argos

Yeah, I appreciate Ryan's feedback, as well as the others. Although I may sound a bit locked in my own vision to some people, it all actually makes me rethink me own expectations about this system, and more important: my current and future situation and livelyhood. So thanks for making me have a small existential crisis, LOL BTW Personally I don't like Wordpress at all, so I don't hope anyone suspects me of being a Wordpress fan, heaven forbid. @Nico: Did your father use the default or the Argos backend?

Interesting. When I mention "user", I mean in fact the user of the platform, so the website builder. For me a developer=coder=programmer. So the user can be someone like me (good skills in HTML/CCS, decent skills in graphics and jQuery, minor skills in PHP, experience with all kind of CMS's), or a developer/coder/programmer, or someone who just installs a CMS for fun and tinkers around with it, etc. So a "user" is someone who uses the software to create a site, whatever his or her background and situation. The person who just handles content, I would call an "end user", or "client". So the person(s) the site is built for, who hired the site creator (the "CMS user") to create it. But I agree it's just as valid to call the end user (content admin) the "user". Based on my experiences with other CMS's I have a feeling that end users will find the PW admin more confusing and difficult than WebsiteBaker (which has the easiest admin I know), and just as easy or confusing as Wordpress or Joomla. But I cannot make any valid statement about that since I never built a real site with PW. But persoanlly, when I talked about usability and user friendlyness I had the sitebuilder in mind, not the end user.

Now a real reply. I seem to have stepped on some toes here and there. Sorry about that. I certainly don't mean to be "deliberately unfair" as Diogo says. I have the utmost respect for you non-coding guys to learn how to use PW and PHP along the way. However, it's a well known psychological phenomenon for people to justify past efforts as being neccessary. But having to learn a fair bit of coding along the way should not be a justification for possible unneeded difficulties in PW. That's what I meant. I certainly don't criticise anyone here. But I do feel PW could be more usable for non-devs, so that initial and basic stuff is indeed more low level. Leaving the coding for complex, higher level stuff. And yes, I know it's fair to say that learing low level stuff is needed before higher level stuff. So, every point of view has its merits. I also appreciate all support that is given to me and other newcomers in this forum. But maybe I am unlike other newcomers who either become PW fans themselves, or are leaving without bothering any further. I try to tell my point of view in the hope that it will be of some use and PW will become more what I had expected, instead of just leaving. Maybe that's annoying to PW lovers, coming across like someone who is criitsizing PW without putting effort in it and expecting PW doing it the Argos way, instead of myself doing it the PW way I do understand that. So again: sorry for any "unfairness" you might feel from what I say or how I see it. Be assured it's not meant that way.

Damn. does anyone else has problems with this forum software? I have lost a reply I was working on 4 times already today. Suddenly the screen only shows page not found type of error, and everything's gone. Going back with the browser button or reload doesn't help. Really annoying. And also: how do you guys use quotes? When clicking the quote button nothing happens with me. No quotes are visible, just an empty field. I can enter manual quote thingies, but that doesn't have the users ID and time line, and the content of the quote itself. OK, let's post this before it's lost too.

Nope, other systems I worked with the last 12 years orso never forced me to code to use available content types. Only deviating from the default content types required coding sometimes. but most of the times plugins/modules/addons/snippets perfectly did what I wanted. The majority of my website work is frontend work, not database related coding stuff. That's why I use a CMS after all, to not be bothered with that:-) As it turned out to be, PW is not the ready to use CMS with tons of extras for developers that I thought it was. It's a developers framework that may be used to some extent by some non-coders as well if they are willing to (learn to) use code. That's not the same, and my only suggestion is make this difference more clear on the site. Or to do something to make it more usable for non-coders as well (without affecting the possibilities for coders). Nothing more, nothing less.

