ALA: Love Your CMS

[LostKobrakai]

I just attended one of the free A List Apart live-events and was quite amazed. The big topics that were discussed were how to chose a cms, evaluating not only the frontend, but also the author/backend user experience and workflow needs and finally the current interest in decoupled cm-systems. The great thing was, that on all of those topics I was constantly thinking how nice it is to handle these things in PW. Some may include more work than others, but in the end it's really avoiding lots of those mentioned difficulties / roadblocks with cmss. 

So my conclusion is really "I love my CMS"   .

For the curious I've included the link to the event page, where the hangout/transscript will be posted later and the hangout link, so you can watch it as long as the event page isn't updated. Maybe someone did even watch it live as well.

http://alistapart.com/event/content-management

https://plus.google.com/events/clcdcbjo5puojn47aprk5plkem0?authkey=CMP6kImisby_tgE

[elabx]

I hadn't heard about the concept of "headless" CMS, though I believe it is kind of the way PW is built right? Like, everything modules around the core?

Also the examples they give about distributed technologies as management systems reminded me of a topic around General Support of someone making an API for a mobile app. 

My favorite part of Processwire is this feeling that I know "a way" of accessing data and just present it however I want to. Not having to look into the documentation every time to see which specific function I need to call and the default admin that makes so easy to show just enough for the right user.

I love this CMS too

[LostKobrakai]

I hadn't heard about the concept of "headless" CMS, though I believe it is kind of the way PW is built right? Like, everything modules around the core?

It's partly that, but mostly that the whole presentation-layer is already decoupled. So you can already go and choose whatever system you like to create the presentation, while other CMSs are quite tightly couple (think of wp loops). 

[Pete]

So what you're saying is we're already ahead of the game? I like it

To paraphrase Terminator 2:

The output is not set. There is no markup but what we write for ourselves.

[pwired]

Aha, so this is what they mean with decoupled cm-systems.

[Soma]

We're lightyears ahead.

[clsource]

processwire is love processwire is life

[Jonathan Lahijani]

We're lightyears ahead.

I believe this as well and here's how I came to the same conclusion...

I recently read this post by the original creator of Drupal and the fantastic comments there:

http://buytaert.net/should-we-decouple-drupal-with-a-client-side-framework

... and that gets you thinking deeply about the evolution of content management systems and what their role is in the coming years.

If you believe their role is ultimately some sort of structured content storage database that's decoupled from the frontend, or entirely headless, then platforms that like already exist.  They are called Content as a Service systems, like Contentful:

https://www.contentful.com/

More about CaaS:

http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2014/10/27/3944

Contentful is "an API-first CMS" and is entirely headless.  It exposes the content as an API.  You can then build your frontend separately in any way that you like.  A very interesting approach is outlined here, using the Roots static site generator:

http://carrot.is/coding/static_cms

The thing about Contentful is that the concept and simplicity of fields, templates (known as "Content Types" in Contentful) and pages (known as "Entries" in Contentful) is almost exactly like ProcessWire.

If you compare the two, you soon realize that ProcessWire is much more robust and feature rich... more field types, ability to nest pages, finer level of control, a User system, not forced into Markdown for rich text fields, ability to create modules, Hannacode/shortcodes and so on.  Contentful is great too, but I feel it has a more precise use case.

With that being said, the way I see ProcessWire is that it can be a CaaS-like/headless CMS much like Contentful, but also a "traditional" CMS like Drupal/WordPress but with way better architecture.  Best of both worlds.

I love my CMS too.

[Beluga]

Jonathan: you should write an article about your observation.