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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/13/2013 in all areas

  1. This thread is for the new PW admin theme being developed for 2.4. Zahari and WillyC, I'm sure you guys both have good intentions, but this is not the right thread to promote other admin themes and such. We're now focused on wrapping up and fixing bugs in the new theme, not redesigning it. This is in preparation for the very soon upcoming 2.4 release. Zahari–please do keep up the good work on your theme, post to the directory, and start a thread for it, as I'm sure many of us will enjoy using it too. WillyC–please don't let that one go beyond the sketch stage. I hope you can appreciate that there's no way one could ever get everyone to have the same viewpoint on subjective things, so that is kind of pointless. The goals here have always been more about the system. Then taking that system and reducing it to the most minimal, easy-to-use implementation. All while still incrementally improving on the old theme. The consensus has been that's what we've done, even if we're still working out some bugs. We'll let others take it and run with it in creating stuff more tailored towards their own preferences and other scenarios. The biggest complaints with the old admin theme were: 1) the colors don't have broad appeal; 2) the header area used entirely too much space; 3) the fields layout was too boxes-in-boxes with excessive linework, emphasizing the containers over the inputs; 4) the type was too small. The consensus and the math has been that the new admin theme solves these issues, while appealing to a broader audience than the old theme. Keep in mind there's no way to make everyone happy, so it's entirely expected to have a hater or two (I'd be more concerned if there weren't). Also keep in mind the old admin theme has a consensus of haters, among those that don't use it every day. So it's a bottleneck when it comes to new users. Is the new theme meant to be some kind of design masterpiece? Absolutely not–it is intentionally trying to avoid making design statements, and focused on reduction to essentials (though not to the point of looking like Craigslist). When it comes to the bigger design project (PW 3.0), we'll hand this off to Felix and Phillip (and perhaps others), who have already nailed the concept. That's my opinion, but we'll seek the input of the community to decide. My experience has been that small team design=good results, community/committee design=bad results. But that's another conversation. We'll move onto talking more about that once we've got 2.4 final. Regarding the Inputfield containers: yes there are still situations where the boxes-in-boxes (emphasizing the containers over the inputs) might suit an individual installation or preference better. But there are more where it doesn't. As a result, it's not as well suited as a default (and we've already been through this to excess), but it is something we always want to offer as an option. The new admin theme system allows for configurable spacing between the Inputfield containers via a setting provided to the InputfieldWrapper. We may even make it configurable within the default admin theme at some point, but I'd rather see other themes focus on things like that. As for the typeface: Arimo vs. Arial. I agree with most with the points about Arial, and I think the arguments presented here against using any webfont make sense. As much as I like Arimo and as good as it looks on my own computer, I think we've got to revert to Arial–it makes more sense with this theme's goals and in the big picture.
    6 points
  2. festisve sasson to all from willyc i is work.on theme two bassed on majani butt many better earely preview butt two moister.hunger here u.is looks.and learn
    4 points
  3. One interesting thing about working with ProcessWire is that since you have to program in your own bells and whistles, rather than just installing some extension, it makes you pause and think whether you actually need them or not. The trouble with Drumlapress is that it is easy to just hit buttons and add things - so you do** Web design, like any sort of creative discipline, should be about the minimal. Even Van Gogh with his layers of oil was minimal - we don't know what he MIGHT have added to his pictures, but we do know that what he did put in he meant to put in. Oil painting is slower than sketching (especially for a lazy bugger like Van Gogh) and there was no way he was going to shove in anything that didn't work for its living. And so it is with ProcessWire. PW is not hard, but it requires you to actually do some work rather than hit buttons like most CMSs, and that makes the lazy ones of us take our time, keep it simple, and make sure we only put in things that actually need to be there. --------------------------------- EDIT I added two asterisks above and forgot to put why! So .... ** The situation has been slightly alleviated since, in Joomla at least, so many of the extension updates are now commercial (even some of the ones that really shouldn't be!)
    3 points
  4. it is true that the more sites you build with PW the better you get at using it and thinking in terms of a collaboration between yourself and the api, and the more you read the forum, view the source code of the profiles, modules etc, you are constantly improving and becoming less of a 'beginner', but that term also implies that PW is comparable to the big 3 (and that eventually when you are no longer a beginner you'll be able to achieve those things in the same time as you would in W/J/D), and as Ryan recently pointed out, it's really not, and probably will never be something that can be compared 1-to-1 with those fully interfaced options. The more you know about and work with PW, the more you come to realize that there really couldn't be a generic frontend user management 'module' since the needs of any such system would be unique to the business/application logic of that project. The productivity and simplicity that the clients get through having their site be 100% custom in terms of both the front and backend is really priceless, and that extra time it might take to build something custom as opposed to using a pre-built component/module/plugin pays off over and over again for years to come. I have built a lot of sites with Joomla and a few sites with Wordpress. In 90% of those sites (that are stuck on those CMS) the clients still regularly contact me to perform content management work, because as simple as they might seem to techies, they are incredibly confusing and complex for the average user especially those people who update their site only once in a long while. When i compare that to the processwire sites built for clients, the result is that none of them ever contact me for content management, they can do it themselves, none of them break their sites, or destroy the formatting or look of the pages through gross violations of the wysiwyg... so my response to your post would be of course, it would be great if someone could write those modules, but I think they would need to be subsidized... maybe start a kickstarter campaign for whichever one you think is most helpful?
