Joss

Evening Pete The reason I asked is that with a profile you are setting up a site from scratch. But what if, for instance, I have a basic brochure site and want to add a simple blog to it? With a module I can install a nice neat, ready to go system with very basic templates - I would have to do some extra work to get the template files as I need them for the site, but at least half the work will have been done. As I mentioned, this is possibly a bit impractical for someone to use as a "download and install a blog" since it would have bits missing, but very useful for my own work, if you see what I mean. Having said that, I suppose it could be useful for a third party as long as they appreciate it wont be completely plug and play and they are good with including stuff.

Mathias, you must have far too much time on your hands to track this post here!!! But welcome anyway (I will now run off and look at Webpop...)

Just a quick question about modules (an area that I really haven't explored properly yet and I suspect might be a little beyond me): Can you use a module to create a system? For instance, a news system with its own categories and fields and index pages (and an example article, I suppose). So, you would install it and voila, you have all the correct fields and templates ready to go (more or less). I know this might not work as a particularly useful download as it may cause conflicts, but I would find it useful for myself to replicate functionality in a new site.

I have never set up a paywall, so cannot help you there, but at the end of the day, the theory with what will work with 20 files will work with 20,000. Pete's point about hiring one of the experienced coders here to sort out an import system is probably a very good idea - it could save you a lot of pain in the future. With the size of the archive, whenever you import all those files, you wont want to be online at the time. But if you are just running as "beta" that is not a problem. I am not sure how long it will take to import, but with no images, and with the files already uploaded ready to import, it wont take long. The physical size of the archive is not the issue here (my audio archive for my clients is nearly a Terabyte), it is the number of files. But each of those is tiny. Once the backlog is imported, then it wont be an issue because I assume you will then just import hourly or something, or will users then be entering articles directly? Your biggest problem, to be honest, is designing a nice site!

Hi Soma Oh, I quite agree with that, and I think most developers will look at a profile and say "oh, good, it can do that," and then take their own direction. And that is the best way to use PW. What I am picking up on here is using profiles as a way of promoting ProcessWire and what it can do, and perhaps giving some less developer orientated users a starting point. But it is the marketing advantage from these that I see as most important. As a side issue, if they are created cleverly enough, (like Ryan's Blog Profile) then they become a useful source of snippets! And of course, documentation - well, you know what I think about good docs already, so I won't bore the world again with that!

hehe - yeah, I kind of went blank after writing the first one. It was one of those things where I thought "I can think of loads of these," then wrote ecommerce and ..... and.... and ..... Brain freeze!

The numbers are not hugely important, really, as long as you have enough server space and power! What is the folder structure/names - I mean, how is this all organised?

OOh! Nice tip!!! Put it somewhere useful!

Yeah, good point - I was more thinking that is hasn't got one that is shown as a separate entity in the admin - which means you can relate things together in any which way you want, in addition to the page structure.

Just quoting Ryan from another thread here and I think In many ways profiles are possibly THE most important path to growth Although, ironically, the most major users of the system will tend to be people who DONT use profiles, their very existence will probably be how they hear of PW in the first place. The profiles I would see as most important, with that in mind, are (in no fixed order): Ecommerce (demonstrating the full potential of a eCommerce module) Blog (extended version of the one Ryan created with pre-installed things like DIsqus, galleries, Facebook/Twitter, feeds and so on) News/Magazine system that allows for multi-authors, a proper editorial process and editors for specific categories (are user-groups saved in profiles?) Some sort of community system with "communities" or "groups" (depending on how you call them) - each having their own wiki, simple board, blog and so on and the ability to make some or all of it private - completely over the top this one! Extended business/brochure site with very simple "news/blog" system, product/services, gallery and so on. These profiles should be put together in such a way so that different CSS frameworks and designs can be slipped in with ease. (Is that possible?). So not like the way I have been doing it! This little group (with perhaps one or two more) could be good community designed projects. That would achieve two things (with any luck and a following wind): A bench mark standard of profile design that will help others who want to create profiles A handful of trusted an maintained tools to get less technical users off the starting blocks Encourage others to create profiles (where did that third one creep in from?)

