99 replies to this topic

[apeisa]

I am very interested to here how people find ProcessWire. Did you heard about it from twitter or blog post? Some tedious google search or something totally different.

Also - how did you found your first visits? Did it make impressions from the beginning or did it took time? Do you go straight to demo or do you read forums and docs first? Or just install and try - what is your method when you find something new and interesting software?

We are doing more and more promoting, and also planning redesign to the site so, this is all very valuable feedback.

[diogo]

I think I googled something like "cms custom fields new markup control flexible", and here I was!

I had a very good impression of the first things I read on the homepage. I was very impressed by Ryan's video, and by the "straight to the point" talk. Although, I had the feeling that it was too personal (I can't explain, maybe the room...). I've seen it again recently, and I don't have that feeling anymore. But, i guess, it can happen to new people.
I printed all the documentation and read it outside while having coffee and enjoying the sun. It was a great reading

[formmailer]

I found out about PW via Google and was very impressed from the first minute.
I've already recommended it to some others...

/Jasper

[ryan]

@apeisa, great question, I'm definitely interested to hear more about this too.

@Diogo, that sounds like exactly the same way I would read documentation too. That's interesting to hear about it being too-personal. I had never made a video of this sort before so didn't really know what I was doing (and still don't) but am learning. This is good feedback and perhaps i should try another room next time. The room I work in (and did the video in) is a large loft-type room with wood floors and it tends to echo a lot in here when talking. So I briefly considered recording the narration in the bathroom for less echo. Glad I didn't do that–that would have definitely been too personal. ;D

@formmailer do you recall what words you were searching for? I've not really been sure what to target from an SEO standpoint. But as we do major upgrades to the site in the near future, we'll probably want to start considering more strongly the words that people search for to find us.

[diogo]

I think I googled something like "cms custom fields new markup control flexible", and here I was!

Ah! when I made this comment, I didn't think of actually testing what results I would get now. Do it yourself and be surprised

The bathroom would be definitely too personal  ;D

[apeisa]

I found PW first from google too. I was looking for new PHP/MySQL CMS, and my biggest requirement was custom content types (templates & fields in pw). So I did searches like "custom content type php cms", also tried to find cms comparison posts and their comments, so I  searched a lot with cms names I did know and had that custom content type feature I was after: "expression engine, drupal" etc...

I liked the video, although it is a bit too long for introduction. Two minutes of Ryan before we even see ProcessWire I think that something like 3-5 mins would be perfect.

[n00dles101]

found out about it in january on WebResourcesDepot.

http://www.webresour...0&submit=Search

Checked it out and loved it....

[vknt]

I just checked when I registered for this forum, thats was 22 jan, 3 days after the post on webresourcesdepot.com, so it must have been that post. It was certainly not through google cuz I've had been searching for a long time for something like this.
I was in love with the simplicity of symphony cms but I didn't had the time to learn XSLT. Custom Content Types for me is the greatest thing, only what is need is there and nothing else.

First I looked at the movie and understood that it was much like symphony but with php and I was sold. The documentation back then was a bit lacking but I found my way through and have been using nothing else ever since.

Hope this helps..

[diogo]

Yep, as I told some times before, symphony is also great! XSLT is quite easy to learn and is extremely flexible, but is a pain to write... and it's quite annoying that you just can't print "<!doctype html>". Besides, it feels like you are fighting all the rest of the world by using it...
I guess, at the time, I was also looking for something like symphony, but written on a wide spread language.

[slkwrm]

I remember I was searching using google, frustrated after realizing that MODx Revo back-end is not going to be faster soon because it's based on ExtJS and it's heavy as hell. I didn't expect too much, because previously I was trying to find a CMS that would embody my vision of a good one, but was getting no results that would satisfy my needs. Every time I was finding something I felt like the architecture is not well thought out (MODx Evo) or code is poorly documented (Joomla) or that system is bloated and require a lot of hacking to get it working the way you want and its API is not intuitive (Drupal).
I was looking, first of all, for a reasonably fast CMS with a concise, intuitive API, custom fields and a simple back-end. So I googled something like this: custom fields easy api cms. Bingo!!! The first result (at least in my area) is processwire.com, the second is an article on cmscritic.com, but it's dated by 3rd of october 2011, so it wasn't there at that time.
So after finding it, I watched a video on the main page and liked it very much, Ryan is really good at explaining things. And on contrary (with Diogo) I really liked that personal flavor of the video, maybe because I was tired of all that standard marketing stuff that you can find on CMS websites. I was amazed by the simplicity and elegance of the back-end. I even began to doubt that it can really provide all necessary functionality. How wrong I was! 
Then I proceeded to API pages and they blew my mind, I began feeling that I found a true piece of software/art.
Then I went to Ryan's personal website and took a look at the sites he made and I must say, I loved them. Island Hideaway, Tripsite and Directory of Scholars really impressed me, especially after seeing PW's minimalictic backend. I realized that PW is a weightlifter in the body of a ballerina (maybe you'll want to use this as a tagline)  ;D Then I installed it, that was easy. I was reading through all the articles on processwire.com and toying with PW for some time. The only thing that was hard to understand is templates vs. template files ambiguity. So I regestered here, asked and after Apeisa's thorough answer all doubts gone I became a PW's neofit.
Thank you Ryan!!!
P.S. Maybe I should use this post (with some editions) as a review of PW on opensourceCMS? 

