raydale

Hi Wes Welcome to ProcessWire. I - like you - have used WordPress as my main CMS recently (as well as Drupal). WordPress is great as a blogging system but lacks some of those features out-of-the-box that are standard features in a CMS. The trouble is - the necessary plugins to add those CMS features can be of very variable quality. As you indicate, there is still a fair bit of custom coding needed even when the necessary plugins are installed. WP is very much focused upon blogging and CMS features are not such a priority for it. I could be wrong but I can't imagine that changing anytime soon due the company that provides the core devs for it being a focused blog service platform. The security aspect of WordPress also concerns me. Not that it's core is particularly insecure - but more because of those necessary plugins being so variable in quality that they potentially open holes. Also, because it is so popular it has become a big target for hackers. PW fits my needs almost perfectly and I'm so glad I came across it recently. It sits very well in that area between the ease of use and underpowered features that WP provides and the rediculously complex but equally powerful Drupal. I just love the fact that PW gets out of my way and doesn't assume it knows better than me by writing my markup and CSS for me (here's looking at you Drupal) - I just get pure clean data! You'll find the community here really friendly and helpful, the development of PW is pretty rapid from what I've seen, It's also a fairly young CMS framework and yet seems rock solid and stable in most aspects.

@Apeisa this looks great! The more I am getting into PW at the moment the more I am seeing that an eCommerce solution seems to be one of the last large pieces of functionality that PW lacks at the moment. Practically everything else is possible (okay - Forums might be another one but there are many more us cases for eCommerce). For what it's worth I really like the way you are going about it, by building a simple set of functionality and then expanding over time. So many eCommerce systems out there try to do everything and end up being buggy and bloated - therefore doing nothing well. Are you planning a simple PayPal gateway to serve common needs or are you leaving this up to the individual to build these gateways? I should get some time to test this module over the next week or two and can help with anything up to the point of programming (coding is something I'm not particularly good at).

It's been a while - sorry for that! I have just tested this module again in a live setup (I was previously testing on a localhost setup). I am still getting this 'problem' where upon installing the module 'Import Pages from CSV' I am simply returned to the module information screen with a highlighted message saying: 'Click to your 'Setup' page to start using the CSV Importer'. I am given no clue as to having to change the 'Process' dropdown for that module setup page in the page tree. I take it this isn't the designed behaviour? My localhost testing environment is (if any of this helps) a MAMP installation using PHP 5.3.2 and my live site setup is an Apache installation using using PHP 5.2.17

This looks amazing Ryan! Thanks for creating a video showing the functionality too - it makes things very clear. I'm personally glad to see that you haven't just gone the Drupal route of adding a simple checkbox on a single field creation for 'make repeatable'. This is an easy way to do things but your approach allows for repeatable fieldsets or groups of fields which is much more powerful. Like others here - I can't wait to see this in a release of PW.

Hi Ryan, The only thing I can think of is that I have renamed the admin pages url from 'processwire' to 'admin'. I will probably be doing a bit of work on this over the next few days with different localhost installations - so I'll see if I can reproduce it then.

Ah, so I'm not being quite such a noob In my case I wasn't taken through any extra steps and just left at the standard module overview screen (the one with 'Module Information').

Thanks for the nudge in the right direction diogo - that's me being a complete noob with PW. In case anyone else comes across this: under 'Admin' -> 'Setup' -> 'Import Pages From CSV' choose to edit the page and under 'Process' in the 'Content' tab select 'importPagesCSV' from the drop down.

I'm having problems using this module in PW 2.2. I have installed the module and then under 'Setup' and 'Import Pages From CSV' - I get the following message: "This page has no Process assigned."

Thanks Pete. I'm looking at both the htaccess and outside of the web root as viable options. I'd be interested to see which would be the best recommendation going forward as it seems both might be valid right now. Regarding the htaccess route, I'm guessing it wouldn't be too difficult to build a module that could handle this automatically by showing a checkbox to set something like 'Set Private Files'. It would then create the htaccess file dynamically if it didn't already exist. With something like this I could start writing such a module but would need a lot of help with code cleanup etc.

