Silverstripe CMS supplies developers with a set of supported packages for setting up their Silverstripe CMS projects.
The installer for Silverstripe CMS can be used as a base for jump-starting the development of a project.
To ensure compatibility with the Silverstripe Cloud in-nation platform, you will also want to install the CMS CCL recipe module.
The installer comes with a composer.json file which defines dependencies. These make up the feature set of a default CWP ready website by pulling sets of commercially supported Silverstripe CMS modules.
The Recipe CCL package includes the CMS Recipe, the CWP Core Recipe, and other modules recommended for platform compatibility.
Recipe options
To achieve more complex use cases in Silverstripe CMS, you may need to combine many modules and add extra configurations to integrate these together. Silverstripe CMS Recipes streamline this process for common use cases. You can read more about recipes in the CMS documentation.
- CCL Recipe - (Recommended) A recipe of modules to add NZ public sector-specific features to your project, as well as platform compatibility.
- CWP Core Recipe - Included in CCL Recipe, or can be installed on its own as the minimum requirement for platform compatibility.
- Search Recipe - A recipe of modules to add search functionality to your project.
- Authoring Tools Recipe - Extra tools for CMS authoring in Silverstripe CMS.
- Blog Recipe - Adds blog functionality for your project.
- Collaboration Recipe - Adds functionality to enhance CMS author collaboration.
- Reporting Tools Recipe - Adds extra CMS reporting tools to your Silverstripe CMS project.
- Content Blocks Recipe - Adds content blocks to your Silverstripe CMS project.
- Form Building Recipe - A recipe of modules to help you build forms in Silverstripe CMS.
- Services Recipe - Adds API and content service modules to your Silverstripe CMS project.
Recipe combinations
The above recipes can be combined as follows:
- Bare bones - Silverstripe CMS installer plus mandated configuration (CWP Core Recipe).
- Bare bones and recommended CMS features - Silverstripe CMS installer plus CCL Recipe.
- The above, adding the Silverstripe CMS Blog Recipe, or plus the Silverstripe CMS Form Building Recipe, etc.
Theme options
There are two supported themes provided to help government agencies quickly get their sites up and running:
- The CWP Starter theme is a developer-focused highly accessible Bootstrap 3 theme. It is suited for sites that require more customisation and a design applied with minimal restrictions.
- The Wātea theme includes more design elements than the CWP Starter theme. It is well suited for smaller agencies with smaller sites, smaller budgets and less developer involvement.
Can I remove the default recipes?
We strongly recommend using the supported Silverstripe CMS recipes that come by default.
The reasons include:
- Reused code makes maintenance simple - it's easier to apply security updates
- The Service Desk might not be able to help you if you are on a heavily customised codebase
- Custom code is usually less stable than the one that's frequently used
- Advertised supported features may not work
- Your site may break when infrastructure changes are rolled out - these changes will only be tested against the official recipe releases
You are welcome to remove recipes or features from the list of dependencies that are not required for your project.
If after careful consideration your development team decides to depart from the recipe model, it is recommended to pull in at least the CMS CCL recipe. If even this doesn't work for you, the last resort is including the CWP Core recipe. This at least will ensure minimal compatibility with the platform infrastructure and will allow us to deliver some subset of fixes and features to you as they are released.
Your development team will need to follow the releases of the recipe on their own and make sure the modules are either updated, or the issues acknowledged as not posing security or technical risk.
Recipe releases
When we announce a new release of Silverstripe CMS and publish a changelog for it, we refer to a new set of Recipe versions, which include new versions of some or all of their associated Modules.
As a rule of thumb you need to remain on the latest point/minor release version of the recipe to receive all security fixes.
Major and minor recipe releases (if you are on 4.9.1 these will be 4.10.0, 4.12.0, 5.0.0 and so on) could take more time to apply. We estimate that on a small site you may need to spend a day upgrading to a new minor version, and a few days or more upgrading to a new major version.
Recipe contents
To obtain the composition of the latest stable recipes, the easiest way is to head to the recipe GitHub repository and look at the respective composer.json file and the dependencies contained there.
For example, here is the blog recipe contents.
To find the location of a specific repository check on Packagist.