Hi, I am a web designer and have just discovered Silverstripe website after looking up on Google how to add a taxonomy or tag filter capability to my website (to help visitors select or filter down the products by type, color or brand.) I don't know if this is the right thing for me seeing as I only know HTML and CSS. Not PHP at all. Please can you advise me on wether Silverstripe is going to work for me? Any advice greatly appreciated. Thank you

Yes, good oo knowledge of PHP is required for most customizations

Hmm, tricky one. I am new to ss myself and im building my first site as we speak. I have reasonable php knowledge as in i can write my own basic cms with an admin section etc but in this day and age you need to rely on proper tested security so thats why i went with ss especially after my joomla site was repeatedly hacked :-)
Anyway off the shelf ss takes care of all the database relationships and creating required fields etc (once you know the code to use) for me the code used by ss was new so i was only aided with my php knowledge in understating the code was correct once i had the code working.

But I started with the default ss3 install and read the tutorial in the help section. From there i was able to recreate the page types from the tutorial and then i was quickly able to create new page types to suit my site. Ive used little css before as ive been away from web pages for 3 years or so and ive also found that customising the simple template was quite easy as it has a lot of css pre defined.
On the down side i have found the documentation to be more suited to an analyst than someone that is actually trying to find out information so as long as you dont want anything too technical the tutorials should give you everything you need.

So to round off, with a little help from here i have created a site that displays new and used motorbikes for sale and product and part info pages, using previous web experience ive easily been able to add tabbs and lightbox views to some of the pages and also image silders and css blocks that are only visable if they have content etc etc. the page types you create make it very easy to get exactly the content you want one the pages you want without compromising and without having to find settings to turn off things like "posted in and posted by and more posts from ....." Like you have to do in some pre built cms's.
it will take longer to create the site frame work but once you have the pages built with the required fields you will find that adding new content will be soooo much faster.