[Soma]

Sorry couldn't resist  ;D

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[diogo]

P.S. Maybe I should use this post (with some editions) as a review of PW on opensourceCMS?

I posted a review 4 days ago, and it's still not there. But yes, you should, because Ryan stepped on some foot and someone must have done a massive voting down on Processwire there. Fortunately it's going up again.

EDIT: Soma, that should go on the frontpage of the website  

[adamkiss]

I found about this exactly 11 months ago through Ryan's forrst post.

Checked it out, emailed Ryan some questions I had regarding this software, and after few brief emails about ahy are we not replying each other in 5 minutes , his first response went like this:

Thanks! I'm glad to hear that. You are the first person to email me about the software since I released in 2 weeks ago

There you have it! Friendly from the start Also, I guess it makes me early adopter. Been hanging around PW ever since.

[jbroussia]

I can't find the page back, but I think it was on a website comparing different light/innovative CMS, and I saw a reference to PW in the comments section by Ryan ;-) At that time I was heavily checking (and choking) on ModX, and found the transition to Processwire so easy, and the CMS so much clearer and well designed, it was love on first sight :-p

[ryan]

Just turned 37 this week and always get a little depressed for a bit every birthday. But these comments and reviews really made my day, and made it a great week! So thanks for that. Also, @slkwrm your in-depth review was really well thought and gives me new perspective. The weightlifter/ballerina concept is intriguing, flattering, disturbing, and hilarious! Especially after seeing Soma's images. This is easily my favorite thread yet.

Opensourcecms.com is a bit of a disappointment because we legitimately rose to the #1 spot there over the period of a week with real users and real votes. Then, in the matter of an hour, someone gave us the slapdown with 50 1-star votes. Apparently someone was threatened by PW's placement there.  Over the same time (seemingly at least), Joomla rose to the #1 spot despite having a high percentage of bad reviews. To make matters worse, they are using the PW logo in ads on their site so that it appears we endorse their advertisers. And I have no idea why they aren't posting your reviews--I've heard this from a few people now. In fairness, the slapdown may have not been their fault, but their voting system is flawed to the point of being useless. After taking a closer look at it, I learned that it could be manipulated quite easily with less than 10 lines of PHP, a strategically placed iframe and some CSS to hide it all. Place the code on any site and every visitor unknowingly becomes a voter (circumventing the IP restriction), whether doing a slapdown or a boost. Clearly such a technique was used to slapdown PW and [I'm guessing] boost Joomla. One could inflate any rating to #1 or last in a matter of hours. I put together a test case to try it once (submitting 1 vote for PW) and, sure enough, that's exactly what appears to have happened. I would never use something like that because I view it as cheating. But it made me feel a little better to at least know how it was done and that the folks at opensourcecms.com weren't out to get us (I'm hoping not, anyway). But if anyone shares my curiosity let me know and I'll PM you what I found (just don't use it). The good news is that PW has already climbed quite a bit out of that slapdown hole legitimately. Honestly I wouldn't care about any of this except I've held that site in such high regard for so many years (and waited a long time to post PW there), that I was just a little disappointed to see the ratings system I used to take seriously is just a joke. But I probably should have known better.  I'm still holding out hope that they will post everyones reviews, as that is where the real value is there and there's no joke about real reviews from real people.

Also, made good progress with PW 2.2 today and admin multilanguage support! I'm posting from a cell phone in the middle of the night (woke up and trying to get back to sleep) so apologize if this post is poorly written, crazy or incoherent.

