PW Site Profiles are like WP Themes?

[clsource]

As you may know Wordpress is famous for the diversity of its themes.

Should Processwire begin promoting the creation and possibly selling 

custom site profiles.

like wordpress themes a site profile

will have all the configurations for ready to go

websites.

this could enable a masification of processwire

for people that wants a simple solution

pre configured and working out of the box.

[Jonathan Lahijani]

For people who want a simple solution out of the box, I would say ProcessWire is not that kind of CMS and that's a good thing.  I see ProcessWire as a developer-oriented tool for building custom, complex content websites that have unique requirements and that should be it's strength.  CraftCMS and ExpressionEngine fit that niche as well.

If ProcessWire were to become a CMS where themes could be swapped at will, I'd imagine that would first pose some technical challenges that would need to be resolved.  For example, to what extent does a theme dictate field/template structure, and if someone were to switch to another theme, how would that work?  Nico's WireThemes proof of concept module has a nice way of going about that.  It's similar to how FormBuilder can map a form's fields to a page's fields when using FormBuilders option to save submissions as pages.

When it comes to WordPress and premium themes (like ThemeForest), once you're on a theme, you are stuck with it.  No easy portability.  Not to mention, each theme is like a CMS within WordPress itself, especially with the trend of mega themes that have recently become popular.  Then when add a few plugins to the mix and you'll probably have all kinds of conflicts.

Although WordPress is still the king of CMSes for ready-to-go themes, I would say that WordPress is going to be losing its dominance in that arena given the new generation of remotely hosted content management systems, like SquareSpace, Wix and Webflow.  Those companies are doing very well because they really cater to people who want something up quick, cheap, easy and with a small learning curve.  No coding required.  It seems that WordPress (.com at least) is stepping up their game to challenge that.  Their new admin system and Jetpack are good examples.

Lastly, being the McDonalds of CMSs will cheapen the image of ProcessWire.

I do think however we should be attracting advanced WordPress developers.  In short, anyone who uses any tools from Roots.io, Underscores, Advanced Custom Fields, WP-CLI, or similar.  There are many talented people in those circles who for reasons beyond me, still use WordPress.

[clsource]

I agree with you that wordpress and processwire are totally different systems

in every aspect. And if PW tries to emulate WP it will lesser its quality and overal developer hapiness.

My point here is we could make a special market for site profiles

that shows a starter package for developers to build on, like those

you mention Roots and Underscores are starter packs for wp theme builders.

Well documented, expertly crafted site profiles

that will lower the barriers for beginners and save time

to seasoned pw developers.

Now there are site profiles, but I feel that they can

be improved in documentation and structure.

[Macrura]

yeah, i think it would be cool to have a completely pre-built demo site with filler content, sort of like the old Joomla 'quick start' model.

the expectation would be that this is for people who only want the features as shown on the profile, and no custom development;

could make it easier to promote it to clients with lower budgets, instead of sending on their way to WP or SS..

[szabesz]

I have just found this css framework (called Responsee III) the other day (actually, I've been looking for something like this for a while). It is not as "bloated" as (say) Bootstrap or Foundation, so it is easy to figure out what is behind the scenes, as it uses vanilla css so no sass/less or similar is used. This framework is not re-written from scratch every second year either. I tested one of its v2 based demo website by replacing the framework's files with the new versions found in v3, and nothing has changed on the frontend, so even upgrading the framework was as simple as replacing some files. A framework like this would be a good choice to be used for this "quick start site profile". People can customize it easily by using their own "custom.css" to overwrite the rules.

Besides the css framework, the profile should support something similar that WordPress does right out of the box (standard blog features with categories).

I also support (actually I am implementing my own PW version) a variation of the delayed output, when (e.g) basic-page.php only does this: $layout = wireRenderFile("layout/basic-page.inc.php"); and basic-page.inc.php contains the alternative syntax style template code, which is often preferred by beginners and people coming from WordPress and similar...

Edit: I forgot the name and the link of the css framework, so I just added it...

Edited January 3, 2016 by szabesz

[rick]

The issue I have with providing joopalpress, out-of-the box, pre-configured solutions, is processwire shouldn't be implying endorsement of any framework or component that is not processwire itself. By including any of those in a default installation, or as an add-on, would degrade processwire to the level of the joopalpresses. The primary strength is processwire is non-destructive and non-limiting with a developer's creations.

What I think might be a solution, is to create a sub-forum under getting started where we can provide topics on setting up processwire with whatever framework (or other add-on) as a guide for new users, and even for seasoned developers to look at. We could also demonstrate how to swap site profiles. I think it would be advantageous to show new users how easy it is to utilize these various components with processwire. But putting all the combinations into an install would not be my first choice.

[szabesz]

@rick: In this case we are back to square one, that is "processwire shouldn't be implying endorsement of 'anything else'" which is the current state we are in Without an easy to use ("shape it to your needs") frontend "framework", you cannot guide beginners/non-developers in tweaking the profile they use.

In this case, we are talking about bloggers, small companies, etc, who need a  reliable, easy to maintain CMS (ProcessWire) and want to tweak the frontend a little bit, but they do not want to "develop" anything.  They just need useful tips and code snippets with step-by-step instructions on how and where to apply them.

I know, this is not the basic idea behind ProcessWire, but the topic here is "PW Site Profiles are like WP Themes?", and we cannot solve it without anything pre-build for the frontend.

[clsource]

A great example of what I mean is Padloper

https://www.padloper.pw/

It gives you simple components for making your own ecommerce with processwire,

haves a great documentation and its professionally crafted.

I think more software like that should be made

[pwired]

Reading the different opinions in this thread about themes for Processwire. Because Processwire is a decoupled system it would be very easy to deliver an out of the box theme. There would be many ways to do this. One way would be the use of child pages that are stacked on top of each other like layers to build up a webpage.

All that needs to be done is to set up a profile where every page has a few child pages. These child pages hold the text and image fields that are used in the (parent) webpage. You just add two more fields: a path to a html layout and a path to it's associated css. You do this for all child pages for as much pages you would have in the website and this would be the theme. Tuning the theme would be as easy as editing each separate html/css for each child. Now let's start selling our themes

[szabesz]

All that needs to be done is to set up a profile where every page has a few child pages. These child pages hold the text and image fields that are used in the (parent) webpage. You just add two more fields: a path to a html layout and a path to it's associated css. You do this for all child pages for as much pages you would have in the website and this would be the theme. Tuning the theme would be as easy as editing each separate html/css for each child. Now let's start selling our themes

Would it be a "basic setup" similar to those page builders that are so popular these days in WP/Joomla and (possibly) others? Interesting idea.