Create a Portal the Easy Way

The best part of SilverStripe is its ease of use. While this CMS won't have

the range of plug-ins and extensions which come with the likes of Joomla and

Drupal, SilverStripe has all the basic features. For example, the intuitive

interface, which can help you create a professional looking portal easily. It is

well suited for the environments where content generators and content editors

are different or content needs to be updated on a daily basis.

Just like you would expect from a typical CMS, SilverStripe comes with

various extensions such as modules for external authentication, blog, calendar,

forum, Flickr, Google Map selection field, etc. It also supports widgets which

can be just dragged and dropped to the sidebar.

SilverStripe also has a strong access control where you can just specify

permission for the administrative part of SilverStripe that a user can have

access of. For instance, you can specify users who can view reports or only

upload files, etc. Unlike Joomla and other CMSes, it's administrative interface

is simple to use. Even a person who is not involved in web development can learn

to administer the SilverStripe portal easily.

Installation



For installing SilverStripe, you need PHP5, MySQL and a Web server.

SilverStripe is easy to install. Download its package from the above mentioned

URL. Once downloaded, unzip and upload it to your Web server. Open a browser and

point to the URL where you have uploaded SilverStripe.

This will launch the installation of SilverStripe. Here you will need to

provide MySQL credentials i.e database name, user and password. You would also

need to specify admin credentials including email, username and password. Click

on 'Install SilverStripe' button to start the installation. Also, you will need

to enable mod_rewrite on the Web server before you install. Once installed,

SilverStripe is very easy to use. Let's see how to customize it.

To create a new page and click on 'Create' button under site content and structure. New page will be displayed. Now specify its name, navigation label, content and publish the page.	Under Behavior, you can choose page type, location, etc. You can also specify whether comments should be allowed on the page, and whether the page should be shown in menu and search.

Under Edit, you can assign who can view and edit the page -anyone or only logged in users or only a specific group of people.	Under File and Images, you can upload pictures, video or any other files which you plan to use on the portal.

Under Security, you can create new groups and assign specific permissions to particular groups. You can specify which part of admin portal a particular group can have access of.	Under Comments, you can manage comments posted by the users on your website. You can modify, delete them or even mark as spam.

SilverStripe also allows you to apply to batch actions such as, publish, unpublish, delete, etc, on multiple pages at the same time.	Under Site Reports, you can view all the default reports such as to do, empty pages and the pages edited in last two weeks.