epreston

That more than answers my question, and in fact is exactly what I was hoping to hear! And thanks for that bit of info about Facebook developing their own PHP - very interesting! I could tell there was some serious custom engineering behind those Facebook features, but I had no idea they want that far.

I've heard very good things about Ramnode as well.

I think I pretty much know what to expect for an answer, but I still have to ask... If, say, facebook or craigslist were only in the idea stage (not back in the day but now) could either of them be built more rapidly, smoothly and reliably upon a framework like processwire than custom-from-the-ground-up? And could the performance (traffic & bazillions of simultaneous users) of the end result be as speedy as a custom built effort? I'm certain it could get built more rapidly, but is there any price to pay on the other end if/when performance becomes an issue? Thanks, Ed

Thanks for both helpful replies! My site is Technologyexchangelab.org, a nonprofit site that collects technology that's particularly useful in mitigating problems of poverty and sustainability around the world. It's a custom-made (not by me) site built on MySQL, PHP5 and jQuery, The heart of it is a growing database of useful technical solutions, categorized in ways that make it easily searchable. We also host a growing number of articles, and lists of other resources. We would like to implement a CMS to better manage these things, although we are not looking at replacing the solutions database at this time. If we could somehow 'embed' processwire into our existing site and use it to manage our articles and lists of resources, that would be a major improvement. I looked into using Drupal, Joomla and Concrete5, but was incredibly put off by the complexity, intricacy, eccentricity and steep learning curves of Drupal and Joomla, and the dreadful slowness of some rather small sites (smaller than our own) using Concrete5. I was particularly put off by how much you have to "just know" about how each one goes about things, ie, that if you add or change something here you must also make a change there, or it simply won't work right. I spent one long night trying to create a simple article entry process in Drupal, basically enter or paste text and upload a picture, and it just plain wouldn't work right no matter what I did, and if it had worked right, what other things would I have to suffer through just to get it to post these articles to our web site as embedded content w/o having to port the whole dang site into Drupal (or Joomla)... yuck. The point on Perch is well taken. If we got it doing exactly what we wanted, who's to say that sometime in the near future a request to extend functionality might leave us trying to get Perch to do something it wasn't designed for. So, if I knew that we'd never need more than Perch, that's what we'd use, but since we don't know that, I think processwire looks like the better and most easily implemented solution for us. Thanks again,. Ed

I need a CMS that can be integrated with an existing web site which happens to be a nonprofit and supported by a small and enthusiastic group of people. We do not either want or need to rebuild the site, what would be *ideal* is if we could install a simple cms that, besides creating whole pages and other content, can also edit existing content by simply logging in, opening the "file" (or whatever you want to call the hunk of content you want to change), making the changes, and, wala, that's it, you're done. So, the simple question is... is this something that can be done using Processwire w/o difficulty? If so, that would be GREAT since, although Perch would be fine for the task described above, that's *all* it does, and I anticipate possibly needing some of the additional power of Processwire, so that if anyone says, that's nice, now can we do this meaning something beyond what Perch can do but Processwire can easily do. Thanks very much, Ed