About

Background

Where ProcessWire came from

History

While most of the code in this version of ProcessWire is less than a year old, the CMS is based on a system that the author has designed and developed over more than a decade of building CMSs. ProcessWire 2.0 is very similar in look and function to Dictator CMS (2003) and ProcessWire 1.0 (2007), both of which are still in use on many sites today. Despite intentions to do so, neither product was ever released open source, except for the projects the author used it with. ProcessWire 2.0 is the first GNU/GPL licensed version, and it is architecturally stronger than the CMSs that preceded it.

Compared to ProcessWire 1.0

ProcessWire 2.0 has an improved (though similar) CMS API and better module system. Though version 2.0 is not yet as mature and feature-rich as version 1.0. Version 2.0 is designed for open source and as such more effort went towards the underlying system and API than to bells and whistles. Specific features that appear in version 1.0 that are not yet present in 2.0 include:

  • Page drafts and page versioning
  • Workflow functions 
  • Extensive logging and history functions
  • Enhanced cache management
  • Expanded RBAC user system with more permission granularity
  • Tagscript

These are all on the roadmap for the version 2 branch.

Why open source?

Version 2.0 of ProcessWire's code was created by a single developer. This has advantages and disadvantages. The intention with making ProcessWire open source is to hopefully bring more people into the project into a community effort. Version 2.1 of ProcessWire is the first version that represents a larger community effort and we consider this a major success. 

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