Giant Robot

Have been meaning to check out SilverStripe in more depth since the presentation at BCA a month or two back. It looks really good, but as with all new tools there's a lead time in getting familiar, and so you tend to stick to your familiar toolkit by default.

SilverStripe is the software (and company) behind the website of the Democratic National Convention 2008. That's no mean feat - read more here. They hosted a meetup at the Empire Tavern in Auckland last night, so I tagged along to see what it was all about.

My first blocker with trying out SilverStripe was hearing that it has its own templating engine. Hardly a major technical obstacle, but when coding and switching mode from one language to another, I'd rather not have to add some new dialect to that part of my brain.

My next big question, which I didn't remember to quiz Sigi on, is multi-site / shared codebase support. I see that it exists but I'm not sure the structure is as simple as (say) Drupal's directory search feature. (SS's method may be a little faster, at a glance. ??)

Sigurd and Geoff were there to answer questions - I'd met Sigi briefly at the mini Webstock '07 - but I spent most of the evening quizzing Mark Rickerby and Craig Boxall from PixelFusion. I explored how well SS might be placed to achieve a couple of more challenging projects on our radar, and got some really positive feedback.

All in all, well worth exploring; based on what I heard, we'll probably give it an evaluation on a smaller site, and see what this new kid on the CMS block has to offer. I'm looking forward to doing so.