MischaK

Cool to see there are options to probably take away a lot if not all of the things I mentioned. I really think the option for having the site tree visually present all the time will be great for people who only edit their site once every month or less. But it is probably unwanted for people who really need to do a lot of work on pages and want all the space they can so cool that it's an option ? I will keep an eye on Processwire and I'll probably do another test some time soon to see what happens if I do some small tweaks to make the admin even more friendly for non technical people.

There haven't been any mayor changes in the way the backend looks in Silverstripe since 3.0. I think one of the main differences between PW and SS on the backend is that when you're editing a page in SS you see the site tree when editing a page. Hence you always have an overview.

So it's been a little while since I did this testing, but I will try to elaborate: I had things set up in a way that you could click "edit page" and double click the main content field to edit that. So I think I was super helpful in that regard. It sort of backfired though because it felt less secure to double click to edit to one of the women I asked to edit the site. The changing the sort order of the pages in the menu was also a problem because of the entry point into the CMS. Because when they came to the "Edit this page" screen, there wasn't any obvious menu structure of the website anywhere to be found. I think I also asked them to revert a page to a previous point -> this also wasn't obvious where to do this. One of them thought the experience in Silverstripe felt a lot more secure because of the draft/publish mechanic aka less fear of screwing up and the separation of edit here -> see changes there was very separated. Overall the CMS experience felt messy to them. --- So looking back: it might have been more of a thing that I tried to set up some extra's which I thought would make things easier to edit that wound up feeling less secure.

So I was planning on doing a full write up a while back to compare the different CMS systems: Craft, Processwire, Silverstripe Since I'm here I will just focus on my experiences with ProcessWire. With some experience with developing websites in Silverstripe I figured it would be good for me to have a look at some other options which brought me here. I do have some features which I really want to have with websites which I deliver to my customers: Must haves: Version management -> if a client screws something up I don't want to waste too much time to get things back in working condition. Easy editing of pages for customers. Extensibility with extra content fields in the CMS. Nice to haves: Inline editing. Easy Multilanguage setup. Easy upgrades. First Impressions: The good: Processwire looks pretty good from a power user point of view. I love the fact that you can just use PHP in templates and also the obvious active development is a big plus and it seems to be very extensible. The bad: No support for IIS out of the box. I did find a web.config on the forum but needed to sign up to the forum to download this. Signing up to the forum lists facebook as a sign in option -> doesn't actually work. The first impressions on the look and feel of the admin. Implementing Actually porting a site template over to processwire with the functionality I needed to add: This process went pretty smoothly I loved the pw-append way of working with templates, templates felt really easy to port and set up. Creating menu's etc. was easy. I loved the way that there are multiple ways of doing things which are available with the templates which can be installed. I also loved how easy it was setting up inline editing and adding an edit link to a page. I think my main problems with settings things up where the way processwire handles images. The problems I had with version control plugin + images. Usability testing After having set up the basics I had 2 lovely lady friends do some usability testing by letting them perform some small tasks on the website. Edit some pages -> add an image Swap the position of 2 pages in the menu. Both smart ladies 1 of them had been actively maintaining a magento shop. And their conclusion was unanimous, they both heavily preferred the Silverstripe backend. For me this meant that I continued to work on the Silverstripe version of the website. I didn't continue to complete all the functionality in the Processwire version of the website. Conclusion For me the conclusion of this experiment was that although I loved building the basic website with Processwire the admin experience just doesn't seem user friendly enough to justify the switch.

I have done both over the last 18 years or so. I think I'll try and do some kind of feature matrix and a bit of a write up on my experiences of going into Processwire so far in trying to achieve these things in Processwire.

I'm someone who has been developing websites for a while, mostly doing full stack .NET development and ASP scripting before that, while using Silverstripe and some other PHP frameworks for some smaller projects which worked well enough for quite some time. Now I have some time on my hands and decided to evaluate some different CMS options. Diving in as a newbie into: Wordpress Processwire CraftCMS After a short while I decided that Wordpress was out while I'm still evaluating Craft and Processwire. My question is, is there any interest here in reading about my experiences in trying to get the feature set I want up and running, with these other systems?