MatthewSchenker

Greetings, I really like everything about this -- good documentation, easy API, and they use SwiftMailer. I will try it out for sure. But sadly, they are not HIPAA-compliant. I was really hoping they were! This is from their Terms of Use: I will test this on some non-HIPAA projects, and follow progress. Thanks again for posting, Matthew

Greetings, Looks really nice! I'm going to look into this further. Couple of things I wonder about: I see "subaccounts," but I wonder if it's possible to have a developer account with clients running under it? I do a lot of HIPAA-compliant projects, and this could make development a lot easier. But is Mandrill HIPAA compliant (doesn't say so in their docs)? Thanks for posting, Matthew

Greetings, This is one of my primary reasons for getting away from Joomla and discovering and falling in love with ProcessWire. I wish this problem were more known. I work with a number of Drupal/WordPress/Joomla people, and I am amazed at how many just assume that what you install in these systems is safe. I'm talking about developers, by the way, not "regular" users! It's not only malicious plugins -- innocent ones can be an issue too. They all open security holes. A well-intentioned developer can compromise your application (I witnessed it first hand). I think another part of the problem that we don't hear about is hosting dishonesty. A lot of hosts specifically market to the Joomla audience (for example), and they spread a bit of false security. I've had conversations with two developers in recent weeks who host at a particular cloud service, and they both believed that the host protected their sites from malicious plugins. (I actually went so far as to write to this host and ask them to guarantee this, at which point, of course, they admitted it was not true). On a related note: happy two-year mark Joss! I'll try to round up the old Seblod and Molajo team for a celebration. Amy Stephen might come too. Matthew

Hey, Happy birthday Joss. What do pirates do on their barrrrrthdays anyway? Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, It's embarrassing when you set a bandwidth limit on your own website -- then manage to exceed it. I'm in the process of completely revamping that silly old site anyway. It just keeps getting put off in favor of those nagging paying clients. Thanks for the heads up. Very much still alive, Matthew

Greetings, This would be great! Tuts+ gets a lot of positive attention, and they do a great job. It would be a really positive thing to have ProcessWire there. I'm ready to march forward with the uservoice vote! I just added my 3 votes! Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, Yes -- same error, same time. And yes, references to files that never existed. It happened for me in the admin area just after I confirmed the deletion of a couple of fields. Is it possible we're on the same server? The problem resolved, but I am concerned about what it means that it happened at all. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, I had exactly the same errors around the same time that einsteinsboi posted here. It got me concerned, but within an hour it resolved itself. Not sure what that was about. Should this be a concern? Thanks, Matthew

