Joss

Interesting link that. I have made similar points with main stream advertising. For instance with music: if an advertiser has a piece of music created by someone who has no artistry, then even if all the messaging is perfect, the advert will completely undermine the brand. The biggest mistake any company can make is to underestimate their audience. It is not uncommon for a company to think they can throw any rubbish at potential customers because "what do they know?" What is forgotton is that every listener to adverts or users of the web use thousands of websites and most of those will be by huge companies like Google; what ever you think of them, these companies will have websites that work perfectly for what they are doing. The result is that even if the customers cannot appreciate what the technical or design differences between a good or bad site, or a good or badly produced piece of music, never the less, they will sense that it is cheap and nasty, and that is how they will judge the company. If you want to completely undermine a brand, even a well established one, commission something that people will view as being "amateurish." Always remember the lesson of Gerald Ratner. During a conference, he remarked, "People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap." Although customers knew his stores sold low quality goods, at least they had been treated like good customers. His statement completely undermined the brand and the customers simply stayed away. It knocked £500 million off the market value of the company. An imaginative, or clean, clear and well written website does not need to cost more money that a crap one - but the damage that can be done by a site that is badly made, poorly written and pays no attention to the brand could cost a client a fortune. Maybe their entire business.

I wonder if it is worth putting together a WP migrator profile that has everything installed ready, the right fields in place and a really, really basic template that is heavily commented? Obviously, it cannot have everything, but if it has a category layout, tags, images sorted out, a WP style pages system (as opposed to the posts) the common hanna code bits and things like fb and twitter tags all ready, the it might be very useful for those who want to get away from WP as a blog. Also needs to take into account read more and mutipage articles.

Nico They are just the normal WP grid - I try and avoid extra plugins other than a lightbox, but that is a template/jquery issue. I often have one image at the head of the article, then the rest at the end as a grid: http://www.foodloversdiary.com/allotment-diary/weeding-in-the-rain/ The way WP handles these has changed a bit over the years - in the old system you would have all your page uploaded images appear as a gallery, unless you hand wrote exclusions into the hanna code, for instance if you did not want to repeat any images in the rest of the article. I am not sure how the new system works. Of course, my blog is old enough to have both! This is why I think that any modules that are available via the PW website, need to be ones that have been checked first, especially for security issues. Same with things like profiles and so on.

I have talked about this before, but was just wondering would anyone be interested in working on an alternative to the current image field system? Completely unpaid and no real reason for doing this, other than I think it might be something that would be attractive to those migrating their way from some other CMSs. So, this is the idea: The new image field would be very similar in look and settings to the current field, but the upload system is changed completely. The new image field would upload images into a folder hierarchy under /assets/files/images/ and not create a folder for each page - this would be unlikely to hit folder number limits. The upload size would be controlled by the image field setting as now. You would be able to create folders from the image field upload panel, if permission exists to do so for a particular role. (This is so folders can be set by an admin if they want to force users to put them into particular folders) Having uploaded the images, you can then select which images are to be part of this field on this particular page, to the limit that is set for for that version of the field A new DB table is created that holds information on all uploaded images for all pages - it is associated to the new upload system rather than the page. Columns can be added for description, author, date uploaded, copyright, anything else you wanted. These columns are global, obviously. The relevant data, like "path," is referenced by the instance of the image field for a particular page ... somehow. This would mean that an image can be moved to a different folder (using a management system) without breaking the link on a particular page as the new path would be taken from the DB table. NOTE: The system should be clever enough so that when an image is moved, the cached version of the image are also moved. The selected images in the new image field can be used in template files and RTF exactly as now, though resized versions would need to cached to the new folder system - that might complicate things, or not. I am not sure how the current system works in that regard. The upload/library part of the image field would probably ignore any resized versions and only display originals. There would need to be a stand-alone version of the upload interface that can double up as a management system - aspects of this system should have specific roles. Folders should also be subject to permissions so that roles are only allowed access to certain folders, if that is useful. An additional component could allow user specific folders. It may also be worth incorporating other media file types for use in other fields. Anyway, a bit vague at the moment! To be honest, I like the current system, but it does not suit certain types of site very well: News sites need a central repository as they frequently reuse images and need to restrict who can use what. E-commerce sites frequently need access to product images for promotions, blogs and so on, outside of just the product entry. My feeling is that since the current system is perfect for many uses, it should not be changed and therefore it make more sense to create a separate system so that you can use it as an either/or - maybe with a global command to stop the current image field from being available if it is not going to be used at all, simply to avoid confusion with multiple developers on a project. Warning - my techy knowledge is useless, so my contribution will be mostly planning, interface design and general complaining. EDIT: Not sure whether a fully expanded version of this with permissions and complicated management might be best as a premium module ... just a thought.

