SilverStripe 2.2.0-rc1: Redesigned interface and an avalanche of new features

Posted by Sigurd on 13 November 2007

We're about to lift the world's expectations about building and managing websites even further.

It wasn't many months since we celebrated Google agreeing to pay ten programmers to add ambitious new features to SilverStripe. Today this work has culminated with the first release candidate of SilverStripe 2.2.0, available for the community so we can work towards a stable version which we aim to have out within a month.

• Download silverstripe-2.2.0rc1.tar.gz (2MB)
• Submit bugs you find. Register to our issue tracker then add your bug report.
• Upgrade instructions

Over the following month our aim is to produce the stable version, upgrade demo.silverstripe.com and produce an in-depth tour of the new features. Here's an overview to satisify your curiosity in the interim:

Redesigned interface and workflow

A team effort led by Elijah Lofgren, Sean Harvey and Will Rossiter added hundreds of usability improvements, judiciously removed clutter from the interface, and reduced the steps to perform common tasks. The result: more fun and productivity for the content editor!

Multiple language support

Thanks to Bernat Foj Capell, Ingo Schommer and a number of translators who tested our web-based translation system, the SilverStripe interface has been translated from English into French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Catalan, Croatian, Dutch and Polish.

We'd love you to translate SilverStripe into another language for us.

SilverStripe also now allows you to have multiple copies of any webpage to allow for multiple languages.

Online image editing. Impulsively upload files.

It's always been easy to insert and resize images to put them in to SilverStripe pages, especially since it automatically resamples your images ensuring they're small in filesize and download time. The competition is still to catch up on this, but now we've raised the bar considerably further:

• Select multiple files and upload in one step
• Crop, resize, and rotate images
• Add new folders to keep images organised
• ... all without moving away from the page you are editing.

Mateusz certainly gets to Pass Go and Collect $200 for the months of work enhancing these fundamental features of SilverStripe!

• See image upload and editing demo. 

Improved rank in Google

Every SilverStripe website now sports a special file, sitemaps.xml, that ensures Google knows about all of the pages on your site. SilverStripe also informs Google whenever you publish a new page to encourage immediate inclusion.

These features are thanks to Will Scott, who will also shortly be releasing modules Google Adwords and Analytics modules.

Reporting Engine

Quin Hoxie built a graphical reporting system that lets developers produce stunning bar and pie reports for websites built using SilverStripe. SilverStripe 2.2.0 will contain a few reports out of the box, and look forward to futher reports in subsequent months.

Webwide single signon via OpenID

Sick of maintaining a hundred seperate accounts on various websites that you use? Waste time resetting passwords to a system you've not used recently. Worried that you use the same password on a bunch of different sites.

So are we, and OpenID is the answer.

You can now use OpenID to give you a webwide single signon to the CMS, and to the forum, thanks to Markus Lanthaler.

Newsletter module enhancements

The newsletter module got lots of love from Elijah. It's now even quicker to setup, is more intuitive to use, features more reports, allows you resend old newsletters, and handle bounces better.

Developer tools

The geek in you will love the hundreds of new features and bug fixes to the underlying framework underneath SilverStripe. Details are in the changelog!