Silverstripe

Isn't life funny, I have been working on what I am going to teach in my year 13 web design class this year. With the webmeets that I have been going to a number of the presenters talking about using Content Management Systems to design the work for the site for their clients. So I have been looking at a number of products. However there was a high school google summer of code compeition that has been happening over the summer. they have been using silverstripe as the product to be developed.

So why not get the year 13 students to create a website using Silverstripe. There are tutorials available and it seems to be what they are interested in, in that way I mean that they used templates off other websites last year, why not let them use the CMS.

So doing some research I have managed to get myself into some PD on Monday for this as there is a meetup for this on Monday. Things just seem to fall into place.

The description of the event is here

*** Main topic ***
Topic: Silverstripe and Google Highschool Contest
Speaker: Sigurd Magnusson

The Talk:
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Introduction to the SilverStripe web platform, and how Google helped over 200 complex tasks get done by highschoolers worldwide.

SilverStripe is a Wellington-born but now globally used open source platform for building vibrant websites and rich web-applications. It is heavily focused on usability (the out-of-the box content management and administration interface strives to be the most efficient system to manage a website), and a fantastic environment for coders; a truely PHP5 object-oriented framework that shall limit programmers mutinying to Ruby on Rails.

Get an insightful overview of the SilverStripe platform, and also breaking news on the Google Highly Open Particaption contest, which saw over 60 individuals from around the world work on 200 tasks covering QA, coding, theme creating, translation, movie making and other highly supporting activities to the project.

You can learn more about SilverStripe at http://www.silverstripe.com/

About Sigurd:
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Sigurd Magnusson is the community manager and a usability evangelist for SilverStripe, a modern open source web platform. In 2007 the SilverStripe project commissioned a usability study, and through the generous support of Google?s Summer of Code, several hundred enhancements were added in the space of months.

Sigurd has been living and breathing the internet since 1995 when the City Council of Wellington, New Zealand provided the region's only internet service; then entirely text-based and only 2400 baud. Add a grandma who taught him C before he got to high school, and the rest all makes sense.

Sigurd would like to see webapps compete with Apple products for usability supremacy. Having helped build a few hundred websites over the past decade, he now focuses on supporting the developer community around SilverStripe, a modern open source web platform he co-founded. He makes a point of using the finished project every day to continuously feed the developer community with a stream of usability enhancement ideas.

Aside from his beautiful partner and daughter, Siggy loves adventure: snowboarding, turning up in a foreign city, reading books in the sun, and being dared into dancing Salsa at annual street carnivals.

So this is on Monday 4th February at Natcoll in Auckland, at 7pm