Documentation
Silva Documentation for users
Guides
These guides are for people with an Author, Editor, Chief Editor or Manager role in a Silva site. The guides show you how to author and manage content and roles in Silva. The quickest way to learn Silva is to read Getting started and then look at the section for your Silva role. The Authors section is divided into ‘basic’ and ‘advanced’. The basic section answers the most often asked questions. The advanced authors section presumes a knowledge of the basic section.
Developing with Silva
Full Silva developer documentation
The Silva developer documentation site http://docs.silvacms.org/ is generated with Sphinx and therefore always up-to-date with the code changes. On the site you will find documentation about the API of Silva, how to write Silva extensions, how to write your own Silva theme, how to set up a Silva development environment, ..., etc.
Silva API documentation
Silva has a very robust and clean API, writing Silva Extensions is therefore very easy and straightforward for every experienced developer. It makes developers eager to create new extensions and extend Silva. The API is well documented and more information can be found on the developer documentetion site.
Silva code style
Coding for Silva is done respecting the coding style, which will feel for every developer as most common sense for coding. Have a look at the complete Silva coding style.
Developer tools
What do you need to get started writing Silva code, and some best practices?
- A code editor, use one you like and feel comfortable in (Emacs, VI(m), Eclipse, Komodo, ..., etc.)
- Use spaces and not tabs in your code
- Use UTF-8 encoding
- A system with all dependencies installed (version control clients, ...)
- Always read the README.txt of the software you're working on (or other written documentation within the product)
- Read the developer documentation if you're working on Silva or a Silva Extension
- Write tests for your code to prove your code is indeed perfect
Setting up a Silva development environment
To setup a Silva development environment we advice to use buildout to set it up using a development profile. Have a look at Installing Silva with Buildout on how to achieve this.
Code base
Bugs
Bugs for Silva can be found on launchpad, you can also report bugs there. If you would like to fix a bug, feel free to contact the community and contribute .
More information on contributing to Silva can be found in our Contribute section of Community.
Documentation for system administrators
Installing Silva
We recommend installing Silva using buildout, and automated install script. More information on installing Silva using buildout.
If you have questions or troubles installing Silva, have a look in Support on how you can get community support .
Integrating with Silva
Silva integrates well with open technology like:
- Apache web server
- Nginx web server
- Squid caching server
- Varnish caching server
- OpenID authentication
- WSGI authentication
- Radius authentication
- OAI: make OAI-PMH harvested metadata browseable in Silva
Technical requirements
Technical requirements
Recommended software and hardware requirements.
Software
Silva installs cross platform and is best installed using an automated install script called 'buildout'. Buildout has software dependencies that should be fulfilled. All information about installing Silva using buildout can be found in the Installing Silva with buildout section.
Hardware
You can install Silva on your laptop and/or desktop computer, below are recommendations which should allow you to run a small Silva site comfortably. This can be used for developing, testing, and a small production site. Storage depends on how much content and which type of content you will store in the database or blob storage. If you know tons of binary assets will get stored the recommended storage will not suffice.
Recommended hardware
- Memory: 2 GB or more RAM
- Storage: 40 GB or more hard disk space
If performance would become a problem you can easily scale Silva to handle the increase in popularity of your site.
Contact the community if you need support integrating these technologies with Silva.