I discovered Wireframe on Sunday after exploring the GitHub repo for the ProcessWire Composer Installer project that you mentioned in the latest PW Weekly. The documentation you've written for Wireframe is just awesome ? - engaging, comprehensive and clear.
I have a short question and a long question...
Does it make sense to use Wireframe together with Markup Regions in any way, or would a developer choose Wireframe or Markup Regions but not both?
The long question relates to what you said here:
I take this to be a reference to the superiority of a MVC approach versus the "default" approach of mixing business logic and UI logic together in a PW template file. I'd like to hear more of your views on this because you didn't talk about it much in the documentation, probably because MVC and the separation of concerns is discussed in plenty of other places around the web. But I was wondering if you think a MVC approach is always the way to go, or if is something you would weigh up the pros and cons of taking into account the parameters of each specific project, e.g. the scale and complexity of the project, if a team will be working on the project, etc.
Personally I use Markup Regions and don't use any separation of business logic and UI logic into different files or folders. From time to time I think about changing to an MVC approach because so many people seem to recommend it, but when I weigh it up I don't see enough advantage versus disadvantage for the kinds of projects I work on. But maybe I'm overlooking something so I'd appreciate your comments.
The main benefits of MVC as I understand it are...
1. If you have a team of people working on a project, maybe with different skill sets (e.g. a front-end dev and a back-end dev), then it lets each person focus on the parts that matter to them. For example the front-end person can focus on the view file without having to see any business logic which might distract or even be unintelligible to them. This totally makes sense to me and if I worked as part of a team this by itself would make an MVC approach worthwhile. But in my case I do everything alone from start to finish - design, front-end, back-end.
2. The business logic doesn't "belong" in the same file as the markup - it's better to keep it separate and it makes it easier to update a site. This seems more contentious to me, and perhaps depends on how much business logic there is. If I have some variable that I'm using within the markup I find it very handy to have the definition/construction of that variable present alongside its usage in output. So I'm not left wondering "what was it that I put into $related_products?" and needing to navigate to some other file to find out.
Now if there were heaps of business logic it might start to feel like clutter within the markup, but when I look at the template files for my projects in most cases there's actually very little business logic present. Maybe that's partly because PW is quite elegant in that you can do a lot with a few lines of code, and partly because most of my projects are not very complex. But even if I do have a lot of business logic I find that placing it at the top of the template file is no problem at all. If I need to work on it I'd rather just scroll up than open another file, and I can use my IDE to collapse any blocks of code that I don't need to focus on. Would you say that MVC is an approach that is more suited to complex projects rather than simple ones?
Things like layouts and partials that are offered through Wireframe are cool, but those are also possible with Markup Regions (layout = _main.php) and built-in PW methods (partials = $files->render).
I have no doubt that Wireframe is a powerful tool, but do you see it as being the right solution for all projects or just some projects?