We recently decided to go with Silverstripe as our CMS for the front end of the soon to be launched [mitto.com] site. I love Silverstripe. In the past we’ve had more of a love/hate relationship, but they’ve been stabilizing their code, and I’ve been understanding it better, so we’re coming to a happy medium. I’ve been using it for the development of our Western Diocese website since last January. Once you’ve got their system down it makes for a rapid and flexible framework. The CMS aint to shabby either.

I use both Macs and PCs to develop, depending on where I’m at. On Mac, I like to use TextMate as my editor (who doesn’t), and on the PC I love e-texteditor. e is pretty much, or at least started out, as a clone of TextMate. It has certainly grown into its own with several innovative features. One great thing about both of these editors is that they support bundles. As you probably know bundles are collections of snippets, templates, commands and syntaxes that support a given language. One day I asked myself: is there a Silverstripe Bundle that will make my development process more fun and productive? Well lo and behold there I found one the Silverstripe Wiki. Its got a bunch of nice features, and is definitely a huge step-up from nothing, but I found it to be lacking in a lot of areas. Also, some of the filenames aren’t compatible with PCs, so it was annoying checking it out on my PC. So, I decided to start developing my own branch of the original code put out by Silverstripe. I’ll eventually submit a patch to have incorporated into their repository, but until then I’m going to be hosting myself.

Check it out

If anyone is interested you can checkout a version for yourself. Use in good health, and give feedback.

For TextMate Check it out into your TextMate preferences folder.

svn co http://ash.svn.beanstalkapp.com/ss_tmbundle "~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles"

You might not have a TextMate folder in Application Support (I didn’t). If this is the case, just make one.

mkdir ~/Library/Application Support/Textmate

mkdir ~/Library/Application Support/Testmate/Bundles

For e These instruction assume that your using Vista. The e bundle directory should be located in Users\username\AppData\Roaming\e\InstalledBundles, where username is your username. Use which ever svn client you use and checkout http://ash.svn.beanstalkapp.com/ss_tmbundle/Silverstripe.tmbundle into it.

If anyone isn’t down with the whole SVN thing, let me know and I can put up a link for a Zip version.