Community member Cam Findlay will present some of the outcomes from his last community talk & brainstorm session back in 2012, around how we can build bridges between the different levels of participation in the wider SilverStripe Developer Community. Following on from this, Cam will present a case study about how SilverStripe CMS was used to successfully overhaul eboss.co.nz - one of New Zealand's largest online architectural specification websites. Link to the eboss.co.nz case study video vimeo.com/60962401

2. Participating in the SilverStripe
Developer Community
Brainstorm Outcomes

3. Communities of Practice
“…groups of people who share a passion for something
they know how to do and who interact regularly to
learn how to do it better”
.

4. www.vimeo.com/silverstripe
Lots of useful knowledge and
SilverStripe goodies… all the meetup
talks are here!

5. Levels of Participation
Peripheral
Active
Core
Group

7. Building Bridges to Core
• Clear guidelines for core contribution, more
concise, more visible.
• Buddy system/mentors – XP/Pairing?
• Advanced Workshops.
• Employment opportunities for core contributors
or on-call experts.
• Hack-a-thons.
• Community questions passed to experts, problem
solved and make public.
• Provide examples of high quality commits.

8. Building Bridges to Actives
• Clearer way to raise bugs - Now on Github!
• Documentation
– Standards for contributing documentation
– quality tutorials on a wider range of topics
– links from 3rd party tutorials to documentation/api
• Support the newcomers.
• Intermediate workshops.
• Meetups (come speak at the next meetup)
• Forums (currently have this, perhaps it could be
structured better?)

9. Building Bridges to Newcomers.
• Offer SilverStripe introduction workshops.
• Social media promotion, target distinct groups and
promoted capabilities of SilverStripe CMS.
• Promote at technical institutes, perhaps provide guest
speakers from SilverStripe?
• Case studies – what can you do with SilverStripe
CMS?
• Ease of installation - Composer!
• Create connections with other communities that have
something in common or a need for a good CMS.

10. Come speak at the next meet up!
Share your knowledge.
Come and have a chat with Sam or
myself during beer time… 

11. Case study

12. Overhauling websites with
SilverStripe CMS
Like A BOSS!

13. Overhauling websites with
SilverStripe CMS
Like EBOSS
www.eboss.co.nz

14. Goals
• Remove technical debt.
• Consolidate the 2 sites and branding.
• Give architects quick and easy access to
technical information and files.
• Future proof technology to grow the business.
• Lead by example and add value to industry.

17. Approach
• SilverStripe 3.
• Bootstrap CSS Framework.
• Small team of distributed developers.
• Agile Scrum/Lean approach.
• Combination of open-source modules and
custom code.
• Contributed back new modules as outcome of
the project.

18. Modules
• silverstripe/silverstripe-blog
• unclecheese/silverstripe-bootstrap-forms
• micsck/silverstripe-excludechildren
• icecaster/silverstripe-largeblog*
• icecaster/silverstripe-versioned-gridfield*
• cam-findlay/wordpressimport-redux*
(complete rewrite for SS3 by ‘tractorcow’ - Damian Mooyman)

22. Dealing with lots of SiteTree child
pages in the CMS.

23. ExcludeChildren Module

24. How we migrated EBOSS’s content
1. Migrated 2500+ Wordpress articles using
Wordpress-Redux module into the Blog module.
2. The site tree doesn’t like this…
3. Implement ExcludeChildren (hide BlogEntry)
4. Install VersionedGridField module.
5. Automagically adds action buttons to any
Versioned models managed through
ModelAdmin.

25. Other awesome things on EBOSS built
in SilverStripe
1. CAD Downloader Tool – Bundle Files.
2. Quickfind navigation – get to anywhere.
3. RESTful API – EBOSS has useful data.
4. Vendor CMS - can update products
themselves.
5. Mailchimp and Google Custom Search Engine
integration.

27. Thanks
@cameronfindlay
hello@camfindlay.com