Totoff, yes, I have seen this where the initial WP site is perhaps three hundred pounds but then there is a monthly management fee of 200 over a three year contract.

Yeah, I noticed those later - I might have a look. My main issue is that a huge amount of the posts have WP galleries attached.

I really must get round to converting two blogs of mine to PW from WP. Trouble is I haven't worked out how to do it.

er ... if you were doing this by straight html, no cms, how would you do it? Surely you would still end up with a single landing page? index.html, probably. In your layout above, if A is reached by mywebsite.com, how is B reached? Would that not be mywebsite.com/B.html? In which case, as far as the visitor is concerned, B appears like a child of A, even though they are actually in the same folder. How is that different from how PW is normally?

To start with, last should be last() (I think) So $img = $m->images->last()->width(200); Then you need to get the url for the image <img src='{$img->url}' /> The URL contains all the path data.

hah! It can get a bit brain numbing by the time you have a page field calling a page with a repeater in it that includes a multiple image field. .... The trick is to basically think of it as a tree of info where vertically is the relationship and horizontally is the data. So $page is my current page and therefore the top of my little tree It has a page field in it called mypagefield, So to get to that $page -> mypagefield mypagefield includes the data from more than one other thing, therefore it must be an array. That goes out horizontally: -- mypagefield = title, title, title, title, and so on. (it may include other fields too) So, that is the tree. The array of data we need is contained in mypagefield so we would write it as $page->mypagefield Then we can do what we like with it. If that array included arrays of information like an image field, for instance, then we have to work our way through one array and then another foreach($page->mypagefield as &pagefield){ // grab each title as an example echo $pagefield->title; // Now we need to go through the array of images that is in a field called "images" foreach($pagefield->images as $image){ echo "<img src='{$image->url}'></br>"; } //end the image foreach } //end the page field foreach So, we have gone through one array, and since that array contains another array, we have gone through that as well. But as you can see it is a logical order. As I always say, if in doubt, work it out visually with a pencil and paper - it can un-fog the brain nicely.

I doubt "title" is an array, though you may have an array made up of titles. Assuming pattern_type is you page field, then that is your array of values, including title and any other field involved. So: foreach($page->pattern_type as $pt){ echo $pt->title; } EDIT: Beaten by Teppo!

There is another issue here, one that applies to CMSs in particular. I think it is really important for small companies (5 people or less, perhaps) to be able to update their website themselves - for many small companies, a monthly fee is not realistic for the amount of value they are going to get from the site. However, I have been stunned by the number of company owners who simply cannot put together two words in any meaningful way, or even in a grammatical way. We seem to be in a situation that being able to use Facebook or some communication app is seen as more important than actually being able to write; it is as if the software will somehow make you a great communicator without you having to try. I just don't get this. Thanks to the way the internet works by default (text on screen), people read more than ever, even if it is just a chat message. And yet, their communication skills, the ability to use words clearly and nicely, seems to be getting worse and worse. And then businesses wonder why they don't get work? All a bit sad, really.