Just wondering: what if I used htaccess to determine the referrer? So, if I placed a .htaccess file into the 'assets/files' directory with something like the following?: IndexIgnore * Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?domain-name.com/ [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !hotlink.(gif|png|jpg|doc|xls|pdf|html|htm|xlsx|docx) [NC] RewriteRule .*.(gif|png|jpg|doc|xls|pdf|html|htm|xlsx|docx|zip)$ http://www.domain-name.com/filenotexist.txt [NC] This isn't my code and just something I just found out there and slightly modified when searching for .htaccess possibilities. Obviously, 'domain-name.com' should be replaced by the proper domain you are trying to secure. I'm not a developer so I'm not sure if there are any potential pitfalls in going this route. What's the opinion here? Would this be a decent way of going about it? For example, would this slow the website down with large numbers of attached files? etc.

Thanks Ryan, I would be very grateful if you could give me a brief rundown of solution #2 please as this is largely for a personal one-off site that I will manage, so any complexity there is fine for me. Going forward - I'm probably going to need a more user friendly method that can be managed by a client user through the admin. Is this sort of functionality on the agenda for PW in the future? If it is - the way Drupal handles private files with D7 is one of the better methods I've seen (if a blueprint was needed).

Hi, I was wondering whether there was an easy way to protect files so that they are only available to the page that links to them? For example: if I have a client page template and add a file field type to it, then create the page and attach a file - I would like to be able to secure that file so that it can only be accessed by the person viewing the page. This way I can create a secure page and file that can only be accessed by a client logging in and accessing their page.

Thanks Ryan, I look forward to using ProcessWire and hopefully having something useful to contribute. Congratulations on a great CMS too.

@Pete: thanks for your detailed response and the welcome. It's interesting for me to see someone here from using ModX as the hierarchical paradigm seems similar to PW. Revo seems extremely powerful and the template system nicely flexible, but I decided to wait until they had ironed out the usability of the admin interface before spending too much time on it. For me ModX is definitely one to watch though. Wow! I am just discovering the beauty of the jQuery style syntax. As mentioned I originally gravitated towards PW because of the flexible fields structure and lack of markup enforced on the user. The jQuery syntax has added another reason to enjoy using PW. That's quite a master stroke I think, as most developers & designers on the web understand and appreciate jQuery. It makes the whole system very much more accessible. I agree that a lot of the comments in the article (and others on forums discussing the same storm) are expecting a lot from WordPress who's origins are in blogging. However, some of the discontent is related to the fact that WordPress does often tout itself as a fully fledged CMS. It nearly is, but obviously focuses on bloggers first and therefore some of the finer CMS points get overlooked (such as really fine grained user access capabilities for example). It's good to hear about the proactive development going on with PW. Some of the other systems out there tend to disregard requests for features or help from users in the community until you have earned a certain status. @Apeisa: Thanks for the welcome. A lot of my experience with other systems is very much from a designers perspective and I still feel like a complete idiot with a lot of them. I agree that once you use other systems you become channelled into a certain way of doing things. Those channels often lead to dead ends because of the approach you have to take and you quickly end up with horrible workarounds. Glad you liked the article - it was very useful to me and pointed me to here in the first place. However, you have to keep an open mind as some of the strong opinions on what are not possible with other certain systems are quite often very inaccurate.

Hello ProcessWire community and Ryan Cramer in particular. I have been using the various open source and proprietary CMS's for over 10 years now. I can quite honestly say that ProcessWire is - for me - one of the most exciting open-source projects I have ever seen. Thank you for your work Ryan! I only stumbled across the ProcessWire framework a couple of days ago via a mention here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3447386 This is a thread that echoed a lot of my personal discontent with WordPress and Drupal in general and as a result I've decided to update my badly out of date portfolio site using PW just to learn the system (I was going to use WordPress). Having only really started using the system 2 days I can honestly say - so far so good. I love the way that (to my mind) some of the better features of Drupal, WordPress and ModX have been all wrapped into a very light and approachable core framework. However, for me - as a designer - the most important facet is the powerful and flexible core that doesn't write XHTML markup for me!!! I really like WordPress and Drupal - they are great systems and I use them for clients regularly. However, Drupal assumes it knows better than me and writes my markup for me; expecting me to build tons of inflexible overrides to tell it to stop and do what I ask! WordPress is amazing - with tons of usability, it gets out of my way enough to give me the illusion that I'm in control, but it's always going to be a focused blogging framework with the more flexible CMS features being second priority strategically. I have high hopes with PW and love the rounded philosophy and structure behind it. I'll let you know how I get on and please accept my apologies for any dumb questions in advance.