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The toughest challenge so far? Being our own client. Actually, the website we launched back then was just a placeholder, and the plan was to quickly replace it with a proper portfolio website. But as is often the case, it ended up taking a little longer than expected. A year later, we’ve finally done it: Our new website is live! https://konkat.studio/ The goal of the new website is to showcase our work and better communicate our services. The site is bilingual and was built using ProcessWire and PageGrid. More on that later. In addition to the website, we’ve also evolved our visual identity and logo. KONKAT (from concatenation) stands for linking individual elements into a functional whole. Our new branding makes this connection visible. In our case, we combine strategy, design, and technology into a unified process. The logo mark communicates this as well; as most of you probably know, the += operator in JavaScript joins elements and assigns the result. It took us some iterations to get the design right, but once the design was done, development was pretty straightforward. Most of the time was spent preparing the content for the projects, and that is also where PageGrid was super useful since it allowed us to design the layout and content of each project individually. Backend view: Managing project content and layouts with PageGrid. PageGrid also significantly sped up development, as we built all other pages using only its core blocks. For the projects overview, for instance, we used the datalist block to automatically generate the listing from our project pages, working perfectly out of the box without any custom logic. We also added some custom code where it made sense, e.g. the scroll animation on the homepage was just a bit easier to achieve with custom code (it uses native CSS sticky). Backend view: Using Pagegrid's inline editing to update some text on the english version auf our services page. Another great thing is that PageGrid takes care of lazy loading images and videos (using the famous lazysizes js plugin) and is caching its content automatically. As a result, we got a 100 on the Google Lighthouse test on desktop and 99 on mobile without any extra optimizations (we are not using Markup Cache or ProCache for this site). Backend view: Editing a thumbnail on the homepage If you have any further questions regarding our workflow or process, feel free to ask. I will do my best to answer them. Also, please let us know if you find any bugs, since the website is brand new, there are probably some we haven't caught yet! We also welcome any feedback you may have. Best, Jan & Diogo (KONKAT)

We have relaunched the old website of design business expert Joachim Kobuss. The old site desperataly needed a facelift and a streamlined CMS that allowed our client to fill over 130 pages of content in a span of two weeks. We at schwarzdesign used ProcessWire + ProFields for the Backend and built a Bootstrap 4.1-based frontend. Features / Services provided Responsive design featuring a desktop layout with two fixed navigation areas and a fixed sidebar that form a frame around the content. Carefully set typography and spacing for a smooth reading experience for long texts on all devices. A hierarchical page tree with three levels of nested pages, all using the same simple set of fields. Password protection for individual pages and an optional password request form. Privacy by design: There's no tracking, no Google Map, no Facebook Like Button or anything like that on the page. Because we don't set any cookies or include third-party code, we don't need a cookie notice ? Modules used Profields (especially Repeater Matrix, Textareas and Functional Fields) Form Builder Tracy Debugger Wire Mail SMTP Duplicator Admin Links in Frontend Sitemap Optimizing for content The most distinguishing feature is the large amount of long texts our client has written. So it was important to provide a good editing experience in the frontend and have a content centered design that made long text sections easy to follow. We didn't want to give our client just a large CK Editor body text, since in our experience, those WYSIWYG editors aren't actually that easy to use for non-technical folk. It also reduces the amount of control we as designers and CSS-authors have over the presentation of the content. So instead, we built a flexible section system using the Repeater Matrix field of the ProFields module. There are three sections: text content, downloads and single image. Each section has a headline field and a radio selection field to switch between two levels of headline hierarchy (corresponding to h2 and h3). For the text section, there's a CK Editor textarea stripped to the bare minimum (strong, italic, lists, blockquotes and links), with no confusing styles or format dropdown. The image section features an additional option for full- or half-width images and an option to display the image description as a caption. And of course, the download section has a multivalue file field that is displayed as download buttons in the frontend. This simple sectioning system allowed us to build the entire site (except for the homepage) using just one template fieldset. There are three templates: Basic Page, Topic and Article. Basic pages are for generic pages like imprint and data policy. Topics may only be children of the homepage, while articles may be children of a topic or of another article, so the pages can be nested indefinitely. This provides the hierarchical structure used for the page layout. Topic and article inherit the fieldset of the basic page, so it's just one template under the hood. There's also smart Open Graph tag generation; title, description and preview image are automatically generated based on the first suitable sections on each page and can be manually overridden using the SEO tab available on all pages. Laying out the page Our design has three fixed areas: The top navigation, the left side navigation and the right sidebar, which shows some general contact info and a random image. The top navigation always shows the top-level topic pages, the sidebar navigation contains all articles in the current topic, displayed in a hierarchical structure. This was technically challenging, as the many fixed layout areas broke the normal pageflow and didn't work well for smaller devices. I solved this using four seperate Bootstrap containers, three of