Oh, goody! Much easier (I suspect) than trying for CKE is to try with one of the simpler JQuery editors out there. I imagine that for general use they will be much more useful for people than either TinyMCE or CKE,

@Alex There are a lot of them around, which is interesting because I did a lot of digging last night about Zeus and I certainly would not install it now. It was highly regarded as a lightweight and scalable server, but when Riverbed bought Zeus in 2010, they were interested in their balance loading systems and not the server. Consequently, they just shove anyone needing support over to the old Zeus support site which has hardly been touched for pushing on three years. It might still work, but you would have to question why a host would not be migrating away from it as fast as practically possible! Joss

I am sure it will Although I haven't used EE, the one impression I am getting here from users is that PW is not particularly a head-to-head competitor to EE so much as just an alternative - a different way of doing a similar job. On that basis, I can imagine that a lot of EE users could get a lot from ProcessWire without abandoning EE where it suits what they are doing. In very much the same way as there is a huge overlap between Joomla and Wordpress users. For that reason (and a thousand others) I see no need for PW to worry about any EE politics. Inevitably, for the vast majority of users, (the ones that never post in the forums) all these things are pretty transient. I have seen that in Joomla and Wurm Online - lots of heated debate that passed over the heads of 90% of users who never read the forums and so remained in blissful ignorance! Joss

It is worth noting this - I have two people I know who are on Zeus servers through names.co.uk (I think) I have found this - not sure if it will help anyone: http://www.names.co.uk/support/hosting/528-zeus_rewrite_rules_user_guide.html

Seuche I suspect you are right. Anyway, I keep tripping over the large pile of trophies she keeps in the attic - about time she got some new ones. Smaller would be nice too! I am running out of room.

Okay, so I was beaten to the post by the twins above! The rewrite rules have to be different, but you are messed up by the php version anyway - in fact, I am not many recent releases of CMSs will run on that - some are insisting on 5.3 minimum now. I would strongly suggest you change web hosts, to be honest. That doesn't sound like a main stream hosting company to me - I am not even sure if Zeus is even being developed any more. I know it got bought a few years back and their old support site seems to have been last updated in 2010. Joss

@Pete - yeah, I will be joining creative cloud next month, probably - but actually, I was talking about a ten year old version I have kicking around! @u-nikos - this will happen (and is, sort of), but profiles cant really be added to an existing installation in quite the same way as a theme can, so this will need to be made clear. But I like profiles - they will make my life easier. Or, that is the plan.

This is an interesting point and I think it is probably one of the main reasons they have grown*, but I would be interested in knowing how much themes have helped to the growth of these amongst professional developers - which is the market segment where things like EE and ProcessWire are probably more comfortable. I can only talk of my own experience, but although when I first started using Mambo I did go theme hunting, I quickly worked out that this was more of a burden than a help - converting someone else's theme often took more time than writing my own, and most of the themes out there seemed so loaded with functionality that I did not need that they slowed the site down. Later with Joomla, the only one I used was one with Twitter Bootstrap built in as a starting point but the rest blank. Since there is no theme system as such, in ProcessWire, it cannot take advantage of that sort of promotion in quite the same way. Though obviously if you are using it with a framework like Bootstrap, you can replace the bootstrap.min.css file to change buttons and colours. But I see that as a strength since you can use any framework or templating system or none at all as you wish, without having to work round any preconceived ideas. As I have joked before, you can even use an old copy of Dreamweaver. *Note: The other thing that has helped Drumlapress is that they are available with Factastico and other systems with many hosting providers reprinting tutorials or creating their own hints and tips peculiar to their particular set up.

