Sam Minnée, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of SilverStripe, has shaped the SilverStripe Suite and is part of its success story as an internationally respected open source CMS. Previously, Sam has posted about Duck Programming.

SilverStripe is proud to announce the release of beta 2 of the SilverStripe Framework 3.0 and SilverStripe CMS 3.0.

What's new?

As you might expect, beta 2 builds on beta 1. As well as a host of bugfixes, here are a few of the new features:

A "list view" for pages. This has been a much requested feature and will be particularly useful to those who manage blogs and other sites with content that doesn't fit the nicely into a tree.

Image insertion and media management have been improved, including an "insert from the web" option.

The usability of the tree view when editing content has been improved.

A new default theme, Simple, that responsively handles narrow (e.g. smartphone) and wide (e.g. desktop) layouts. (Demo.)

In 3.0, SilverStripe now works with PHP 5.3+ in order to take advantage of all the PHP 5.3 features.





















If you want all the details, you can check out the full changelog.

What's next?

Next up, we are planning a beta 3 release. A few of the things you can expect:

Now that we're 5.3+ only, we can make use of namespaces. We will move the SilverStripe classes into PHP namespaces to reduce the chance of conflicting with other PHP packages you may want to incorporate into your project.

We've been running user testing, and we will take feedback from that and make more usability enhancements.

There will be more work to improve performance.

As always, we will be continuing the discussion on the silverstripe-dev Google Group and tracking our work in progress on open.silverstripe.org.

Want to get involved?

If you'd like to help us get from beta2 to stable, here's what you can do:

Download SilverStripe 3.0.0-beta2

Install it, or upgrade an existing site, and try to break things

Report any issues you find on open.silverstripe.org.

Thanks to everyone who has been involved with the development of 3.0 so far, we are getting very close!