[Zope-Annce] Silva 1.0 final released!

[Martijn Faassen]

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-backed version of their site later this week. "Silva is a very
flexible tool for generating and maintaining web content," says Steve
Kendall, who is managing the project. "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."

.. _`ETH Zurich`: http://www.ethz.ch/
.. _`central IT services`: http://www.id.ethz.ch/
.. _`University of Luton`: http://www.luton.ac.uk/

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:

http://www.infrae.com/products/silva

More information about Infrae, the company that created Silva:

http://www.infrae.com

Press Contacts
--------------

Martijn Faassen, Infrae, faassen at infrae.com