    3 points
  5. You shouldn't, if you look in the forums for Willy's post, you will see how many important things he wrote already. And wouldn't be even half of the fun if it wouldn't be in Yoda language
    3 points
  6. It's unlikely a single module will provide everything everyone will need for a login/registration system, because everyone's interpretation of its requirements will be different every time. Will users use email or usernames? What other details do you need to capture about the user? What validation needs to happen on these extra fields? Do people need to validate their email addresses, or do accounts have to be approved manually? What security roles and settings need to be applied? Where do people log in? Is there going to be a "remember me" option? What happens if they forget their password? What if there's a third-party backend system that the authentication needs to tie in to? Those are just some of the considerations I can think of based on my experience of building similar bits of functionality in the past. With the frameworks and CMSs I've used, I can't remember very many of them them that have been flexible enough "out of the box" to do what I needed without having to hack where I shouldn't, or ended up with me writing my own methods to replace theirs. To pick an example. I mainly use CodeIgniter, and have done for a long time. One of the "ready-made" libraries for users is called Ion_Auth (or something like that). In every application I've written with CI, it has never been a good fit because the application demanded either much more or a lot less; or I didn't like the way it handled a certain part. The API is already there in ProcessWire, you just have to utilise it in your template files to suit the website being developed. There really isn't much to it, and because of that, any module that did try to cater for it would either only cater for a particular type of site; or it would be overly complex and force developers into its own way of working - rather than the other way round. In lots of other systems, you have to get modules and plugins for just about everything that isn't in a WYSIWYG box, because the core system is too inflexible to let you do "stuff" any other way. With ProcessWire, the API is completely open to use how you want to use it. One of the reasons I dislike Drumlapress is for the plugin-for-everything mentality. Need to split out some images in a carousel? Install plugin X. Want to put some images in a gallery page? Install another plugin Y; and never the two shall meet (because when they do, their javascripts conflict, and the back-ends are totally separate...). Several months later you might want to put some of those on a map. Oh, that will be a separate plugin Z that doesn't really work with X or Y. And then you update Drumlapress to the next version because of a major security flaw (again). Plugin X is fine, but plugin Y breaks because it's not compatible with the latest version. And then your website is broken.
    2 points
  7. Zahari Majini, I like your design, although I'm not sure that it solves the "boxes in boxes" issue that was one of the main goals of Ryan's redesign. I also don't agree with you on the contrasting colors looking fuzzy. I'm not seeing the borders with in-between colors you're referring to. I think the bigger problem with uncalibrated monitors is when using more subtle shades of gray and lower contrast areas, since many monitors will not be able to handle these nuances or will display the subtle grays as white. I'm also confused about the "tables" you're referring to. Usually extra line height in tables makes them easier to read since it is harder to mix up the lines. And outlining every cell is often unnecessary and ugly as long as data is consistently aligned (and can sometimes actually confuse things by adding too much division or not emphasizing proper groupings). That said, your tables don't look bad since the outlines aren't overbearing. Just some thoughts. From a visual standpoint I'm not "in love" with the admin redesign either, although from a functional standpoint I love it, and I do like the new field "grid" since it seems like a more flexible and clear way of laying things out. And I'm with Ryan in his philosophy of keeping the admin very simple and "unbranded". In that regard the flat design makes a lot of sense.