I feel we're running in circles... For the last time I will try to sum up my point of view. Not to keep "complaining", but to make myself clear, as I feel I get reponses that don't match what I said. 1. I agree disappointment has two sides: expectations about the system and the system itself. Based on what I had read and my own skills, my testing week with PW has led to some kind of disappointment. Not in PW itself (which seems to be more powerful than I will even know), but in what I had expected based on what I had read. 2. I had expected a powerful framework/platfom/CMS for COMPLEX tasks, PLUS some sort of easy way of working with PW (or ready to use functions) for mundane tasks like creating pages, blogs, galleries, forms. As it turned out to be the second assumption is not true (although a lot of experienced PW users seem to disagree with this, but that is in hindsight, and many times people tend to forget or justify past struggles and efforts). 3. Therefore I propose to EITHER add some way of ready to use module-like way of simply creating regular content types like page, news/blog, galley and form to build a regular semi-static type website that powers most of the internet. OR to not do that and deliberately aim for (pseudo) coders that are willing and capable of starting from zero by creating a site with PHP/PW from scratch. I did not and do not propose to low level PW into some 1-2-3-click website for non-sitebuilders, as some have suggested. I just suggest that PW takes a stand on what is wants to be, and take actions according to that. Should it be a CMS that even non-dev website builders coming from other CMS's can use for creating run of the mill sites without coding? Then it should have more or less ready to use regular content type thingies. Should it be a developer platform, that even could be used by non-devs who are willing to learn to code to some extent? Then this should be better made clear on the site. Now it's a developer platform that suggest it's also a ready to use CMS, besides a platform. It's not. And that may lead to disappointment for some beginners, and also to annoyment for experienced users that see non-coding newbies enter the forums with questions and support requests that could have been prevented.

I am not complaining at all, nor do I think PW should be a system for non-website builders, nor am I such a person myself. Please don't feel attacked if I have some criticsm about your favorite tool. My aim was to help PW forward by telling what I as a non-coder would like to see, and what I miss in PW from my own perspective. However, the typical response I get from most hardcore users is some form of passive attack: "It's you. PW is great, and you just should put more effort in it, and that you will see the light". Well maybe. But that's not the issue. The issue is that I don't WANT to have to put effort in it to create even a simple site. But if Ryan and other contributors decide not to put effort in making PW more easy for creating basic websites, that's fine. Hey, it's your product. My only advise is to make your position on this more clear on your site, and not market PW as you do now. I really thought PW was another kind of platform than it turned out to be, and I based that on the information on the website.

That's why I added to last paragraph I totally respect and understand any decison regarding the targeted users for PW. But it appears there are different opinions about the (real or perceived) "status" of PW with regards to "usability for non-devs". Hm.. I don't think that's good English. But I hope you know what I mean. Right now PW is targeted at devs and "aspiring amateur devs". Which is fine. But it would be good to make that perfectly clear on the site, and explicitly state that you HAVE to do some sort of (real or pseudo) coding to build a site with PW. That saves you guys also from annoying newbie questions in the forums, who thought that PW is an alternative for systems like WP, Joomla, WebsiteBaker, CMS Made Simple, etc.

The learning curve would be even lower if there was no need for documentation for simple tasks at all. In my opinion any CMS should aim for such high usability standards that creating a simple site with pages, news/blog, forms, and gallery, based on a default install should be possible without having to learn anything that is beyond general content creation standards. That is what a user friendly CMS is about in my opinion: making it easy to do core content creation without having to study. I am not talking about learning to find your way around in a new admin, but I mean having to really study because otherwise you cannot figure out how to create basic content. Of course PW can choose to be a system for devs, and add some form of threshold on purpose, by not making it easy for non-dev beginners. Offering a system that requires a decent amount of effort to even begin with basic stuff, would be a valid decision. But that should be made very clear on the website. Texts like "ProcessWire is designed to have an approachable simplicity [...]. From the surface, there is very little complexity and the application requires no training" are simply not true, reading it from a general public's point of view.

@Martijn From my own experience 90% of the sites I make are for entrepeneurs and small businesses. They need the four things I already mentioned a couple of times: 1. regular pages: title, content, image(s), maybe downloads 2. news/blog: title, intro, content, image(s), maybe downloads, categories 3. image galleries: thumb, lightbox, maybe description, categories 4. forms I think this is the basis for the majority of websites. More complex stuff can be done by coding, snippets, modules, etc. @Diogo I'm sure it doesn't lead to frustration if you communicate the nature of PW clearly on the website. It's a framework where you need to do some coding yourself if you want more than the basics. But to get beginners going, there are some basic thingies more or less ready to use. A whole lot of users will probably settle for that if it covers their needs. If they need more, then there's some work to be done.

