Lagoon examples - Silverstripe CMS

Why we’re talking about more uses for Lagoon

One of the most pertinent pieces of feedback we’ve received through the ongoing “Office Hours” series has been that whilst we provide first-class support for hosting Drupal projects, our customers who are using a much wider variety of tools can feel that they have little guidance, and therefore require more support to bring projects to Lagoon. We are looking at addressing this in many ways – from creating a wider range of base images (along the lines of php-cli-drupal) and building a more versatile mechanism for operating tasks on Lagoon projects to making more examples and demonstrations available to prospective users. This blog post is part of a series that will expand on a number of alternative CMS/Framework solutions, and provide some background and examples for you to utilise.

What is Silverstripe CMS?

Silverstripe CMS is an open source Content Management System, originally created and developed by Silverstripe in New Zealand and used worldwide. It is widely used in enterprise and government settings, and is the core component of the New Zealand Government’s Common Web Platform (CWP). Silverstripe is built on PHP, and is enhanced by a range of commercially and community sponsored modules.

Silverstripe on Lagoon

Given that Silverstripe is built on PHP, supports Composer and has a similar configuration to Drupal, it has been relatively straightforward to implement Silverstripe CMS on the Lagoon platform. Silverstripe also supports Redis, Solr and Varnish to improve site performance and searchability.

Our Silverstripe example project has been configured in a similar way to Drupal–a container running PHP and NGINX, a standalone MariaDB container, and a standalone CLI container (running PHP) which allows SSH access to perform CLI operations with Sake. As with any Lagoon build, these containers are the exact same ones used in local development and the online production or development hosted environments. We have also tested extending Silverstripe with our Solr and Redis images.

As with other (non-Drupal) PHP-based frameworks, we have used the non-Drupal versions of the CLI and NGINX images. To make the NGINX container aware of the default Silverstripe paths, we have inserted the relevant configuration into the docker image.

The standard Silverstripe Composer-based install has been used, including recipe-cms and recipe-plugin to extend it with Addons, and the simple theme has been included as the default.  The entire folder is volume-mounted into the local development install, to enable rapid local-development.

Why Lagoon for Silverstripe?  

The Lagoon Silverstripe example is intended to be a starting point for a Silverstripe project. All Lagoon’s default inclusions and functionality will be compatible with Silverstripe; local development options via pygmy or Lando, full access to all running services, the predictability that comes from running the same images in local and production environments, the security of production-hardened PHP images and the versatility of CLI-helper images to perform basic administration tasks on your site.

Lagoon will also provision all the necessary production-ready services for your project: logging, backup, monitoring, security and more.

Looking for a Silverstripe hosting alternative in New Zealand? 

amazee.io has partnered with Catalyst Cloud to offer secure, scalable hosting based on Lagoon in New Zealand. Learn more.