Mark C

I had watched it, but it was at the very beginning of my survey of the CMS scene. In other words, I needed to watch it again, because I got a lot more from it this time around. Thanks for the tip. @alxndre I'd sure like to see more content like this, obviously... I'm not typically a video guy, because I find them frustrating in that you have no choice but move at the presenter's pace, but this video was very balanced in that regard. There are a couple of PW tutorials (the very first one in the tutorials section on the Docs page, for example) that have animated gifs of certain concepts and I found those extremely effective. With that approach, I was able to watch a gif repeatedly to see what was being referred to, if necessary, or not watch it at all if the still was enough, or if I already understood the information. Also, I just want once again to thank each and every person who's contributed to this topic to assist me - it's been as encouraging as it has enlightening.

Ah - they were more astute about your intent than I was - I thought they were links to different spots on the same page... Thanks again. Between you, all the other posts in answer to my questions, and even a very detailed PM, I've got hours of reading to do now...

Thank you - I found the information on the page you provided the links to VERY helpful...

I snipped portions of your post, not because I didn't appreciate them, but for brevity. I had looked at the tutorials you referred me to, but I'll do so again since you feel they're relevant to my questions. As to your comment on Pages not being pages, I had read that, and I even remembered it, but I don't think it had clicked, at least not in the context that would have cleared up some of my confusion, so thank you for that, as well. What I'm envisioning building, is a set of sites dedicated to the preservation of historic areas by means of promoting tourism to them and, thereby generating interest in them and support of their maintenance and protection - quite simple, really, in the grand scheme of things. The content management requirements would be pretty simple, but calendaring for events and creation of "news" posts (as contrasted with full-blown blogging) would be a necessity. Obviously, the sites would be fairly graphics-intensive. The people responsible for the content would be very non-technical, so ease of use, and probably the ability to do it from the front-end itself, would be important.

I agree with your viewpoint - it certainly is true that having a tool that tries to support "the latest thing" isn't going to be nearly as useful as one that "just works". It was that very thing that drew me to PW, but my difficulty was in trying to understand the rather "elaborate" mechanism on the back-end tool-set, which was completely disconnected from the front-end. I see the potential value there - now I just have to dive in deep enough to see the specific value in my own situation, I think. At any rate, I'm convinced that it's there. Thank you for your assistance! As for examples, I think they all revolved around templates: Neither adding new fields, nor reordering existing ones had any effect on the output page. Then, when I saw it was all hard-coded in __main.php, rather than home.php, I was even further bewildered. As another poster said, however, it seems that part of the "demo" isn't really intended to be used...

That makes complete sense to me, and is definitely a point of clarification I'll ponder a bit as I mull all the other excellent suggestions - thanks!

First, I want to thank you both for your helpfulness in taking the time to respond to a my question. The diversity of participants, timeliness of responses, and overall demeanor of the forum here was actually a secondary reason I chose PW, after looking at literally dozens of CMS platforms (including Concrete5, FWIW). (As a brief aside, I knew I didn't want "just" a WYSIWYG-based web development environment. It's not my style, and I don't like the limitations, inefficiencies, etc. Ryan's ProCache module seems particularly impressive to me, on the efficiency front...) Second, I want to be clear that my next questions/statements are in no way meant to be argumentative or deprecating, either to either of you, or to PW itself. I know that probably goes without saying, at this point, but written communication often has the drawback of loss of real intent, and I want no misunderstandings - I have a feeling I may need to feel welcome here... I have to confess some amusement and nostalgia when I read your replies, because it's the sort of thing I've said many times when training programmers, with respect to why sometimes C (or even assembler or machine language) is sometimes selected over one of the myriad other choices available today that are called (or used to be called) "fourth-" or "fifth-" "generation" languages. However, at this point in my lack of understanding of PW, the comparison ends there, because I don't yet see the value of (and thus the time spent coding) a GUI that doesn't affect anything other than the behind-the-scenes view of the developer. I do agree there's considerable potential value there, but I'm not recognizing it here in this case yet, possibly because I don't have a clue what I've taken on yet. There's probably another corollary to my first/second- vs. fourth/fifth-generation language comparison that I'm missing here, and that's what I want a grasp of, I think. (Please also keep in mind that I have no formal education in Computer Science, Information Technology, or Data Processing, as it used to be called, because none existed when I entered the work-force.) The primary reason I selected PW was the purported flexibility and ease of developing any sort of solution. If my business idea flies, there's going to be quite a few very varied sites to come from it and I'm going to end up engaging others to do a lot of it - for now, I'm having to stand up a demo myself, and PW just seemed to me to be the most intuitive way of organizing the various pieces in the process, to the extent that my limited understanding of it was capable of an informed decision, at least. Now, as I'm getting started actually attempting to "flip the switches and turn the knobs", I see all sorts of switches and knobs that don't appear to do anything meaningful. I know that this must be a case where "appearances can be deceiving", so I'm hopefully asking for some enlightenment at the right time so I don't make any decisions that cause me to waste a lot of time. Perhaps, what I need now, depending on the responses I get to this little diatribe, is to go through another basic tutorial, or "philosophy behind PW" presentation, wherein it is compared to the "other way" of building websites, so I can understand this basic aspect of it clearly. As I stated in my first post, I suspect that my issues stem from the fact that I'm coming at this opportunity to familiarize myself with PW from the exact opposite direction that most do... At any rate, sorry for wasting so much of everyone's time with this level of verbosity, but I really do appreciate the efforts to get my head straight on PW and what it brings to the table! Thanks again!

I'm an old programmer (as in Algol, Fortran, Cobol, PL/I, C, Perl, etc.) just learning web development for an idea I have as a hobbyist/retirement project. So the database side of things is no problem, nor is PHP per se', but the way everything fits together in ProcessWire is giving me trouble. I realize this is likely a completely stupid question, but I don't understand some of the most basic mechanisms in ProcessWire, most likely because I'm starting web development, not from the ground up, but using a CMS framework, I guess. I've gone through several of the tutorials, installed ProcessWire on both a shared hosting server and my personal WAMP (see how I'm already throwing around FLA's like I know what I'm doing?), and trying to build my understanding of the workflow, but I can't figure out why (seemingly contrary to some of the tutorials), I can move fields around on the home template that comes with the Intermediate Site Profile, even add new fields and include them on the Home Template and Page, but these changes never show up on the browser page. If I make changes to content, titles, etc. of existing fields, they show up, but changing the order of them doesn't affect the output at all. It appears that this is because that's all specified in the _main.php file, but I don't understand the capability of being able to move them around in the Templates, if they're hard coded in PHP... I'm sure there's something somewhere in one of the tutorials I've already read that covers this and I just missed it, but at the moment I'm completely baffled as to what's going on... If there's a "basic-er" tutorial somewhere on how all this stuff fits together, or a good overview of the concepts that I should go through first, I'd be grateful if someone could point me towards it.