So I’m really liking SilverStripe so far. The only things missing that are totally driving me up the wall:
1. Built in search feature.
Their tutorial on adding a search feature didn’t work so well on a site with two blogs and a dozen or so other pages. I’ll have to tackle this one soon though.
2. Uniform set of tools.
Building a page has a neat set of tools for formatting, adding links to other sites, pages, files, etc., adding images, etc. On the flip side, adding a blog entry uses a very limited subset of "BBCode" where you have to use square-bracket wrappers around your text like:[u]this is underlined[/u]
which is a serious pain in the neck, especially when you want to link to another blog article or page on the site, since you don’t get to use the fancy link injector.
3. Built-in hooks for Captcha
Sure, the built-in hooks for Akismet are pretty slick and work *very* well, but it’s not bulletproof. Granted, neither are captchas, since some spam engines can read captcha graphics now, but together you’d block a whole lot more spam.
4. An option to force all comments to be moderated by default.
Someone wrote up some instructions on how to hack the software to do this but I haven’t tried it yet to see whether it’s effective or not.
5. Sorting mechanism within the software for blog entries.
Currently, you can only view entries in the reverse order you add them. That is, the oldest things you add are at the top of the list, newer items and things you create ‘right now’ end up at the bottom of the list — which is annoying when you have a few hundred articles to scroll through just to get to the new entry. Why don’t new articles appear at the top, or give me the means to sort it how I want to access my articles within the software?
6. A ‘quote’ style for blockquote that actually works.
Granted, on a whole, SilverStripe is still kind of new (a year or so old?) and can’t be 100% of what *I* need since what I need is different from what you need, and it’s merely meant to be a framework for building upon. And heaven knows it’s not that I’m lazy, I’m just annoyed that some things that are ‘second nature’ to so many other CMS engines aren’t present yet, and SilverStripe is already in a v2.2.x branch. Some great features that SilverStripe DOES have, like the AJAX editor, the ‘tree’ mechanism for articles and pages, the tool for adding links to pages (that I wish was part of the blog entry mechanism), and built-in reporting tools.
Recent Comments