Introduction to Silverstripe 3 - how to contribute to the technical side of the website

Silverstripe is a open source (BSD licensed) content management system developed and maintained by a New Zealand based company of the same name, along with contributors from all over the world.

Silverstripe was chosen as the cms to use for the website, because it offers a working system out-of-the-box, without having to need for tons of plugins just to get a simple website online. It is php combined with its own templating language, that similar to other templating languages allows to integrate static text (any text basically, but in the context of a website usually (x)html) with dynamically generated content (loops, function calls, ....)

The talk will give an overview of the basic architecture (MVC - Model View Controller) and will then focus on the differences between the currently used silverstripe 2.4 and the newer version 3.1. The goal is to show people what the possibilities and also what the limits are in terms of feasibility in a large project like LibreOffice.

After the talk, listeners with existing knowledge of html and css should have no problem creating a nice new design for the LibreOffice website :-)

Target Audience (everyone is invited, that list is not exclusive :-):

• People without prior knowledge, who are interested to learn how the system looks from a editor's view, instead of only viewing the finished webpages/people who want to set up their own website, but are unsure what CMS to use/whether to use a CMS at all
• People who want to improve the look of the website (designers knowing html and css, but not having any idea how the content end the layout find their way together)
• People who know php and want to extend the program logic, have ideas for adding additional features to the site but don't know where to start