Joss, you interprate things much more complex than they should be. Some posts above you posted a link to a tutorial on creating a simple gallery. Why not offer this as a ready to use thingy? Maybe add a bit more to it, but nothing fancy. If people want more, than can do that. Just offer the basics, that's what I am talking about. It doesn't matter how it is constructed, just give beginners something to start with, and tell them that it's just an example, one way of doing it. It doesn'need "support", as it's just a sample of working with PW, and those things are constantly discussed in the forums anyway. I really don't understand the resistance towards offering some elementary ready to use content types or functionalities. It doesn't matter if there are zillions other ways to do things. Why should everyone invent the wheel themselves? To learn the system? PW is not an educational system, it's a CMS (or whatever you cal it). Learning how to code is not the purpose of PW, is it?

Joss, I think there is some misunderstanding here. Maybe it's my misunderstanding of PW. You talk about a complex layer on top of PW that needs support, monitoring, upgrading, etc. I don't envision that either when I talk about adding (in any form whatsoever) some core functionalities (which is not the same as adding functionalities to the core!!) to PW so that non-devs can build general sites with it too. Nothing more, nothing less. All PW fans here keep saying that adding these yourself is soooo easy, so why not offer them right away to beginners? It doesn't affect PW in any way. It just adds some comfort for those whose coding skills are low, or simply are not interested in coding in the first place. I don't see any negative impact for PW as a system at all. As far as I understand site profiles are some kind of complete site setups, right? Very nice if you want all the functions and layouts of that profile. But what if I want only pages and a blog? Or pages, a blog and a form? Or pages and a form and a gallery? Then I need to deconstruct the profile, making it a much more cumbersome and error prone way of working than the other way round (adding the functions I want to a basic install or existing PW site).

@pwired Yes, it's a returning topic. And that means something, don't you think? Apparently there are two major groups of users. Why not try and cater for both groups? Any CMS that manages to close the "gap" between these groups has a big advantage. Coders do not have so much to gain from closing this gap, as do non-coders. And furthermore, they may be afrraid that hordes of newbies flood the forums with please-hold-my-hand-creating-a-site-about-my-pet-rabbit requests, or that catering for non-devs means a decrease in flexibility and "cleaniness". That causes reluctance to try and cater more for non-dev users. But I think the value PW improves if both devs and non-devs can use it for their goals. Right now, it's more a developers tool than a general purpose site building CMS. Which is fine in itself. But expanding the user base by improving usability for non-devs could mean a big boost to the value of this system as a whole.

It seems some devs are afraid that improving usability is quivalent to decreasing power and flexibility. In my opinion these things should and could go hand in hand, and are intrinsically not contradictory.

Guys, thanks for all the comments, hints, tips and encouragement to keep on trying. I appreciate that. Reading back I also notice I was rather grumpy last night. Sorry about that, I should not engage in these kind of forum discussions in the middle of the night. Being very tired I have a tendency to be much blunter than I normally am. Some people made the remark that modern website creation often involves some form of coding, more than 5 to 10 years ago. That's true, and indeed at the heart of my frustration. While my general site building skills have improved with the demands of the market, my coding skills lag behind. So the discrepance between what I CAN and what I WANT is becoming bigger. What I want is the more or less ready to use functionality of a CMS like WebsiteBaker, Joomla or Wordpress, combined with the flexibility and power of PW. My first impression was that I would be able to create custom stuff pretty easily, but after trying for a week orso I was disappointed. Partly in myself and my lacking skills, partly in my expectations that turned out to be too high (in relation to my skills), and partly in PW because a number of things are really not user friendly (enough) in my opinion. I do feel that PW could benefit from having ready to use functions/modules/profiles/whatever-you-call-them that can be regarded as absolute core functions of any website: regular pages, blog/news, form, gallery. I'm not talking about time management, full blown ecommerce, forum, or anything fancy like that. No one expects that in a core CMS setup. Just the basic stuff to build any regular informational website, like a typical small business website. It's not important if that would be part of the core, or separate addons, they just need to be readily avaliable without having to heavily edit underlying code. I don't see why that would harm PW as a developers framework. That aside, I do feel I need to PW another go, if I have the time. All comments have given me a new impulse to try again to overcome my own current limitations.

