Hello!
First of all, i'd like to apologize for my bad english and also for perhaps silly questions....
I have a website about indoor plants with about 1 million page views per month ( http://www.zimmerpflanzenlexikon.info/ ). Currently this ist just a simple php application with a mysql database and the data i edit with "Toad for mysql". This worked quit well for the last years, but now I would like to switch to a real CMS to maintain my website.
I have a lot of experience with a Java CMS (Fatwire) and this works in a comlete generic way. After installation, you don't have anything at the beginning. You have to define attributes and then combine these attributes to content types. Then you create templates and pages, tell the pages which template to use and at the end, move the content to the page that should be displayed. This is all done in the administration frontend. Everything else, like navigation, breadcrumbs and so on you have to do yourself via JSP code. Now i looked at several PHP CMS and there i always have the feeling, that there is not so much flexibilty. At every page, you immediatly write the content for that page. But what, if i want to have 4 articles on that page?
For my website, the content items are mostly plants and diseases with a lot of attributes (light, watering, and many checkboxes etc...). Navigation is done in several ways. You can sort by botanical names, german names, pictures and family) Then in the subnavigation you can click on the starting letter and get a list of these plants. Then i have a special search where you can seach by name but also by switching special attributes on and off (like search all plant that need full sun, bot much water etc...). If you are interested, just look at my website, i think then you see what i mean.
The last "problem" is, that there are aleady many thousand links to my site (like http://www.zimmerpflanzenlexikon.info/lexikon.php?id=11 ), that should also work after i switch to an CMS.
My question ist now, do you think that I could do that with Silverstripe? I already read a little bit the documentation and from the technical point of view i really like it.
Thanks a lot for your help!
Greetings from Vienna,
Harald