuss the module on the SilverStripe developer mailing list.

Yesterday we released an update to the SilverStripe CMS. As it fixes security vulnerabilities in our software, we recommend that production websites should upgrade to this version.

No API changes are generated in this release, so existing modules and websites should upgrade easily. Related to this release, we also issued a security update for the SilverStripe forum module.

• Changelog
• Download SilverStripe-v2.3.5.tar.gz
• Post bug reports as usual at open.silverstripe.com
• standard SilverStripe upgrade notes

On the topic of security, we recently updated developer documentation on security that we suggest SilverStripe developers read.

A free event for people interested in open source software will be held at the Wellington Town Hall this Saturday, 23 January. Running from 11am to 2pm, the open day is a rare opportunity to meet key people from around the world committed to the open source movement.

The day comprises exhibition booths showcasing open source software, a number of talks, and fun activities for kids as well as hardware and software hackers. The open day is the final event in the week-long Linux.Conf.Au conference, which has placed Wellington at the epicenter of the global open source movement. We hope to see you there - you'll find us at table number 15.

• Learn more from the LCA2010 website.

Every year Packt Publishing, a tech book publisher, runs a global award for the best open source CMS. In 2009, SilverStripe had its best result yet.

The Packt CMS Award is a major award: many thousands of people around the world rate their favourite CMS, before judges thoroughly evaluate the most popularly voted software. There is no more significant worldwide competition that rates open source or proprietary content management platforms, so we're very proud of our year-on-year progress:

• 2007: Finalist (Top 5) in 'Most Promising' (Products under 2 years old) category
• 2008: Winner of 'Most Promising' category (USD2000 prize)
• 2009: Finalist (Top 3) in 'Best Overall CMS', a highly competitive category (USD2000 prize)

Judges of the award announced WordPress as the 2009 winner, rating SilverStripe second, tied with Modx. Damian Carville, Marketing Manager at Packt Publishing, said SilverStripe received 17% of the 23,000 public votes. This number is significant when you consider that there were 5 finalists, and some finalists such as WordPress and DotNetNuke have significantly older and thus larger communities who can vote. To be a finalist, SilverStripe had to gain public support in the form of nominations, and beat out dozens of other nominated products.

We asked the judges to offer feedback on what they rated as the strengths of our software and what their overall view of our software was. We also asked, if they were in the position of managing our software, what they would focus on adding or improving. Bryan Ruby from CMS Report.com responded to our request in a public blog post, and said the following about SilverStripe:

I mentioned at the start of this review that you can't choose a CMS solely on the criteria but also on how well it meets your project requirements. For the CMS projects that I'm routinely involved with, SilverStripe would likely be my first choice of the five CMS finalists in this category. My placement of SilverStripe in the number three spot is likely more a reflection that both WordPress and DotNetNuke are more mature applications and SilverStripe is still needing some room to grow as a full featured application.

Although SilverStripe is one of the youngest open source projects among the finalists, the availability of relevant documentation on its website scored high with me. The SilverStripe community has done a great job in mixing text, videos, and graphics to provide quality documentation that can't be matched by many of the open source projects I visit on a regular basis. If you take a deeper look into SilverStripe, you'll also find that SilverStripe also scores well in ease of installation, customization, and usability.

The one area where I thought SilverStripe could improve was in the availability of themes and perhaps even the quantity of available modules. Again though, SilverStripe's project community is still relatively young and with time there should be no doubt we'll be seeing a continued increase of themes and modules made available for SilverStripe.

Ease of Installation	4
Ease of Use (Usability)	4
Documentation on project's website	5
Scalability (extension/plugins)	4
Availability of themes	3
Security measures	4
Performance	4
Ease of Customization	4
Total Points	31

We'd like to thank the judges for their time and Packt Publishing for running the awards. We're also grateful to Packt for the $2000 prize - this will be spent on furthering our open source software. Lastly, and importantly, we'd like to thank our user and developer community for voting for us!