which are fixed. Only the container with the main page content flows normally. The left sidebar only fills the three leftmost columns of its container, the right sidebar the three rightmost columns, and the main content takes up the six center columns of it's container. All three have an offset to the top to make space for the fixed header navigation. This way, all the seperate layout areas can never overlap. The CSS that applies position: fixed to the containers is wrapped in a media query with a min-width, so on tablets and mobile devices, the areas simply stack. Check out the source code to see how those containers are laid out! The logo is text by the way, not an image. It's positioned using CSS3 transforms. Password protection Our client wanted to password protect some of his pages with varying passwords, so he can give different people access to different sets of pages. Also, he wanted to have a password request form, where people can submit their name and contact information to request access to a specific page. In the backend, we added a password field that activates the password protection for that page. There's also a checkbox to display the password request form. The form is built using the Form Builder module (and a simple hook to add the current page title to the outgoing mail). However, for the password protection, we built a custom solution. While there is a readymade module available, we didn't want something based on user accounts. A visitor should be able to simply input the password on a protected page and start reading, without bothering with registering an account. The authentification is stored in the session, so after closing the browser you have to input the password again, but that seemed to be a worthy tradeoff. Anyway, when visiting a password protected page, the template checks if the user is already authentificated to read this page; if so, it displays the page content, otherwise it displays the password input form and the password request form if it was also activated in the CMS. A nice-to-have feature that we built in addition is that if multiple pages use the same password and you input it on one of them, you are automatically authentificated to view all of them during the current session. A caveat of this method is that since the page content depends on the current session, we couldn't use the inbuilt page cache at all. So instead we used the cache API to cache rendered section markup and the navigation menues, which still results in a blazingly fast site. For the techies amongst you, here's the PasswordProtectedPage class we wrote for this functionality: <?php namespace schwarzdesign; use Processwire\Wire; use Processwire\Page; use Processwire\PageArray; use Processwire\User; class PasswordProtectedPage extends Wire { const PASSWORD_FIELD = 'page_password'; const PASSWORD_INPUT_NAME = 'page_password'; const STORAGE_KEY = 'authentificatedPages'; const STATUS_FREE_ACCESS = 'free_access'; const STATUS_AUTHENTIFICATED = 'authentificated'; const STATUS_NOT_AUTHENTIFICATED = 'not_authentificated_yet'; const STATUS_WRONG_PASSWORD = 'wrong_password'; /** * The status of the authentification. */ public $status = self::STATUS_NOT_AUTHENTIFICATED; private $page; private $authentificated_pages = []; public function __construct(Page $page) { $this->page = $page; $this->authentificated_pages = $this->getAuthentificatedPagesFromStorage(); } public function handleRequest() { // pages with no password set if (empty($this->page->get(self::PASSWORD_FIELD))) { return $this->status = self::STATUS_FREE_ACCESS; } // pages that the user is already authentificated to use if (in_array($this->page->id, $this->authentificated_pages)) { return $this->status = self::STATUS_AUTHENTIFICATED; } // if the user set the input, check the password if ($password = $this->getInputPassword()) { if ($this->passwordIsCorrect($password)) { $this->authentificatePagesByPassword($password); $this->storeAuthentificatedPages(); return $this->status = self::STATUS_AUTHENTIFICATED; } else { return $this->status = self::STATUS_WRONG_PASSWORD; } } else { return $this->status = self::STATUS_NOT_AUTHENTIFICATED; } } public function userCanAccess() { return in_array($this->status, [self::STATUS_AUTHENTIFICATED, self::STATUS_FREE_ACCESS]); } public function getInputPassword() { $password = $this->wire('input')->post(self::PASSWORD_INPUT_NAME); if (empty($password)) { return null; } return $password; } public function authentificatePagesByPassword(string $password) { $pages = $this->wire('pages')->find(self::PASSWORD_FIELD . '=' . $password); $ids = array_map(array($this, 'extractIdFromPage'), iterator_to_array($pages)); $this->addAuthentificatedPages($ids); } /** * Private helper Functions. */ private function passwordIsCorrect(string $password) { return (string) $this->page->get(self::PASSWORD_FIELD) === $password; } private function extractIdFromPage(Page $page) { return $page->id; } private function addAuthentificatedPages(array $page_ids) { $this->authentificated_pages = array_merge($this->authentificated_pages, $page_ids); } private function getAuthentificatedPagesFromStorage() { $ids = $this->wire('session')->get(self::STORAGE_KEY); return $ids ? $ids : []; } private function storeAuthentificatedPages() { $this->wire('session')->set(self::STORAGE_KEY, $this->authentificated_pages); } } This is used in the template like this: <?php namespace Processwire; use schwarzdesign\PasswordProtectedPage; $protectedPage = new PasswordProtectedPage($page); $protectedPage->handleRequest(); if (!$protectedPage->userCanAccess()) { if ($user->hasPermission('display-page-password')) { /* Display the password in plaintext for editors & admins */ } /* Display the password input form */ if ($page->show_password_request_form) { /* Display the password request form */ } } else { /* Display the page content */ } Screenshots

Today we've relaunched the website of one of the most beautiful castles in Germany: "Castle Marienburg". The Castle was built as a birthday present of King George V of Hanover (1819-1878) to his wife Queen Marie (1818-1907). Located right next to neuwaerts hometown Hanover and being one of the greatest Tourist attractions in our region it was a real pleasure to be allowed to bring the feeling of this venerable building to the digital age. // Some parts of the website are not yet translated. We know about this I'll add some details and technical notes next week (if anyone is interested).