There seems to me to be a growing misunderstanding of what a website actually is. Leaving aside ecommerce, which is a very specific and obvious function, I think many companies look at a website as basically another advert. My background is in above the line media, especially TV and Radio, and I have spent a huge number of years creating adverts that bring a customer to a clients door. Once they are there, it is the client's responsibility to make sure the customer buys something, gets some sort of satisfaction or service and wants to come back. It is a very simple, linear process. When website designs first started, there intent was a little more blurry - they were not quite an advert, nor a brochure, could contain a huge amount of information and could be as stuffed full of words as you wanted. A lot of companies seem to work on the principle that if people found your website, you should give them lots of value in the form of information so they would then want to hit the contact button and consolidate some sort of relationship. Then along came the SEO position developers. They threw out the idea of value relationships and instead turned websites into instant ads. The entire idea was to drag people to the website at any cost and with any luck, get them to contact you. The perfect SEO website is formulaic, basic, fast, uncluttered to the point of utilitarian and offers no customer value at all - that is not what it is there for. It is back to my radio and TV ads where all we tried to do is get the customer to the clients place of business; to their door. The problem is that a website is not the clients place of business. There is a very good chance with an SME that it is impossible to monitor it, have live chat or anything else that a customer would get if they actually turned up at the place of business. The site is just another ad - so all that has happened is that you spend possibly a lot of money on SEO and online advertising just to persuade people to go to a web address to simply see another advert .... probably a not very well designed one at that. But that is where we are at. Companies that make their lively hood online are spending money on their websites because those really ARE their businesses. But companies that are using the web simply to tell people about themselves are being persuaded by cheap, SEO orientated marketing companies to produce low value, template based, formulaic adverts that address no brand considerations what so ever. Indeed, my very little experience with these companies trying to sell ME a website for my music company has shown that they never ask a single question relating to my brand, brand values, product targeting or the million and one other facts that are kind of basic for any serious advertising campaign. I can write copy that will make a company dance and sing - I really am very good at it. I can make cute things dimple like a Disney princess, make serious services like lawyers sound like sage advice from your favourite grandpa, or make your garage service sound like the best thing since sliced Model T Ford. But that does not fit with the formula. Copy and design like that needs research, time spent with the client and that thing that scares people most of all - imagination. And none of that is cheap. The hard part is persuading the client that the monthly standing order he is paying for the seo driven, same-as-everyone-elses template site might be getting him a handful of orders, but in the long term could seriously undermine his brand. I have no idea how to do that as I find more and more that when I deal with people and talk about the importance of brand, of good customer relations and of building something of value, that they look at me as if I am talking a foreign language. I am beginning to feel a little old!

This is not a problem. Forget the idea of categories as a separate thing for the moment - they are just pages. So, for instance, you can have this structure: Home -- News ---- Politics ---- Religion ---- Coffee And then under each of those you would have the actual posts. The template for the posts would include a page field. That page field would be set for a single selection and then the parent set as the News page. On the input settings for the page field you would pick the input field type of your choice and then also enable being able to create a new page directly from the field. When someone creates a post, they would be able to select a category or create a new one. The drawback for this is that you could end up with thousands of categories if people go silly! Also, if you want the category pages to have additional details about the category (and intro paragraph, icon, whatever) then you will have to go back and edit those pages. But essentially, what you want to do is very easy indeed.

Reed makes an interesting point about social networking - I don't care what anyone says, but Social Networks can be a really bad way of keeping people informed and companies are falling for this left, right and centre: It can seem flippant and cursory It can lack detail It often relies on the client having to do the running to find information You don't know whether you are dealing with someone serious or just a back-office PR lacky Your important communique is surrounded by non-relevant information, advertising, animations and an inappropriate environment They are incredibly impersonal, ironically It strikes me that a good communication system should be exclusive to a company, and in the case of something like Servint, should be completely external to the system it is talking about (so it does not go down with the rest of the system). The blog post that Reed has written should have been available during the incident and should have been emailed out to every contact email address they have. Clients should be encouraged to make sure that they have registered an emergency email address (or several) where notifications are sent. Emails should NEVER say "Keep up to date by following us on twitter," or "check our blog often," or anything else that means the client has to do the work - updates should be regular and emailed so the client has to do nothing. Servint have a really good reputation, from what I see, for being very technically able. But any reputation is made up only partly by a company's history for being good - the rest (possibly the bigger part) is based on how they communicate with their customers; how much detail they give, how often they supply information and how direct and personal are those communications. With the advent of social networking, companies (most companies, probably), have abandoned good personal relations in favour of bulk, cheap, impersonal relations via facebook and twitter. Companies should use these systems, they are fun and chatty - but they are not personal. When the muck hits the fan, they need to deal directly with the customer, not via a third party.

ProcessWire has no theming system like Drumlapress - basically because it does not need one. Anything you can do with html/css/js can be used with ProcessWire. Dead Simple Example: Create a file in /site/templates/ called mytemplate.php Go to the admin, go to setup -> templates and add new. You will see mytemplate.php listed. Select it and create the template. It will automatically have the title field added. Now, go to the front end of the admin, to the pages list, click on Home and then click on New. This will create a new page under home. Select your new template from the drop down, fill in the title field (for example, "testpage") and save. Publish it. Go to the front end and go to yoursite.com/mypage/ It will be blank. Open your mytemplate.php and add this to the top: <?php echo $page->title; ?> Save and refresh the page - you will now see the page title, but with no formatting at all. However, you can now see that you can add any html formatting to mytemplate.php you like - use a framework like Bootstrap or work it out in dreamweaver, anything. All you have to do is to add the API like the example above to display content for that page. ProcessWire puts no limits on how you build your site and neither do you have to convert anything to work with it - you can create ANY design you like and not be tied up by someone elses design. What is more, you can do this by learning only the smallest amount of PHP (like, what you can learn in a morning) and by learning to use the very logical API. For a more detailed tutorial, go to http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/Basic_Website_Tutorial

I find custard pies work fairly well.

