The Google Highly Open Participation Contest ended after a hive of stunning work over two months. SilverStripe begun with 60 tasks, and because students get paid for each successfully completed task, SilverStripe had to seek numerous times for Google to increase the funding to enlarge the contest based on unanticipated student demand. In the end, about 180 tasks were completed, three times the initial expectation.

In the few weeks since CMSReport wrote about the launch of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, open source CMS projects SilverStipe, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone have been having a field day.

SilverStripe has been working hard to teach, mentor and review work by students, resulting in batch of new themes and drag-n-drop widgets available for download. A new release came out today with CMS administration translated in a variety of new languages contributed by students. They've had to double the number of challenges for students because the uptake has been so great that tasks have been completed much quicker than anticipated.

Drupal has recieved a dozen of code patches, improvements, videos and other completed tasks, and much like SilverStripe, has also been adding lots of new tasks to keep up with a real thirst for work by the students.

The anticipated SilverStripe 2.2 was released this week.

SilverStripe 2.2.0 is a major release containing a staggering quantity of new features and work from our ten Google Summer of Code students and an equally impressive effort from the core team.

Lots of new features and enhancements with this version of SilverStripe. Some of the new features and changes for this CMS include:

• Redesigned interface and workflow
• Multiple language support
• Google Sitemaps support (improves search engine optimization)
• Online image editing. Impulsively upload files.
• Support for authentication by OpenID (auth_openid module included with installer)
• Newsletter module enhancements
• Developer tools, more APIs make it more fun to be a SilverStripe geek

As posted at SilverStripe.com:

Thanks to one of our open source community members, Roel Gloudemans, you can now use SilverStripe in conjunction with external authentication sources. This allows you to login to the CMS or other secure parts of your SilverStripe website with an account stored in LDAP, Active Directory, a mailserver and so on.

Complete Story

Sigurd Magnusson wrote to us letting us know about a YouTube video where he talks about his company's content management system, SilverStripe. The video was recorded while at a recent function at Google for software developers.

Here's some interesting content for both you and your readers, providing a  quick overview of our project, company and our success with the Google  Summer of Code project.  :-)

• New security system (benefiting from Google Summer of Code)
• Blog Module (with drag-n-drop widget support including tag clouds, RSS feed, etc)
• Support for Updated Gallery Module