Silverstripe CMS agency perspective: James Cocker

Please tell us something about you

As a freelance web developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, I manage all aspects of website creation, including design, development, hosting, and maintenance.

For over 23 years, I’ve been creating websites under the banner of Purple Spider Web Design and have clients throughout Europe. Almost all of these websites use Silverstripe, which I discovered in 2010 at version 2.3.

Why do you use Silverstripe as a framework/CMS for your projects?

I take pride in prioritising the user experience—not just for visitors to the sites I create but also for my clients when they update their website content.

Silverstripe enables me to provide an excellent editing experience for my clients. It ensures a clutter-free environment by presenting only functionality relevant to my clients’ needs.

Additionally, Silverstripe's site tree view displays pages in a familiar hierarchical view that mirrors the website's front-end navigation, making it easy for clients to navigate their content when editing.

Where do you think Silverstripe really stands out compared to other systems?

The highly flexible backend framework enables me to develop nearly any feature a website needs; this, in addition to the unique site tree view, seamlessly integrated modules and the ability for clients to easily roll back content updates, makes Silverstripe an easy-to-use yet incredibly flexible platform, that is hard to beat.

What are your favourite modules?

• Elemental has allowed me to give my clients much more flexibility when managing their website content while keeping things easy to use.
• Display Logic allows me to hide irrelevant CMS fields, only showing them when necessary to help keep the CMS clutter-free.
• FocusPoint allows my clients to customise the crop of images they upload.
• GridField Bulk Editing Tools allows me to make it easier for clients to upload images in bulk into their galleries and slideshows.

Please tell us something about your development setup.

I develop on Mac and do like a good GUI. So I’m currently using VS Code as my editor, Tower as my Git client and CodeKit for CSS pre-processing etc.

I run my sites locally using Laravel Valet, and I manage them with the PHP Monitor app, DBngin for MySQL, and TablePlus for database management. I use Transmit whenever SFTP is required.

How do you typically deploy your Silverstripe projects?

I host my sites on servers with UpCloud and Digital Ocean. I use Ploi to manage my servers, sites, and deployments (which Ploi automatically performs when new commits are pushed to GitHub). I also use Oh Dear to monitor various aspects of my sites to ensure they run smoothly.