Why you should update to SS 4

SilverStripe 4 the latest version of SilverStripe, was released early this week (A couple of days ago, 8th Nov). This release is a major milestone in the development roadmap for SilverStripe. It creates a huge learning curve for developers, and for questions for businesses on upgrading your website's to SilverStripe 4.

Out of the 101 reasons you should start on thinking about upgrading we believe that these reasons will be a game changer for you.

Speed

From SilverStripe 3.6.0 (released on June 2017) the framework supports PHP 7. And according to the release announcement of SilverStripe this only made a significant improvement on the speed, and run 2 to 5 time faster on a PHP 7 installation.

SilverStripe 4 is developed to support php 7.1 + and is works much faster on PHP 7.

Responsive CMS

Responsive web is no more a new term. SilverStripe 4 CMS is built to work responsively. This does mean that it works on mobiles, tablets, and desktops. And the new CMS allows you to create content with almost all your devices with a web browser.

Protected files and file security

It has been one of the missing features of SilverStripe to add in file security. However the void has been filled in with the Secure assets module. Its no more the case and file security is an in built feature now for SilverStripe. When you open up a file it does show you options to secure it and restrict the access level to a certain group in SilverStripe. Here's a screenshot of the file permissions user interface.

Speaking of files, SilverStripe has done a lot of updates to the internal assets management as a whole. There is a new file browser, which opens up in a popup and can be accessible from anywhere. This lets your browse, edit, or upload new files without navigating away.

Campaigns

SilverStripe 4 has a new feature called Campaigns. Campaigns are collections of publishable items Pages and Files. The idea is to allow you to write all your contents and have them in draft mode and add them to a campaign. Once everything is
ready you can publish them all in one go.

This is helpful when you want to publish multiple pages, files or images at once.

3.6 is only fully supported till mid 2018

Yes it will be actively support only for another 7 or 8 months (SilverStripe roadmap). If you are planning ahead you should start thinking about updating the site and to have a solid upgrade plan in place. If your web application is a complex system its alway better to start early with having test plans, unit tests, and deployment processes in place.