Silverstripe Joins, and Renames, the Plugin Game

By Angela Natividad | Published Sep 17, 2007

Following closely in the footsteps of Movable Type 4, which likes to think of itself as less of a blog platform than a harmonious collective of plugins, New Zealand-based Silverstripe has released a blog module with a “drag n' drop widget system.”

Why use one word when five will do?

The complimentary download requires Silverstripe 2.1 or higher. v2.2 is currently being tweaked with Silverstripe's apprentices from Google's Summer of Code.

Silverstripe 2.1 users enjoy the following amenities:

A customizable look and feel, right out of the box
Customizable “tags” and “archive” widgets
AJAX for comments - a functionality that's growing in popularity. Movable Type users now have access to a similar feature, courtesy of MT-Hacks
bbcode formatting in both blogs and forums. Blog posts can be written from within the site, in addition to the CMS admin interface
Akismet or Math Question for guarding against comment spam
Drag n' drop widgets. Available widgets appear to the left of the interface. When dragged to the right, they're enabled and can be customized by users. Existing options include RSS, Flickr, Technorati and YouTube widgets

There's not too much to say about the widget functionality yet because it's still new. To add some bling to its box, Silverstripe is currently conducting a call for widget developers.

Download the drag n' drop module. If you'd like to contribute to the project, read the widget documentation and visit the contributions forum.