Update on Silverstripe and the WebPI

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In March I wrote about SilverStripe and the work that we had done with them to add them to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

This month PC World has picked up the story and published this one pager (the article isn’t online yet but may turn up on PC World’s website later this month).

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At the time of MIX Siggy mentioned their intention to add SQL Server support in their next release. Last month they added SQL Server 2008 support to an unreleased trunk of their application and introduced the SQL Server alpha module.

This early release uses the standard mssql function that ships with PHP. We are actively encouraging and supporting Silverstripe to also test with the open source PHP SQL driver extension provided from Microsoft that should improve performance, reliability and scalable when integrating PHP with SQL Server 2005/2008 on Windows.

The intention is once released to update their installer in the Windows Web Ap Gallery to include this option making SilverStripe truly a “1 click” install on any “out of the box” Windows Server or development machine via the WebPI.

Since MIX I have been encouraged to read what the open source community has been writing about this partnership:

Ex Zend Technologies guy Scott Dahlgren wrote:

More Than Talk

Wow - this is huge - and in fact all of these pieces do fit together into a very powerful story, but it took until now for me to really get it. Microsoft is in fact serious about working with the open source community. They are not just talking about it and rolling out nice marketing programs, they are actually delivering.

Also at MIX, Thomas Deml did a demo on IIS the whole time using Silverstripe during his Developing and Deploying Applications on Internet Information Services (IIS) talk.

Siggy mentioned in an email to me that the month after MIX that downloads of SilverStripe CMS grew ~62% for the month. A figure that he attributed partly to releasing a new version of SilverStripe CMS as well as being on Slashdot and Ajaxian. That said 37% of downloads were directly attributable to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer!