Silex is a CMS

Content management system

A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

, classified in the Flash CMS

Flash CMS

A Flash Content Management System is a Content Management System specifically designed to create and manage Adobe Flash Content. The main purpose of a Flash CMS is to generate Flash content within a browser environment. To qualify as a Flash CMS an application must be able to manage text, images,...

 (Flash content management system) family. Key features are an WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...

 environment to edit a publication and a manager application to manage permissions and multiple publications settings.

History

• Founded in 2003 by Alexandre Hoyau, Pol Goasdoué and Pierre Teissière. The project is oriented towarda video and cross media.
• In 2005, the version v0-6 is presented at the WWDC2005 in Cupertino California. Apple is interested in Flash capacity to compete with their Quicktime plug-in. Macromedia has just been acquired by Adobe, Apple’s main partner.
• In 2006, the program was presented in several conferences at La Villette and won a challenge organized by Dauphine high school with INRIA - French National institute for research in computer science and control. The program at this time was mainly used for freelancers small projects.
• In 2007, Silex source code officially released as open source
• In 2008, Silex was among the 100 first Open Source projects on SourceForge. Silex v1 is released.
• In 2009, Silex was project of the month on SourceForge. The program was presented Silex at several French conference: Futur en Seine, Les Trophées du Libre, Pas sage en Seine, Wikiplaza
• In 2010, the team members formalized their cooperation by creating a non profit organization for promotion, deployment support, and development of open source software projects related to SILEX and Open Source Flash.. The organization became the official maintainer of AMFPHP, a mature communautary project.

Features

Functionalities:

• WYSIWYG environment to edit a publication with drag and drop
• manager application for permissions and publications settings
• search engine friendly, deep linking
  Deep linking
  On the World Wide Web, deep linking is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a website, instead of that website's main or home page. Such links are called deep links.-Example:...
  
   enabled
• suitable for prototyping
• web based, can be installed locally, on a web server or as a portable app
• multilingual contexts management
• free templates and plugins

Criticism

Since it is associated with the Flash platform, Silex is not well accepted by the open source fanatics. It is mainly because Flash is not standard and therefore is not readable on some platforms, and it does not play well with assistive technologies. The team said that the next version will also output HTML5, which would change all this.

Silex has always had performances problems. This is because it is a mix of several technologies, including ActionScript 2 and javascript, which are known to be slow. And also it has a heavy framework inspired by traditional CMS.