OH. MY. GOD.
Tell me I'm not dreaming!
I've been scouring the Internet for weeks looking for a CMS that would allow me to give my clients a decent user experience.
I've developed sites in Joomla, Drupal, Silverstripe, and Wordpress. Joomla was a nightmare of epic proportions. The admin interface is confusing and inconsistent. Drupal had promise in theory, but trying to customize it just caused it to bug out. Silverstripe is nice, but the admin panel is slow and clunky. Wordpress is great for blogs, but feels like you're hacking it if you're trying to use it for more than that.
After my frustrations with the big name CMSs, I decided to try and get a better lay of the land and see what else was out there. Every one of them was either lacking a crucial feature, poor on the usability front, or a buggy mess.
I have some programming knowledge, but mainly I am a designer looking for a CMS that lets me design the client's experience in the same way that I'm able to design the end user's experience. I don't need templates or templating languages. I want something that lets me be the designer and then gives my clients the power to work with what I've developed.
As someone deeply concerned about user experience, I don't understand it. How could so many developers get this so wrong? Were they just throwing these things together without thinking about the use cases? The need for flexibility? What people actually NEED in a CMS? I was beginning to think I'd have to become a PHP developer and build something from scratch.
So far, what I see in ProcessWire is almost exactly the ideal CMS I have been piecing together in my mind's eye. The consistency in the mental design model, the absolutely crucial ability to create your own page types and custom fields for your clients which is utterly lacking or nonexistant in nearly every major CMS, the ability for logged in users to easily update a page they're on by simply hitting an "edit" link from the front end...
Elegant, logical, and flexible. It's obvious that you've put a lot of thought into this. Thank you.
I can't wait to get started.