Post title kind of says it all. Well, maybe not... Ryan, you have created just about the best gift a web-developer can possibly ask for. Every day so many of us get to open this gift and create something new with it. Your gift compounds and expands exponentially as our work courses through the Internet and brightens the worlds of clients everywhere. ProcessWire helps make all of us bigger, faster, stronger... Not only have you created a great gift for us all, but personally you are a terrific presence: consistent, professional, helpful, patient, creative... In other words, HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, That's because we see our representative images as a blank slate, with no assumptions about how they should be designed -- a custom field. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, I don't doubt that the three choices are the result of a legitimate nomination process. I'm saying that if that process leads to only three choices for "Best Free CMS" it's not a very useful contest. In general, one of the problems I see in the CMS world is that systems like ProcessWire and Joomla/Drupal/WordPress are constantly put into the same category, when they are essentially different types of systems. And since CMS Critic has a mission of exploring the complexities of the CMS world, I think they should embrace their role as an analyst of CMS choices, and focus on articles exploring the dimensions of the CMS world. Contests like this just add confusion and misunderstanding. EDIT: I don't see how grouping CMSs based on whether they are "free" is generally useful. Why not group them according to logo color theme? Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, I happen to still be connected to a private forum for the biggest Joomla CCK (I maintain a couple of legacy Joomla projects), and they put on a push for people to vote. But this is predictable. It's a problem that there are only three choices for a large generalized category like "Best Free CMS." I think CMS Criric needs to take a fresh look at the whole nomination process. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, If you don't need to complete all the categories to compete for the Chromebook, then the instructions are false. They clearly state that you need to complete everything to win. Clearly, this will skew results with "blind voting," as Diogo said. I'm not doubting how they ended up with 3. It's just not very useful to have a "best free CMS" category with 3 CMSs! What do the results tell us about anything? Another question: why is Joomla listed as a "free" CMS and also as an "open source" CMS? Shouldn't all 3 be listed twice? Also, why is there a category for "Best Small to Midsize Business PHP CMS"? How in the world did they make that determination? And why is there no "Best Large Business PHP CMS"? Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, I really like the idea of this annual competition. But I am not pleased with the way CMS Critic is handling it this year. 1. Offering a free Chromebook, then requiring people to vote in all categories, will ruin the results. Obviously, many people will vote on systems they don't know just to complete the survey. 2. The voting system often hangs up or freezes on mobile (iPad Air in my case). 3. As Apeisa mentioned above, some categories are vague (e.g., "free" vs "open source"). 4. The number of eligible systems is rather unimpressive. I love ProcessWire, but winning doesn't mean much if it is only competing against 2 other systems. I think the idea of the CMS Critic Awards is terrific, and I would love to see CMS Critic gain an even bigger audience. But they are going in the wrong direction here. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, Ah, the code war sees a battle here on the PW home front! This has been raging on for a long time. You don't have to choose all or nothing with languages. My own history is with C/C++, and over the past year I have been spending time learning Python. After a while, you start seeing the same underlying principles in each one. PHP is perhaps more "messy" than other languages. You don't have the same level of agreement in PHP as you see in the Python, Ruby, Java, or .NET worlds. All of those other languages have rallied around a set of conventions, frameworks, and more. Fewer conventions and many more frameworks makes PHP more confusing at first. But that's also what makes PHP so lively and flexible. Thanks, Matthew

Hello, If ProcessWire goes down the road of theming, I would be very vocally against it. Along with "themes" comes a set of assumptions and core approaches that many of us detest. One of the main reasons I fled from Joomla, Drupal, WordPress is specifically because of theming. Anyway, providing themes would be a temporary attraction to people accustomed to the way the "Big Three" CMSs work. The moment users of those other systems need something further, they again would have to understand core design/markup/interactive web technologies. Beyond superficial themes, the general fact that ProcessWire is different will become apparent again. In other words, the differences between ProcessWire and the Big Three goes far beyond profiles or themes. It's somewhat of a waste of energy for us to appeal to Big Three users with themes or profiles. I think we need to be clear that ProcessWire is a system that expects you to take some initiative to get up to speed on the core web technologies. It is not, and should not become, a system that "does it for you." It may be difficult to accept, but ProcessWire will never appeal to most WordPress/Drupal/Joomla users for that reason. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, Apeisa & Totoff: I agree that comparing WordPress and ProcessWire is a flawed approach. What can you do in 30 minutes? You can conclude that the systems are inherently different. But the review we are discussing here, after 30 minutes, still ends by comparing ProcessWire on WordPress terms. Any review that can't conclude that the systems have very different concepts, and are for very different audiences, has failed. My analogy from woodworking: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are like pre-made project kits. All the wood pieces are cut to the right sizes for you, numbered according to how they must be assembled, with pre-drilled holes. You even get a set of various sized screws, a little bottle of glue, three mini cans of paint (just enough for the project), and a set of instructions you need to follow. With ProcessWire, it’s more like you have a project idea, and you jot down the sizes of all the parts and make a list of all the hardware you need, choose your own paint colors and glue. Then you go to the store to buy it all. In the end, the project kit looks like everyone else who bought the same one. The one you made yourself takes longer, but it does more, and it’s unique. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, Wow, 30 minutes! I think the author will spend more time reading the comments than he did with ProcessWire. Up next: after one hour with PHP, he decides it's not as good as Python. Unfortunately, I have spent way more than 30 minutes using Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress, so I could not help but weigh in on this one. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, Just some quick evidence from the past month or so of just how big this issue is becoming: https://www.facebook.com/ServInt/posts/10152593666901177 https://www.facebook.com/ServInt/posts/10152593860231177 https://twitter.com/servint/status/486609891172560896 http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/servint-ceo-promises-improve-customer-communication-wake-reston-va-data-center-outage I don't know... Thanks, Matt

