cmscritic

Thanks for the offer. The individual in question may be offering full development of what we need in exchange for advertising / promotional services. I'll let you know if we need additional help and truly appreciate the offer. Thank you, I think we should be ok at the moment but I'll advise if we need additional help. Gotta love this community! I'm in need of more coffee before I go full on with my reply but one of the big ones was the lack of a media library to reuse media content (I'm aware now that there are some solutions to this so we'll see how this plays out if the new site gets developed back on PW). Obviously, this is frustrating because we're stuck re-uploading images as opposed to reusing old ones. I know there are some solutions out there but IMHO it should be part of the core solution as opposed to something requiring a plugin.

A quick update folks. A member of the forums has reached out and offered their services so perhaps you'll see our return to ProcessWire after all. We shall see.

I thought I'd chime in and answer some questions first and foremost as I saw people chatting about this here. We initially moved because we wanted to add some functionality that would have cost too much to develop. My biggest issue myself is that I am not a developer (i'm a tinkerer) and I wanted more advanced product pages, etc. Yes, they could for sure have been built in processwire but I felt that for someone like myself who is not a code guy, I was too limited by the product as I simply don't have the time to learn enough PHP to code and hiring a developer to do work i could theoretically do myself with wordpress seemed like a waste of money. So those were the initial motivations for moving. Now that we've moved, however, the whole "grass is greener" effect has faded and I have some regrets, however, the extra functionality has allowed us to make more sales and bring on new customers that we didn't have before. So it's a catch 22 for me. I'll expand more on this further down. I don't think this is a fair statement, frankly. The initial point of our website was to view things from an end users point of view, not that of a seasoned developer. Our reviews don't go into how easy it is to code with something but rather how easy it is to use, how functional, etc. These are the things most of our readers want to know as we tend to get a lot of traffic from those who are looking for software but don't have a development background. Yes, this grade sucks. Part of the issue for me is again, I'm not a developer so we clearly need to work on things. This is good to know, please do tell me what specifically you feel is missing so we can fix it. ProcessWire is an awesome product and Ryan did a ton for us. Ideally, I would have loved to have simply paid him to make everything we have now work on PW. If that was a possibility and the cost wasn't too high, I would have gone that route. Sadly, it just isn't feasible sometimes and I often look for alternative ways to compensate those who work for us. Before our move to WP, the intent was to search out vendors who were willing to take on the task of building our site on their platform in exchange for an agreed upon advertising term. In other words, they build our site on their platform (which is a bonus as then their product gets noticed more, as was the case for processwire) and in exchange, we offer advertising for an agreed upon term as the form of payment. With the case of PW, however, this didn't work and we needed to pay for the development costs up front which, while worth it since Ryan is so awesome.. tend to get costly when every tweak needs a developer. If I'm able to find someone with a development house who wants on the advertising in exchange for work method, I may be able to pull off a move back to PW but until then, I may have to search out other alternatives. Fortunately, there are plenty of companies that are interested in doing this but I'm picky so moving is a decision that I need to consider deeply. Normally I wouldn't share these kinds of details to this extent but I feel I owe this community, which we've been part of for a long time, an explanation. So here's the pitch: If there's anyone out there who wants to take on the task of making what we need a reality and getting long term advertising for their business in exchange, drop me a line. Until then, the search for an alternative may continue as WP simply seems to be causing too many issues and bloat (I should have seen this coming granted but hey, nobody's perfect and a critic isn't always right). Thanks for reading Mike

Beautiful work. I like the cleanliness of the site. Very well done.