[nikola]

I've found about ProcessWire while searching for php cms fields keywords, but can't honestly remember on which site I've spotted link to PW site. I've tried the demo, installed it, and immediately fell in love with it. Over the years I've tried numerous CMS packages and everyone of them was bloated in this way or another. I used WordPress and WolfCMS before PW, but abandoned them in the flavor of PW. I need to sharpen my PHP knowledge a bit further and then I'll be able to pull the most out PW.

I'm really disappointed to hear that opensourcecms uses this kind of poor voting system, because I always felt that it was one of the legit sites for CMS reviews and that the voting system really represents the opinions of the end users.

Anyways, congrats on your work so far, looking forward to see PW 2.2 and multilanguage support right out of the box soon.

[apeisa]

Congrats on your Birthday Ryan! It's not sad to be older and wiser

Have you posted to Opensourcecms about their voting system? It seems to me that it should be quick fix to do - although not sure if there is anyone who cares enough (site feels like there is no one giving love for it).

Great stories from everyone, I love the ballerina stuff too

[Pete]

My review to OSCMS was posted quite some time ago now - the same time as the one on alternativeTo. I know it says they're read by real people before approving, but I am actually slightly worried that maybe there's a character limit and anything over a certain length might not be getting through (my review was reasonably long).

I was annoyed by the hosting "ads" too.

I was almost tempted to start building a similar website in Pw (I start lots of things off spontaneously when I think I can improve upon something and almost always never finish them  ), but then I stopped as I realised I don't want to build a site about other CMS'. That sounds a bit fanboy-ish, but if you were ever to build a similar website you would likely have to deal with some software you don't like and I just don't have the commitment for that.

Someone should really build an alternative though

EDIT: Did the number of PW downloads actually increase by the number of down votes over the period the down votes appeared? To me that would show some evidence of how flawed the system might be, not that anything will stop people voting down stuff they've not tried (assuming that turned out to be the case). There are always ways around voting systems however, so the way I would personally do it would be to tie votes in with "quality" reviews (constructive criticism etc) and not allow a vote without one - much easier to see who's just bashing and who's being thoughtful, but you do run the risk of turning into a dictator that way

EDIT2: Meanwhile, back on topic, I found PW when reading a review about MODx. I think it was a link from the MODx website and there was a post in the comments (where there were a few alternative CMS' suggested) where someone mentioned how great Pw was. I checked it out, was skeptical for about 30 seconds until I played the video on the homepage and realised what it could actually do. Now all I have to do is finish converting my large-ish gaming site as I think that would make a good case study, as well as potentially result in some modules I can give back to the community ... sadly other work keeps tearing me away from that plan

[diogo]

yep... clearly something was not smelling well on oscms, I'm glad you found out what it was.
I was also getting annoyed by the adds. I don't think it appears that PW endorses that company, but they are attesting that PW works well on their hosting, even if they really don't know it. It's just plain dirty!
Anyway, I hope they publish my review soon. I confess that I was lazy, and wanted to copy it to Alternative.to as soon as it would be published (so stupid that i didn't copy it before submitting), but I will write a new one there soon.

Happy birthday Ryan!

[Soma]

You know what? I also wrote a review on OSCMS 5-6 days ago.

I also went a few times in the past to this site to look for cms's, but haven't really payed attention to the ratings as it seemed to be unserious... seriously just looking at this dead ugly unserious website, fucked up by far too many ads... I've spent too much time with online votings in the past when creating custom content for games, there was contant fights for years going on on star ratings. So what. I think star ratings aren't really what should be chosen anyway. I tend to think, simple "like" buttons are better, and only for registered user.

Back to topic:

I discovered PW through an "Best CMS" online poll/voting I went coming from an tweet by modx community. Somebody mentioned PW in the comments with only: "ProcessWire, like modx done right.". This caught my attention. After reading "jquery inspired" and watching the video and what it's all about I was hooked in a matter of minutes, didn't even try out the demo, just started installing and playing around. I was amazed by how simple and powerful the API was and the general approach seemed to makes all sense. I was literally thinking "Finally the CMS I was looking/wishing for since a long time appeared! It's a dream come true". Also reading through all the threads in the forums I was only confirming, that there's the right mood and philosophy towards what it should be and where it should go. Simply love PW! Can't thank Ryan enough for sharing his work, AND providing amazing support and love for the people using PW.

EDIT: Yes I found the concept of the weightlifter/ballerina so funny I couldn't stop laughing. It made my day/week!