Greetings, Kongondo: I find it hard to believe it's coincidence. All hosts have trouble, but the total hours of ServInt's downtime is hard to get beyond. I'm trying to give ServInt another chance, because it's such a pain to switch everything to another server. But I wish I had never left my previous host, which had zero downtime in the 5 years I was with them. Ryan: In my opinion, it's perhaps time to pause before endorsing ServInt. I'm not doubting their good history, but something is clearly going wrong with them. I wonder whether they have grown too fast? For example, this latest outage was a drive corruption. OK, that happens, but the fact that it caused 10+ hours of downtime just for them to restore from backups indicates a deeper resource problem. I will ask them to switch me to the same resource as ProcessWire. That way, either you share my pain, or I share your luck! I'd definitely like to hear what kinds of redundancy plans other people use to counteract situations like this. Thanks, Matt PS: On the idea of switching to one of ServInt's European servers, I have learned that their Amsterdam center has experinced significant outages lately as well.

Greetings, I would have to strongly (very strongly (very very strongly)) advise against ServInt. They have experienced an unusual amount of failures recently. Don't bother looking at their "99.9 uptime" stat, which is either misleading or measures something other than uptime. I have posted at length about this elsewhere in the forum. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, After another embarrassing outage, my sites are up again. Over the past month, I have spent the equivalent of one full work week dealing with ServInt outages and the related customer communucations/explanations associated with them. I have not seen that many hours of downtime in 12 years combined with all kinds of hosts. I'd like to take the opportunity to hear from others here what kinds of systems or redundancies you put in place to handle outages like this. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, Today, my phone started ringing from clients complaining about their sites being down -- AGAIN. With disbelief, I logged into the ServInt portal and saw this message: "The host machine disk array has suffered corruption. We've begun restoring the VPS's from our backup system to other host machines. Updates will be provided periodically on the progress." I post this because I know here on ProcessWire ServInt is discussed as a good hosting choice. This is three major failures in about a month, totaling (so far) about 30 hours of downtime. I have managed to soothe my clients twice before, but today it has crossed a line and become impossible to sugar-coat the issue. Servint is not a reliable host. Thanks, Matthew EDIT: This latest failure has now been going for over 9 hours.

Good Afternoon, Ryan: yes, all of my sites were offline for four hours, from 5:00 AM to 9:00 AM EDT. I've got some communication started with Servint via their portal, to hopefully figure out what's been going on lately. I also tested the sites using the following services: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ http://www.websitedown.info/ http://wheresitup.com/ All of these services showed all my tested sites down, both specific sites and the IP addresses they use. If it were just the outages, it would be bad enough, but in between the outages my sites have been really sluggish. Joss: Yes, here in the Northeast USA, our place names seem to play an elusive game with the UK: New England, New Britain, New London, Northampton, Cambridge. We even have a Thames River. Thanks, Matthew

Greetings, Sites are back online again. All told, this outing was over 4 hours, and a lot of headaches -- again. It's becoming difficult to explain to clients that "it's not my fault." Every time, their outings only affect "a small number" of clients, but I seem to keep on ending up in that "small number." We're looking at about 14 hours of downtime within the past month. I'm really trying to be generous here with ServInt, but it's difficult under the circumstances. Will try to move forward. Thanks, Matthew