HI Leeston I am sure you will have fun here. Just watch out for code-based group hugs! Yell if you want to know anything - the support is not so much one-to-one but Many to one! Joss

HI Aaron I will be writing up a better tutorial later this week on this very subject, so look out for that. But there are also some other posts in the forums about this with some snippets to help. Basically, this sort of thing is good to do in ProcessWire because you are not regimented by a particular structure - you can easily create your own. That helps when it comes to realising the clients needs; you don;t have to persuade them down a route they dont wish to go down. Joss

HI Aaron Funilly enough, we have been talking about categories. As you noted, processwire does not have a native category or tag system, and the reason is that it is easy to build one using pages and the page field. This is incredibly rough: Create a template without a file - call it category for neatness! Dont add any fields to it. Create a page using this template - call it Categories (for fun) and make it published and hidden Now, create a couple of children to this new page with the same template - call them category 1 and 2. They should be published and visible. Now, create a new Page field - call it Category. Once you have created and saved it, edit it and under details Select a single, and then in the input tab, select PageListSelect and change the Parent of selectable page to your Categories page That field can now be added to articles and will save a category name with the page. You can then use that to filter results in your template files. You can use the same system to create nested categories, tags or whatever. You also have the option to allow people to create new categories from the field. That is very rough, sorry, but is a basic way to get you started. As for permissions, I haven't done a lot with those yet, but you can create user groups and restrict them to various functions. I am sure some better answers will appear shortly! Joss

Pete is right - you should stick to something really simple to start with. Do the walk through and you will see the separation between creating a "template" (That is the object in the administration that you use to group your fields together for a page), creating a page (That is entering data that is stored in the database) Displaying the "page" using a template file (that is the actual layout done using a file in the /site/templates/ directory) The point is, that you can do come very, very basic template files just to display some sort of output, and then replace them with something more complicated later - you dont actually need to use any particular profile at all. In fact, for your purposes, probably better just sticking with the basic one that comes with the install. Take it from me, it is surprisingly easy to learn.

There is a joke about Google and Apple App stores that there are a million apps - and 999,999 of them do the same thing. The point with ProcessWire is that it is perfect for people who do not want to be channelled into a narrow focus of development by how either the central system works or how the plugin developers think you should work, but want to have a system which allows them to problem solve quickly and easily. Take me, as a pretty non-techy sort of person. I have put together a block based (!) site to use for a particular process. It has slide shows, carousels, and all kinds of straightforward JQuery gimmicks that suit my purpose and I haven't once had to go and get a module from anywhere. I was able to do it all with the structure that PW offers me. I have used Joomla quite aggressively over the years, including for a large support site for an online game, and have used a multitude of extensions from the JED. The vast majority of them I can replicate on ProcessWire without recourse to any modules, and those I cannot replicate, I probably will be able to eventually, or some bright spark on here well help me out. And the best thing of all? Because this all uses the Processes in the system and relates directly and seamlessly into the Wiring of the core, my finished product does not resemble one of those large tinfoil balls at 1970s parties with cocktail sticks of pineapple and cheese stuck all over it! Even to non-tech me, it looks like a unified application, ready to be rolled out and used by a client. Now, that is fun. Think I will go and play some depressing blues on a Ukulele to celebrate! Joss

Is it my imagination, or is it getting busier round here in the last couple of months since I joined? Fun! Though I probably ought to being doing more working and less funning!

It is a difficult balance (as Google, Apple and, closer to home, Wordpress have discovered) between convenience and liability. The main reason to keep all modules centrally hosted is that it becomes self promotional - if someone is looking for an ecommerce something and google brings up a PW module, then that leads them to ProcessWire. If that is hosted on the ProcessWire site, then the stickiness of the link is greatly increased and people are much more likely to follow through and find out what the core is about. The downside is that it is difficult to keep QC over everything - the three above certainly haven't managed it even with a lot of resources! Incidentally, what is the logistics of working this backwards? This is a silly idea and a little off topic, but here goes. At the moment you install PW, then the Module Manager (which will get merged) and then a module that has some sparking functionality. A profile, perhaps. So, what about if you can work it the other way - you find a wonderful module/profile/thingy that is exactly what you want for you next website creation, you click download or install, and it fetches the PW core for you ... and so on. OKay, so probably only sensible for Profiles rather than someone's menu addition, but would be an interesting little bit of workflow. It means profiles can be advertised without the end user having to find their way back to the core first. That is about as sticky as you can get. It is like finding the perfect door handle and discovering the house is supplied automatically