    2 points
  8. Bienvenu au forum icietla There are probably many workarounds for that scenario. You could create a checkbox inputfield, and check the value in your head or init.php template. If that checkbox is checked, you could do a redirect to the other language. if($page->redirectLang == 1) { $user->language = "en"; $session->redirect($page->url); } (untested)
    2 points
  9. Hi Guys! Festive mood is definitely in the air! They are playing Chirstmas songs everywhere in all the shopping centres here in Kuala Lumpur! Anyways, just want to share with you my thoughts on the current admin theme here. Quite simply put I don't like it at all and I think it's visually a step back from the old theme. Now, I would like to add that I truly believe that 99% of you here are incredibly more capable here than I am. I really struggle with all of this web stuff. It just does not come naturally to me as I am more from an engineering / electronics / audio / automotive background. So I'm more used to spanners and resistors and turntables.... not coding! Having said that, I use my Mac extensively and have purchased quite a few programs for it and so I would say that in a month, I would come across 30 different computing software interfaces. And before settling on ProcessWire, I had looked at and installed many many CMS's over many years. So, whilst I may not be technically competent to be commenting, I have enough first hand user experience to confidently say to myself that the current theme here doesn't inspire me at all. Perhaps it's just me, but when I look at tables for example, I like to see that all the cells have borders. When I see borders in some places but not others, I begin to feel that somethings broken. The line height used in the table field is excessive making it less easy to read and further reinforces the point. One thing I note that is prominent in this theme is that to create seperation between zones, strongly contrasting colors are engaged. An example would be the radiused nav tabs in the mast head. When you have such high contrasts like this, any 1px borders used become very difficult to see. Sometimes these borders end up creating a sense of blur between the two contrasting color regions and you can end up with a fuzzy look! The end result is a somewhat undefined nav setup to my eyes at least. Elsewhere in the theme these neighbouring contrasty colors dont look too good either lacking in definition. And by using the philosophy of incorporating strong color regions, what can be a lovely pair of colors on the designers screen can end up to be a really cheesy color scheme in front of thousands of end users around the world due to a world full of uncalibrated screens. On the old admin theme, the magenta bar on black that signified which nav item you were currently on or hovering over was very sharp and precise and covered the whole vertical region. So to me the current arrangement is a step back. Then there is the issue of the drop down. I may be too fussy here, but the resultant dropdown styling just doesnt match the character of the masthead nav tabs. And so it's these little things like this and the "incomplete" table stylings that all add up as you traverse the admin site and make this theme appear incoherent and unpolished and makes me feel like it's a little broken. My next issue is that the fields / panels should not be in one continuous vertical stream. They should have some spacing between them. The styling of the text, headers, content panels etc to me is also in need of some improvement as when you click edit on a page, you are smacked with this massive wall of text. To the uninitiated, they wouldn't know what is what. What is needed here is to carefully select colors, font sizes, spacing etc to try and do two things subconsciously. One, signify at a glance that there are various unique field sets on the page and make it easy to differentiate them instantly. Two, once the fielset has been identified, help funnel ones eyes into the input fields so that they can focus readily on the cursor and be able to type things in and are not bothered or distracted by any surrounding text / colors / contrasts etc. I could go on. But I'll stop here. My comments here are not to criticize. Please don't take them as crticisms as they're not meant to be. I say again, all of you are way more skilled and knowledgable and capable then I will ever be in web dev. And I can see the incredible amount of work that you guys and Ryan have put into this. So why am I bringing this up? Well, for one simple reason. ProcessWire the tool is world class. Ryans world class. You guys the community are world class. But this theme as it stands isn't world class... and I myself would like it to be world class too. Now, perhaps I am the only one who thinks that this theme, as it currently stands, sucks. There. I've said it! Maybe the rest of you and the world thinks its world class. Then that's ok. I apologise if my comments offend anyone. But I do believe that it's very important and would like to not go with popular opinion and instead truly speak my mind and try and make a difference. I'm extremely happy accepting that I am the one who is lacking here and am unable to appreciate what many people appreciate as a very fine theme. Anyways, talk is cheap. And so with my admittedly limited abilities, I have tried taking this theme in a very different aesthetic direction. Perhaps some things in it might interest you. Perhaps not. I think many of you might find it very dull, boring, uninspiring. I've spent a lot of time in WordPress admin, and so I lean more towards their styistic conventions and colors rather then the ProcessWire conventions and colors. The idea here was to create a very different starting point for ProseeWire admin themes. It is of course my hope to see the current admin theme converge towards these admitedly Wordpress inspired stylistic conventions and directions. Wishful thinking of course! But no harm right? Anyways, it's fast approaching Christmas guys. It's been a great year and I would like to wish all you fabulous guys a very merry christmas and a happy new year! I've learnt so much from many of you and would like to thank many of the regulr guys who have helped me out here. Cheers guys!
    2 points
  10. Another easy way you can upgrade from the ZIP is to unzip the archive, and copy the /site/ dir from your existing installation into it. Then delete /site-default/ and /install.php, and rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess. Upload to your web server or development environment (replacing your existing installation), and you are good to go.
