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Silva 1.0 released

Publication date: 30.December.2004, 16:59

Silva 1.0: The Structured Content Management System

July 20, 2004 - after two and a half years of development, the Silva team is happy to announce the release of Silva 1.0. Silva is an open source content management system with a focus on structured content and its reuse. It is based on the open source web application platform Zope, and the programming language Python.

New in Silva 1.0 are:

  • Deeply integrated support for Kupu, the WYSIWYG through the web editor with support for both Mozilla and Internet Explorer.
  • Silva 1.0 ships with full documentation that is a Silva publication itself. When you install a new Silva root you get the option to install the documentation as well.
  • Other new features include image thumbnail support and image cropping support.

"At ETH we operate a mass virtual hosting Silva instance hosting a few hundred sites," says Reinhard Hess, of the central IT services at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). "In addition to that there are a number of sites being run by independent departemental IT units across the university." ETH Zurich has been deploying Silva since 2002 - and they are also developing on the platform. "Silva is well capable to compete successfully with other web CMS products in the enterprise range - either open source or closed source. Silva was a good choice for us. Silva gives us the best cost/performance ratio even in the long term and maximum operational flexibility."

The University of Luton in the UK is going online with a new Silva-based site later this week. "Silva is a very flexible tool for generating and maintaining web content," says Steve Kendall, University of Luton project manager. "Previously all web content had to be looked after by a small team of central staff with specialised skills, but now we have the mechanisms in place to return full ownership of the content to the faculties and departments."

Downloads

You can download Silva 1.0 final here:

http://www.zope.org/Members/infrae/Silva

The -all.tgz ships with everything needed, including Kupu.

A list of changes can be found here:

http://www.zope.org/Members/infrae/Silva/HISTORY.txt

About Silva

Features of Silva include:

  • Through-the-web user interface with easy access to all features, including access keys.
  • Extensive documentation aimed to authors and editors, as well as for site managers, designers and system administrators.
  • Through-the-web structured authoring of documents using a WYSIWIG editor (kupu) or a forms-based editor. Content can be published to the web and exported as XML. Content can be reused in multiple areas of a publication using ghost objects.
  • Workflow and versioning support allows an author to work on a new version of a document while another version is already published online.
  • Separation of responsibilities between author, editor, and chief editor roles. Optional full integration with very large user sources using LDAP. Extensive group management abilities (with or without LDAP).
  • Resizing support for images, and extensive support to position images in document text. Images and files can be imported singly or in bulk.
  • Flexible customizable presentation using Zope Page Templates. Different sub sites can have different publications and designs. Virtual hosting support for sub sites.

Silva extensions include:

  • SilvaNews - create and manage news and agenda items in Silva. RSS syndication and aggregation support.
  • DocMa - external server which integrates seamlessly into Silva and allows Silva publications to be exported to MS Word documents, and MS Word documents to be imported into Silva.
  • SilvaExternalSources - include data from external sources into documents, including CSV files, results from relational database queries or any Python script.

More information about Silva can also be found here:

https://infrae.com/products/silva

More information about Infrae, the company that created Silva:

https://infrae.com

Press Contacts

Martijn Faassen, Infrae, faassen at infrae.com