SilverStripe - a newcomer in the Open Source CMS market
Flexibility and usability in an Open Source CMS seem unreachable, but it is not. On February 3th SilverStripe Open Source CMS was launched by the SilverStripe, which is a company based in New Zealand.
Over the years we saw lots of Open Source CMS projects start up and then disappear or merge into other projects. It was different with SilverStripe. SilverStripe is a mature product in the proprietary CMS market that became Open Source. Focused on flexibility and usability, the product managed to find an uncovered demand within a crowded Open Source CMS market.
We will try to give you a very general overview of SilverStripe CMS. We will come back with a more detailed analyse of the SilverStripe later this year.
User experience
The user interface the most sexy and attractive we ever seen in an Open Source CMS before. All functions are made in Ajax which makes the administration smooth and comfortable for a trained editor, while a untrained editor will find the structure hard to understand.
Some functionalities like inserting images to an article can be extremely bandwidth consuming, since the system downloads a thumbnail of each available images in the selected folder.
Overall the user experience was nothing less then fantastic.
Forecast and predictions
Even though the user interface is exceptional, SilverStripe will still have to work hard to catch up the competitors. Especially when it comes to build a solid community and extend the CMS core with advanced CMS functionalities. As most Open Source CMS projects, SilverStripe suffer from a lack of documentation. This can be a significant road block for them to establish the critic mass of community members.
We believe that SilverStripe can take a significant share of the Open Source CMS market due to their focus on flexibility and usability, but for now they did not reach the enterprise level yet.
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