Rebuilding the ProcessWire.com website (part 5)

This week we’ll take a quick look at last week’s new master version launch and then discuss the status of the new ProcesssWire.com website currently in development.

A smooth launch for the new master version

Last week we released new master version 3.0.123 and everything has been going smoothly. There haven’t been any GitHub reports of issues specific to this version thus far. If that continues for another week then there likely won’t be any further master version increments next week, and we’ll get back to updates and additions on the dev branch.

Another launch: new website for 2019

In addition to last week’s master version, one of the goals for 2018 has been to launch the new ProcessWire.com website. There aren’t many days left! But I’m still aiming for that, and I need some help. I’m trying to launch on the 1st, but the kids are out of school and home, so if not on the 1st, I’ll be happy just to get it launched sometime next week.

I did go ahead and create a homepage, as I didn’t think there was time to commission someone else to do it until 2019. And likely that’s what we’ll do in 2019. But for the sake of getting online by January 1st (or as close to it as possible), I’m going with what I’ve got. We can always change it later, and likely will.

While I've got something for the homepage that I think is working well, I’m not going to post a screenshot of it, because that takes all the fun out of it. I’ve already shown you everything else in screenshots. It’s not fancy and not particularly unique or interesting, but is I think (hopefully) an improvement over the current one. You'll have to let me know post-launch.

Once the whole site is live, some of you may be interested in redesigning some or all of it, and that’s great, I invite the collaboration. But in the interest of time, I just wanted to do everything I could with it first, and then let the community have at it, where there is interest.

There's another factor too. All of you get to design/develop websites all of the time, which is what I love to do too (second only to developing ProcessWire). It recently occurred to me that 2018 is the first year in about 15 years that I hadn't design/developed any websites. Somehow nearly a year had passed and I'd not had any full website projects come my way. I'd been so busy working on ProcessWire and related projects that I hadn't even thought about it, until recently. I'm in this business because I like building websites, and it's important that I keep doing that, so I thought it was important that I built this one before the year was up.

One of the visual elements in the homepage is my iMac (something that looks like it at least), as a frame for screenshots, or a GIF screencast. But I’m having trouble finding the right screenshot that really captures ProcessWire. Here’s what I’ve got right now, and maybe it’ll work temporarily, but it's not great.

Ideally I’d like to find a screenshot (or screenshots) that really captures ProcessWire better. Maybe it should show not just the admin, but also a compelling front-end of the site being developed, and maybe (maybe?) even a PhpStorm or Sublime editor editing a template file, so the whole development environment is in view. Just ideas. But I’d like to know what you think, and if any of you have any ideas or could perhaps make a screenshot that you think might work better than mine?

Here is a higher resolution version of that iMac frame above—feel free to overlay your own screenshot(s) on top of it if you’d like to experiment. I appreciate any thoughts or ideas you have. The iMac frame doesn’t necessarily have to stay either, though it does seem to work well in the current design, even if it looks a little generic outside of it.

Another option that might work would be a GIF screencast that fits in that iMac frame (or some other frame) and demonstrates using the ProcessWire admin. But what to show? There’s so many possibilities. Just a screenshot seems likely more realistic to have this launched by January 1. But a GIF screencast definitely could be interesting here too, if not now then later.

Quotes

I’m using quotes from ProcessWire users in the new homepage (and elsewhere), as kind of testimonials between the different sections. These are short 1-3 sentence quotes, mostly that I found in past ProcessWire Weekly “Site of the week” sections. But I need more. If you have any quotes, would like to write a quote, or know of any existing quotes that might be worthwhile, please let me know. As examples, here are some that I’m currently using for placement (all via PW Weekly):

The end client and designer love the ease at which they can update the website. Training beyond how to log in wasn’t even necessary since ProcessWire’s default interface is straightforward. —Jonathan Lahijani

We were really happy to build our new portfolio website on ProcessWire! We wanted something that gave us plenty of control on the back-end, without any bloat on the front end - just a nice, easy to access API for all our content that left us free to design and build however we liked. —Castus, web design agency in Sheffield, UK

We chose ProcessWire because of its excellent architecture, modular extensibility and the internal API. The CMS offers the necessary flexibility and performance for such a complex website like superbude.de. ProcessWire offers options that are only available for larger systems, such as Drupal, and allows a much slimmer development process. —xport communication GmbH

…building with ProcessWire was a breeze, I really love all the flexibility the system provides. I can’t imagine using any other CMS in the future. —Thomas Aull

Indeed, if ProcessWire can be considered as a CMS in its own right, it also offers all the advantages of a CMF (Content Management Framework). Unlike other solutions, the programmer is not forced to follow the proposed model and can integrate his ways of doing things. —Guy Verville, Spiria Digital Inc.

If we could quote you, what would you say about ProcessWire? Please reply here.

After launch

After the new site is launched, we’ll be working on updates to the forums. Though because the new design is very similar to the current one, likely very few updates will be necessary (probably just the top navigation area, and maybe the footer).

Pete was also working on a really cool feature that can show your logged-in forum information and notifications in the top right corner of the new site design (under the navigation), so that’s something we’ll be looking at as well after launch.

Related sites like the modules directory and the developer directory will start to get in focus after the main site is launched and everything is working.

Despite working on this new site for nearly a couple of months now, I’m still finding sections of content that need updating. There’s just a lot of content. So while I think I’ve got most of it covered, I’ll be continuing to update content after the launch.

I’m also continuing to tag and categorize content in several areas, so the cross references aren’t complete at this stage, and will continue to be populated post-launch.

Thanks for reading and I hope that you all have a Happy New Year this coming week! The next blog post you read here will hopefully be on the new site. Check in at the ProcessWire Weekly for the latest news and updates too.

I've finished migrating the comments to the new site, so have disabled them for now so that I don't have to migrate them again. As a result, if you'd like to leave a comment, please post to this thread in the forums instead.