Silva: The Silva Content Management System

Silva is a powerful CMS for organizations that manage multiple or complex websites. Content is stored in clean and futureproof XML, independent of layout and presentation. Features include versioning, workflow system, integral visual editor, content reuse, sophisticated access control, multi-site management, extensive import/export facilities, fine-grained templating, and hi-res image storage and manipulation. Silva has an open source (BSD) license.

Nominate Silva for the Packt Awards:

Award Finalist

In 2007 Silva was a finalist for the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award, coming in third in the Other CMS Category. Over 16,000 nominations were received with the top five open source CMS’s in each category going forward to the final.

Many large organizations and universities use Silva; see our references page for a list.

Silva supports a separation between authors who create new content and editors who decide whether content actually gets published. It also allows delegation of editing the responsibilities for a section of a site to others. This avoids a single-person bottleneck without the loss of editorial control.

To assist in the publication process, Silva implements workflow where multiple versions of the same document are stored. A document may be published while a newer version can be edited simultaneously. Silva’s workflow supports email notification to streamline the production process.

Behind the scenes, Silva stores content in XML. This leads to several important advantages:

The same content can be used in different media, such as the web, paper, or word processor content. Web publication of content is native to Silva, but Silva also has export filters to PDF and MS Word, and more can be built when the demand arises.
The content is future proofed and not out of date as soon as you want to use a new system or present it in a different way.
The structuring of the content facilitates more sophisticated searching and indexing.

Silva is extensible with new document types and other types of content objects.

Documentation

Silva Documentation
There is a Silva Auxiliary Documentation section on this site, containing additional documents that are not included in the Silva product delivery.
There is also an archive of outdated documentation.