Hello all. Must say I'm very excited to hear about SilverStripe. After a moderately underwhelming experience trying to incorporate a wordpress blog into my existing site, I decided I should have a better look into CMS's so as to fix a number of issues in one move. When I found there was a solid alternative from of all places, my home country I had to check it out. Well everything seems to check out on a fundamental level, but I want to ask a few questions to see if SilverStripe will (easily) do what I am after.
I already have a html/php website set up for a gaming community I'm involved with. I put it together by buying a decent looking template and then systematically pulling it apart and making it do what we need - which is about my level of programming. It started with a few static pages and I have added wordpress and a phpbb3 forum, but I am getting pretty tired of toying with the static pages, especially in order to get say, activity highlights from other pages to display on my main page. I assume a CMS will be much better integrated by nature. Am I right?
So here's the stuff I'm after that ideally is already included in the SilverStripe install, or alternatively can be added with existing modules and/or existing tutorials:
* Blog or something like a blog for articles with good options for menu's, tags, categories, and permalinks
* User comments on articles
* Forum
* 1 sign-up for users to post on the Forum and Comment on articles
* Can utilize and manipulate incoming RSS and post updates as new articles (A News Feed)
* Automatic updates to homepage based on content from other pages
* Making/modifying templates is no more difficult than working with an existing website
* Search
That's about it i think. Pretty straight-forward wish list for my demographic I'd say :) but I just wanted to be sure my expectations were achievable before going and doing a whole lot of work.
Any response or advice very much appreciated. Thanks