You guys keep repeating that you must be "willing to learn". As if it were that simple. If you don't have coding abilities, you will never leanr, no matter how hard you try. I have been trying to learn PHP for the last 10 years. My skill are still VERY limited. I can only tweak some stuff by trial and error. I just don't have the ability for it. I never understood math on school either, no matter how hard I studied and tried. Man, I wish with all my heart I could code. My life as website creator would be som much easier. But the truth is, I am limited by my ability. Not by lazyness or unwillingness to learn PHP. I am not blaming anyone for creating a tool for developers. But I think I understand enough of PW to see that with a little extra work by the devs, PW could be so much more than just a coder tool. Just some basic built-in allround functions like news, blog, pages and forms is needed to transform it from a developers thing, to an allround CMS with a giant bonus for anyone who can and wants to code. Making this valid observation ridiculous by asking sarcastically if PW also should have a forum, ecommerce and a tax system is not a very helpful attitude. The subject of this topic is making it more user friendly, not making it more dev friendly. Unless you think PW is only for devs. In that case you can close this topic, as I said before, and you can feel all warm and fuzzy about yourself being clever enough to understand this system.

The topic subject was how to make PW more user friendly. There are valuable suggestions given. But you simply sweep them from the table, because users "should learn a bit of code". This is why I find it often so hard to really communicate with coders. They often look down on non-coders. You really think that people who cannot code, are simply too lazy to learn, do you? I had hopes PW would become a major player in the field of both small and large complex sites, but it seems I was wrong. It's a coders' tool. And it seems like some influencial people here go to great lenghts to keep it that way. Too bad.

@Norbert: Spot on, this is exactly my opinion too. Except for the analogy with TemplateMonster packages. I don't think it's wise to follow that path, because of the negative aspects you mention yourself. But it should be possible to incorporate Regular Page, News/Blog, Forms, Gallery functionality into the core, that won't break after upgrades. Styling should be done apart from the core. @Diogo: Norbert is talking about a new user who is not a developer who likes to dive into code ocean to get wet. He is refering to ordinary users who want to build sites, who have enough HTML/CSS, etc skills to do so, but only lack coding skills. I agree with him that PW should offer at least some standard basic fetaures, ready to rock and roll. And be able to get up a site without much ado. En when he wants, there are many options to explore. It's just not user friendly to offer a CMS or framework where a new user is confronted with a blank slate and tons of options, but all must be build by himself, based on hundreds of scattered information chunks on forums, and websites. It's not that PW will decrease in value for developers, if non-devs are also catered for. If you want to get them on board, you need to give them a big hand. Unless you are perfectly happy with the status of having built a very cool and powerful, but also very complex system, that is only really usable by coders. In that case you can lock this topic right away.

Pete, you have valid arguments, and I see your reasoning. However, in my opinion PW in its current state is only usable for devs and aspiring devs (people who like to put real time and effort into learning the system, AND who have the capabilities for it). Let's take myself as an example. I have been commercially building websites since 2002, and have used and tried MANY platforms, as well as hand coded HTML/CSS, etc. I do have a very basic grasp of PHP code, but only to edit simple stuff, and doing things by trial and error, and with lots of help from forum users. But I am not a coder. I regret that, I would love to have better coding skills. But I just don't have the mind for it, it's too abstract. I can try and try, but my level won't ever improve. I have tried PW for a week, spending about 30 hours with it in total. I was excited (and still am), but got frustrated in the end, because of the mismatch between my skills and capabilities, and the way current PW works. I don't want to build my own CMS, I want all basic stuff more or less ready to use, and an easy way of working with (let's call it) custom fields. PW doesn't offer what I want and what I can handle right now. So I'm working with Joomla+K2 right now. It does everything I need fairly simply, although Joomla has its fair share of user unfriendlisness too, as most of us know. But it's very powerful and flexible, and there are many addons and themes. And for me those aspects are more important right now than the promises of PW. I can imagine there are many more people like me. All people who could be potential PW users if the system would evolve a bit more into a ready to use system, besides the power it has for devs.

I am not sure about different installation profiles, as they are limiting. And PW's strength is supposed to be "unlimitedness". Most websites are general sites, that need regular pages, and news/blog, and photo galleries, contact forms, etc. So I think the PW core should offer built-in modules like that. Or they should be available as ready to use plugins. The only way a CMS will be seen as a usable system for both individuals and small businesses, is when it is a complete system. You should be able to install it, and create regular pages, news, blogs, forms, and photo pages right away. You should not have to build basic stuff like that yourself. This is the absolute basis. The added value of PW will be all the custom stuff that's possible for the more technically inclined users, and devs. Corporate use will probably need more power than that. But if you want to cater for individuals and small biz besides corporations, you will have to get the basis more user friendly and ready-to-use than the current state. However, I think PW is a very exciting product, and I have high hopes for continued development to make it more accessible, more allround ready-to-use, and more user friendly.

[Maybe a somewhat off-topic reply] I would not call PW an Enterprise or Business CMS in this stage. I would not even call it an allround or general CMS at this stage. In my opinion it's purely a developers' CMS. I understand enough about the PW concept to understand why developers are psyched about it. It's a very promising concept indeed. I see it as a concept system, and not a real-world CMS yet. I know, I know, you can create real-world sites with it, but you have to be a developer. A real one, who can code, and can think very abstract. Someone who actually likes things to be abstract. Fired by my initial enthousiasm some time ago, when I discovered PW, I spent quite time trying to get my head around this system. I failed. I read all relevant forum posts, and support info. But still I failed. I was able to create a simple semi-static site after a while. But I would not need PW for that. I can use Wordpress or WebsiteBaker or Joomla or whatever. I got very frustrated trying to build a basic blog-site, even with the help of the semi-ready blog module I got frustrated about the complexity of it all. I also got frustrated about everything being called a page. I know the reasoning behind it, yet I think it's a user unfriendly concept that is already enough to stop PW in its tracks when it comes to widespread use. There are many usability shortcomings in PW that make it unsuitable for general use, let alone Enterprise use. It's an infant system, when it comes to allround features, plugins, and usability.It will not appeal to many people except coders and devs. That's not enough to make more than a dent in the current CMS landscape. I am not a developer. I am an experienced website builder, and I think PW is way too abstract and too cumbersome for people like me. My clients would even fail to understand 90% of the low level PW stuff I know now. I simply could not offer this system to clients, even if I would understand it completely myself. I keep an eye on PW, and I hope many of it's usability issues will be fixed in the coming years. Right now I use Joomla/K2 if I need a CMS with easy custom fields option. For a semi-static site I use WebsiteBaker, and for a typical straightforward blog either Joomla or (heaven forbid) Wordpress. PW an Enterprise CMS? Only if all people who work with it are coders. And those chances are very low. Sorry for the negativism, I'm still excited about PW, but it's not a suitable general or business CMS in the real world right now. I hope it will be someday.

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear enough. What I meant was, what is the difference between the modules "Hannacode" and "Shortcode"? These are two different shortcode type modules. http://modules.processwire.com/modules/process-hanna-code/ http://modules.processwire.com/modules/markup-shortcodes/

By the way, what's the difference between Hannacodes and shortcodes?

To make PW more user friendly (especially for non-coders) I think it would be best to create a Hannacode subsection in the Modules section on the regular PW site. Personally I think regular users should not be send to some Github page, as it is far too technical, intimidating, and therefore unfriendly environment for non-coders. Hannacodes are (as far as I can tell, as a newer than new newbie) ready to use code snippets and as such could be offered on the regular site.

Mr-fan, you're right, the PW Hanna system seems to be very like the "WB-droplets" we are familiar with, coming from WebsiteBaker. There is even an integration with the editor, called HannaCodeHelper. Check it out in the Modules repo.