    2 points
  11. yes of course, but it could seem that way to the 'beginners' who won't then be able to adapt the module to their site's logic; so i'm suggesting to have a site profile (that may include modules) where the full logic of the relations of fields-templates-modules can be studied and then reworked to the developer's needs;
    1 point
  12. You may already be aware of this, but apparently Isotope has a memory leak which the original developer's failed to address. More details and a fix are https://github.com/khiltd/isotope-leak-free
    1 point
  13. I like Drupal as out of the box working cms solution with great modules, but it uses a lot of generated source code and styles (works fine, but isn't always nice...). Some changes are difficult without a deep look at the generated html and css. Processwire is a clean and powerful framework with really great api, but you have to take care of the features and the output (html, css). That isn't a disadvantage! It's more work to do, but final you get what you want... Processwire and maybe also a lot of the modules are designed for programmers which build own applications an top of it. Maybe some ready to use modules (with configuration page, useable/ nice templates,...) could make PW even more interesting for Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress users. For example... login/ register/ reset password (frontend members) image resize filter with colorbox integration (show image as thumbnail / custom size image with link to original image inside a colorbox) tags, archive (parts for a "simple" blog module) native forum or a strong integration (for community building) I know all examples are possible and most can be found as snippets here in the forums! But beginners would be happy to get such modules ready to use from the pw module repo
    1 point
  14. There's a little bit of unnecessary code in your original post (and a bit of mixing $page and wire('pages') ) during the first two lines - you could also write it like this if it helps: $tdsphotos = $pages->find("tagsx.title=$page->title, limit=8, sort=-created"); One thing I would like to mention to everyone is that in double quotes you can to this: $page->title but not $page->somepagefield->somethingelse - as soon as you throw in the second -> (I'm not sure of the technical term!) you need to wrap the whole thing in curly braces like this: {$page->somepagefield->somethingelse} or you'll be troubleshooting it for hours like I did a few months back Alternatively you can concatenate as usual to avoid the curly braces requirement, so: $tdsphotos = $pages->find("tagsx.title=" . $page->title . ", limit=8, sort=-created");
    1 point
  15. No problem at all - happy to help. I just pushed another small update that adds a canonical link to the page if you are using the new "Load" option. This is to help identify the ID based URL as a duplicate of the proper PW url so Google etc won't penalize you for duplicate content.
    1 point
  16. I learned to appreciate PHP via frameworks (mostly CodeIgniter, but also some time with Yii, Laravel, and Symfony). More recently, I've come to appreciate CakePHP. All of those frameworks provide great power for making complex apps. But the syntax can sometimes be a bit opaque. At the same time, I was also using Joomla (with a thing called Seblod, which promises to turn Joomla into an app builder). I could not wait to drop Joomla. Then I discovered ProcessWire last fall, and right away it seemed to me that it offered the same power as the PHP frameworks, but with crystal-clear syntax. At first, I thought for sure there had to be a lack of depth for ProcessWire to be that clear, but at every turn I've found that ProcessWire provides depth very close to what's needed for most apps, while maintaining clear syntax (or to borrow a word thrown around in Laravel circles, "expressive" syntax). To me, ProcessWire immediately felt like a framework, because it makes no assumptions about how "themes" need to be constructed, and because it has nicely defined API methods for doing everything in code. Having also come from the Joomla world, and having also spent a bit of time with Drupal and WordPress, I was curious about ProcessWire positioning itself as a "CMS." As I said, it seemed to be more comparable to frameworks. Back to your point: people who just want drag-and-drop site building won't use ProcessWire very much. ProcessWire is not equivalent to that kind of system. But ProcessWire can pull in people from Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla who want to customize those "big three" CMSs and are frustrated by assumptions those systems make. I know there are a good number of people in this position in all three big CMSs. They can use ProcessWire like a framework, and get the CMS capabilities they look for. I don't know exactly what segment of the big three is represented by this description, but I know from experience they are there. Thanks, Matthew
    1 point
  17. You can use a WireArray and fill it with image objects from pages. Then get a random count from that WireArray. It's also in the cheatsheet. // new WireArray object for storing images $images = new WireArray(); // we find all pages using a specific template that have at least 1 or more images. // assumes the image field is named "myimages". If we deal with really lots of pages/images, consider using a limit to avoid performance problems $pa = $pages->find("myimages.count>0, template=basic-page, sort=random, limit=10"); // loop all found pages and import the images to the $images object foreach($pa as $p){ $images->import($p->myimages); } // output 4 random images from the wire array foreach($images->getRandom(4) as $img){ echo "<img src='{$img->url}'/><br/>"; } Reading again, and looking at Ryans code, it does pretty much the same, just little different way. Think about it again... Is there really any difference ? From: get ALL images from ALL pages and choose 6 random from them. To: get randomly 6 pages from ALL pages and choose 1 randomly from each page. I don't see really a difference, only that the second is far better and the way to go, because you limit the find for pages in the first place. Getting all images from all pages could create problems and not so scalable.
    1 point
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