Implementing SiverStripe Fully

Ok this is week 2 for milestone 2 and my group has been working on our CMS' and following a skeletal mockup. What I said last week was that now, for milestone 2, we need to have certain things working perfectly within our CMS'. E.G. - CAS Login through UH and Admin and Student home pages. But SilverStripe again is giving me problems and I have to change certain things within the code.

I found a module called External Authentication which can use an outside source to login. It uses authenticate against an LDAP server, Active Directory, a mail server, or some other external source. Now it is not as easy as some other CMS that just works right away, so I have to look more into depth on how to work this login process.

Just looking for this information is taking a lot of time just to get it working. I think this is because SilverStripe has not expanded that far and fast yet so there is not much modules that can just plugin and have it working.

I am still having fun working with SilverStripe though, and learning things that I did not know. Maybe all these things that I have to look up in order for it to work will benefit me in the future because then I would know how to fix it.

Work for MileStone 2

Alright, we just finished talking with our professor and what we are working for MileStone 2 is to actually get our CMS' working. We have to get the CAS login working, user/admin pages working perfectly, and have the layout of the page working. OH MY.... I am glad to have gotten my CMS working how it should be but what wasted my time was that tinyMCE. And what I had to do to get rid of this was to change the code within SilverStripe, which can be found here. Other problems I found was if I wanted to change themes the transfer would mess up the code and then I would have to go in the code again to make everything work again. I believe this is a really big disadvantage for Silverstripe because compared to my group's CMS' they did not have to do what I had to do.

Milestone 1

So far my group has worked on our chosen CMS': dotCMS, SilverStripe, Joomla, and Drupal. My CMS, SilverStripe has given me a lot of grief. The main things that we looked for in our CMS' is the implementation of google gadgets, charts, forums, CAS login. At first SilverStripe did not allow any javascript code to be entered in its html editor. There was no documentation on this anywhere in the SilverStripe website. I thought I was going to be the first one to drop the CMS. But as I heard from Joel that SilverStripe looks a lot like Joomla and that Joomla kind of had the same problem and he had to change a setting within it, I kept looking for a solution. AND I FOUND IT. tinyMCE is the html editor that SilverStripe uses, and it comments out certain code when entered. Now it was not as easy as Joomla where all you had to do was change a setting. I had to change code within the CMS just to have it work. So now I was able to catch up to my groups standing with their CMS'.







I was able to implement all the main things that we needed for our project. However, I am still playing catchup with the layout of the site, but I am glad to have gotten it working.

Milestone 1 for our group was to be able to get the CMS' to kind of do what we want the website to look like. And we have all completed/gotten through this milestone, but with some problems. My problems as of right now is the layout and the implementation of the CAS system.

For Milestone 2, I believe we are going to narrow down the CMS' we are working with to at least 2 and come closer to choosing a final CMS to work with.

SilverStripe Learning

Alright!!! now so far our group has researched the four different CMS' that we chose, dotCMS, Drupal, Joomla, and SilverStripe. And so far, it looks that all four of the CMS' can do what we want them to do. At first we were following the mockup that was shown like this.



But as each of us tried to work with our CMS, it was difficult to make it that way. So we all agreed to "try and make it the way the CMS wants to make it". And so we set off to make what we can.

The difficult thing I had with SilverStripe was getting the thing to work. And that wasted a lot of time. But do not get me wrong, SilverStripe is very easy to use and download and get running if you already do not have another server running on your computer. I had Apache and the one that downloaded with SilverStripe. So if you do not have a server application already, then the SilverStripe download will be super easy.

But during that time of frustration, I researched first for the things that SilverStripe can do. And I found that it might be a problem with google gadgets, which is one of the biggest things that is needed for our project. So far there is nothing in the documentation and online that says google gadget can be easily used.

This is a big problem for the project, so as far as I can see right now, SilverStripe is something that we might not use. But that is not final yet, because I have gotten SilverStripe working correctly on my machine and I will see if google gadgets will be a problem yet or not. So wait for next week on my new post and see if SilverStripe will still be used.

CMS Researching

Our team, Kukui Cup Tech 1 was tasked to research different types of CMS for our project. The CMS' we looked at was Anahita, dotCMS, Drupal, Elgg, Joomla!, MODx, Ning, Pligg, SilverStripe, and Wordpress. These CMS' are platforms that help create a website, and what we are looking for is a platform that can be easily created and accommodate the things that is needed for the website, which is Google Gadgets, forums, and charts.



By looking at the above picture, we compared all of the CMS' based on the listed criteria. What we came down to was the 4 green highlighted CMS'. Each of us will take on one of these four and present them to our teacher of what the CMS can do and what it can support.

The CMS that I am working on is SilverStripe. It is a very nice looking platform and from the looks of it very easy to use. I am excited to work with this platform, and next week I will show you what I have learned.