Air New Zealand has chosen to migrate their main website to the SilverStripe content management system. This is pretty massive news for Xebidy, as in manys ways for me it vindicates our decision to use the SilverStripe content management server for all our development.
We chose SilverStripe as our development platform because in the early days when we were looking at what to develop on we wanted object oriented architecture, we wanted something that we thought we would not outgrow and we wanted something Open Source. When I came from TravelFAT I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was go down the Microsoft route. We also loved the fact that this was software that was originating out of New Zealand (Wellington unfortunately – only joking). SilverStripe was also at the time just selected for the Google Summer of Code, which we believed would give the project a massive technology boost plus international support from the open source community.
Our decision was perfect and right from the word go we have been rapt with the SilverStripe system. In many ways it is more than simply an excellent content management server it is also a development platform for the guys and we have developed web applications such as Travel Generation and Ididit on SilverStripe, without the actual content management aspect.
Xebidy has made one significant change to the SilverStripe CMS that we promote for our clients – the addition of the Bootstrap drag and drop interface. Initially I had some pretty firm ideas about what I thought a modern content management server should actually do; the main being that you should not be completely restricted in the way you build up pages. By this I mean that in my opinion most content management systems have too many restrictions that one part of a page must be an image, another a set of text. There is no flexibility to change that. We added the functionality to simply drag and drop any content anywhere on the page and then use CSS to strictly control how the website looks. Mat Weir’s CSS skills have been invaluable for our clients in this regard.
We really want to release the Bootstrap interface open source also and have recently completed an overhaul to make it as a module and have submitted the necessary patches – so hopefully it is not too far off. We welcome anyone that wants to help.
SilverStripe as a piece of software continues to develop in leaps and bounds and being open source, Xebidy and our clients continue to reap the benefits. We also try to be active in the community with Michael Gall one of our main developers doing a massive amount of work on the translations functionality.
When big companies such as Air New Zealand, AJ Hackett and Adventure Tours, and the 2008 Democratic National Convention in the US chosing SilverStripe then it can only mean great things for everyone.
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Hey Daniel, looking forward to your bootstrap UI – Michael gave me a brief presentation a while back, looked very slick!
It will also be an interesting usecase on deep interface customization in the CMS, something we’d like to see more of, but need feedback to identify and stabilize external APIs and extension points first.
Thanks again for sponsoring the first part of the Translatable refactoring, it really helped to get things going (and release some of this work with 2.3.2)