ChiefPundit

@Joss, like I said the best way to sell PW, is to demo a test backend/ front-end website with a client and allow him/ her to play with it. If they say they like WP, then they will know better when they use PW. Most of the fear in folks is in the mind and this is the best way to tackle it. There are other things that systems such as WP have going for them though: >> An ecosystem of themes and theme designers/ developers which make for selling templated websites and lowering costs >> An extensive set of plug and play plugins which too lowers costs >> Entire verticals such as schools, doctors, restaurants, hotels, etc, covered via plugins/ themes >> An extensive and exhaustive set of 3rd party integrators and vendors for virtailly anything you want to do with it >> Sheer number of users, developers, clients who add so much weight to swing opinion in WPs favor >> Tutorials, how tos, ebooks, marketers who recommend it in/ as part of their work Hopefully, as PW matures and more agencies and professional embrace it, we should see installation profiles, recipes and plugins adding to make the system popular. I am not sure whether theming can be done in advance like the other CMSs in PW, because everything is custom-built within it. The alternative is to package themes with the an installation profile itself. Drupal themers such as themesnap do this already. We will have to deal with these issues, should they come up, effectively with whatever logic we can summon. Well, the other way of looking at all this is there is opportunity in PW to create all this for many of us:-)

As someone who has been using WP, Joomla and Drupal before Processwire, to build a variety of websites across industries, here's my take on this: Wordpress is good as a one time solution to the problem. Problems can occur when a client comes back to you, 2 years after you have developed the website, asking for additional functionality. Example, please add woocommerce to the site. This means the website needs to be upgraded to the latest WP version; the theme will surely break after the upgrade and would need to be fixed; you then add woocommerce and theme it anew to fix the site. This is as good as redoing the whole thing. The same problem exists in Joomla and Drupal too to a greater or lesser degree The issue of creating a custom solution for the client, as @joss has mentions above, exists with Joomla and WP. You are always working around modules, plugins and code to create. The result is always an inelegant solution. Eg: This content piece comes from modules/ widgets. That piece comes from content area. The other page comes from K2 and so on. The content on a page comes from different places on the backend with most of these systems and that's counter-intuitive. Clients will find this difficult to understand without some practice. PW is so much more elegant, easier and intuitive for both the developer and the user. Everything can be made logical and sensible in PW. The biggest problem is bloat caused by too many plugins: bloat in code, bloat in css, bloat in js. Drupal is a beast. WP and Joomla, don't lag behind. Followed by breaks caused by plugin/JS incompatibility and the time required to fix these in these systems. I recently trained a client on a system built with PW. It took all of 20 minutes. For WP, I have to gives a long lecture on posts and pages and the difference between them. I have to explain widgets and demonstrate which elements in a page come from where. As mentioned elsewhere in this forum, WP/ Joomla/ Drupal are safe bets for clients. One way to explain the benefits of PW perhaps is to demo the client a test site which you have and ask him/ her to poke around, or guide the person through it in all of 20 minutes. Perhaps you could have a WP site too to contrast the ease of PW. That should seal the deal.

Ivan, always happy to oblige:-) The backend is not customized. It uses the Modesta Theme which we felt was a tad better than the default. We were under tight time pressures to launch the site and decided to skip any backend customization. For the time being, permissions are just for backend admin - web, magazine editorial. There was an idea we had mooted with roles for users who submit photos, but because of the launch deadline, we have deferred that bit for Phase 2. I am appending a screenshot of the backend, just to show you what we have done. The Block-System that you see, is for organizing the Home Page content. It has 3 regions [left, middle, right], very similar to Drupal's regions, in the template. Within each region, post excerpts can be added by the admin for control of the Home Page content. Magazines and Web Editorial, are organized by month. Trust that answers your questions.

Pete, I reckon all what you have stated are the reasons why so many of us have gravitated to Processwire. I did a bit of scouting before we ended with Processwire. The search was for light, fast systems [coming from Joomla, WP, Drupal that was necessary] as we had enough problems building large sites with those CMS. And what I read and saw about PW here was promising. We started with one programmer who was briefed to experiment with it and within a week he was going ga ga over PW. We then took it forward to the entire team. Now, we have 10 of them working on Processwire, on various projects. PW is the choice CMS at Pigtail Pundits, replacing WordPress and the occasional Drupal project. It has given the team here new energy and fresh possibilities and that's remarkable in itself. May it continue in absolute abundance, for PW, and for the entire community behind this remarkable system.

Thanks a ton Pete for the on-page links. I'd forgotten that bit when I wrote the post. Just to clarify. We didn't build the whole site in Drupal. We had started in earnest on it. We had a few content types ready, one entire magazine was inputted, the gallery was tested and some social stuff such as Instagram and Facebook were being experimented with. We had also gone ahead with some styling on Drupal for the demo. It was after all this that we decided to switch to Processwire. Data Entry came much later, as you've guessed. Processwire is simply remarkable for sites like these. The key things for the team here were: >> Easy to understand and work with [learning curve compared to other CMS is negligible] >> Fast [no code bloat] >> Flexible for both programming and theming >> Scalable, for publisher/user driven content sites as in National Geographic Traveller India I guess that we were also lucky in that we had this wonderful project to work on, were experimenting with Processwire at that precise time, and then decided to shift to Processwire from Drupal. That's one heck of a karmic combination of events. Will check the 404 bit, thanks.

Thank you Christophe. I shall check out MailerLite.

Thanks Manaus. Will add RSS.

Got that Ivan. Will check and correct. Thank you very much.