Hi Matthew - that is really bad luck mate! This sort of potential failure is something I have had to contend with my entire working life - not, admittedly from servers, but from the fact as a sound producer, I have always had to cope with cutting edge technology that is almost guaranteed to fail at the worst possible moment! And if remote connections are involved (especially anything satellite shaped), then the potential risks are increased dramatically. In those cases, I ALWAYS made sure clients knew the risks and always explained to them exactly what we had arranged as a backup plan. These were costed in. So, for instance, once when we were doing a live Q&A across the world between staff and their CEO, we actually did a short, recorded interview the day before with the chap as a backup. In that case, the line DID fail, and the client used a pre-prepared script that I had written for him to apologize to the staff and introduce the recorded interview. Although it was still embarrassing for the client, we at the production house looked great! You cannot prevent every problem and despite always having a backup plan, I have still ended up with egg on my face several times. I even had a client blame me for a lightning strike which took the power out at the hotel at which he was holding his conference; why was I unable to prevent it??? The only thing that might be worth considering is a server/website on a stick, given to the client in advance with instructions and to say to them, "Murphy's law says that the only time the line will ever go down will be tomorrow night - if it does, this is what we do.... It won't give the entire experience, but at least you will be able to carry on" The chances are that this sort of thing will be a rarity, but at least the clients will always know that you care enough to have had a back up plan. Some people think that admitting to a client that things can go wrong makes them look weak somehow and that they should not worry the client with that sort of thing. In my experience, it actually makes you look professional, experienced and well prepared. I do think the IT industry as a whole struggles more with this than other industries - partly because the technology is inherently unreliable (!) and partly because the industry is still very young and does not have the decades of experience and history of catastrophes that something like the broadcast industry has for instance. EDIT: Having just read your note that this was a competition site, I think your only true backup would be to have had a secondary hosting ready to go at an alternative location, and an already active cname address, so: mycompetition.com mycompetition.company.com (at alternative hosts) Again, with a preprepared statement for the client to read to explain that the gods were being unkind and this is what they would do. And of course, cost it in, telling the client in advance that things CAN go wrong and this is an insurance policy - he can go without the additional cost, but at his own risk.

ummmmm

The only thing in there is the rsort function - not that I can see it creating a problem, but for the sake of elimination, you might want to remove it. Not sure you really need it since you can change the order within the find() selector. I was hoping to see an incomplete tag somewhere - the puzzle for me is that though the random <li> is in the middle of the list, it is displayed at the end of the list - for me that normally means there is a tag out of place somewhere. But I cant see one.

Very odd I have just checked my music site which uses bootstrap and exactly that markup and it is fine. The empty <li>, which seems to be the problem, is always 3rd from last in the list, except on the last page when it is third from the front. I cannot work out why this is being generated or by what. What is your find() query for the news list? Or, even the entire function?

Yes, you have to set up the variable before the loop, otherwise all you have a pile of addons to the variable without the original variable, if you see what I mean!

Hi, you appear to have an additional <li> without any content - can you post your code for the pagination and the markup immediately around it?

Okay, I have just deleted the field and created a new date field and that is okay. I have no way of checking this, but it seems that in updating PW to 2.4,4, the existing date field I had created stopped working. But creating a new one after upgrade was fine. ummmmmmm

Getting a pile of errors: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'match' of undefined claysvehiclerepairs.bear/wire/modules/Jquery/JqueryUI/JqueryUI.js?v=193:7 Failed to load resource http://nikkomsgchannel/e?001c00510056005100360040006c0052005c0055002d002600…5c0041005c000900640031002e00500052004a0041001300520054005400710050002a0035 Failed to load resource GET http://nikkomsgchannel/e?001c00510056005100360040006c0052005c0055002d002600…5c0041005c000900640031002e00500052004a0041001300520054005400710050002a0035 VM44:63 rapport_nikko_send_focus_eventVM44:63 rapport_nikko_on_focusVM44:73 GET http://nikkomsgchannel/e?001c00510056005100360040006c0052005c0055002d002600…5c00430059000900130033005c0054005c0041003000630052005600510071002700280047 VM44:50 rapport_nikko_on_blur The actual template has nothing special in it - couple of text fields, an image field and a couple of CKEditor fields. Oh, and a page field. All normal stuff.