Is PW right for this project

[am*]

Hi everybody,

I´m developing a website with some features where I´m not sure if processwire is a good choice to work with, as I`m new to PW.

First, it should be normal website for a friendly society with the typical information like about us, some pages and stuff.

Plus there will be a custom user management, where some users are paying members.

Plus there are courses the admin can manage in the backend and users can book online.

So these features clearly stand out of ordinary websites and demand a pretty complex database structure.

So the question is, if PW is flexible enough to allow me creating these features with their complex database relationships in a way it makes sense?

Or am I better off using an even more open and flexible framework like laravel where I am sure I can code these features in, but where I´m lacking the basic CMS structures PW would offer me?

Thanks alot!

[Tom.]

Hi am*,

Welcome to the forum, you will find that ProcessWire is called a CMF over a CMS and for very good reason, it's incredibly flexible. There is nothing you mention which stands out of the ordinary. ProcessWire has been used from everything to simple one pages to Project Management Systems, and it performs extremely well in all walks of (development) life.

I would encourage you to check out the new documentation https://processwire.com/api/ref/ 

Updating fields such as if someone becomes a paying user, it's incredibly easy:

$user->of(false);
$user->addRole('member');
$user->save();

One thing to remember in ProcessWire is everything is a page, this means the API is incredibly simple not matter what you want to do, as the syntax is completely the same across all different types of pages. 

[Francesco Bortolussi]

Processwire could be used for everything with it's own "Way of do things", data management or whatever you call it; but he is also beneficient and does not prohibit you to create your own parallel data structures(Like custom tables in MySQL) and make queries using PDO.

In the Software House I work, we have used it even for backend in an App (iOs & Android).

You just need to use your imagination.

[szabesz]

I always think of ProcessWire as complete PHP framework bundled with integrated browser based content management tools (hundreds of tools, actually). ProcessWire should be listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_frameworks#PHP

You do not even have to use the CMS if you don't want to, but why reinvent the wheel?

[am*]

Great, that´s what I wanted to hear
How would you compare PW to Laravel in case of ease to use, complexity, possibilities?

If there are guys here who also worked with Laravel.

Of course, asking this in the PW forum will not be very represantative

Are there cases where you would prefere a pure framework like laravel?

I didn´t yet start developing with pw, but my feeling is that it is a bit more lightweight.

What I didn´t like so much about Laravel is that it´s very much abstracted, a bit too much for me not being that much of a hardcore dev

Some opinions on laravel vs pw would be interesting.

[szabesz]

I'm not a hardcore dev either and my only encounter with Laravel was the one and only occasion when I fiddled with it for a few hours. Laravel seems to be a heavyweight campion with all those 20k+ files you need to implement even a Hello World app. Incorporating only about 1800 files, ProcessWire is definitely on the lightweight side.

With its friendly community, constantly improving documentation and features I opted for ProcessWire instead of all the others I also checked out.

ProcessWire sites are also easy to manage, upgrades are rarely an issue if performed with some very basic care, (say, if you modified your .htaccess, then do not replace it with the default one while upgrading, etc...). Even if you run into issues, our above mentioned friendly community is ready to help right here in the Forum

[Bill C]

Hello am*, welcome You have probably already noticed the 'Modules' section on the site. I am rather new here myself.  I just wanted to point out that you will find a category of modules referred to as 'Users and Access'. I think that if you are going to be developing a site that requires user management, you will find some modules in that section that you may find very helpful in giving your development a little jumpstart. And that's only one category of modules, you will of course see the others that may contain code that you can incorporate into your site. There are tutorials to help you understand how modules are used in Processwire. You definitely want to browse through the tutorial section.  Well, not just browse... you know what I mean. Get a grip on the template concept in Processwire, especially 'selectors'. Selectors are big. Anyway, I think you will be further impressed by Processwire and has others have said, this is a great community here. Very active, very helpful, very talented. Have a good day and best wishes with your site development.

Oh, one last little tip for you. Actually I picked this up here from one of the threads in the forum and thanks again to the person who posted it!. You may have better results if you use Google to search the forums.

Here's an example. Plug this into Google's search box ' site:https://processwire.com/talk/ user management '

Here's another that pertains to your questions ' site:https://processwire.com/talk/ table design '.

Anyway, before I get too carried away and create another tl;dr type post. Enjoy!

[DaveP]

Plus also try https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=014789015761400632609:fxrf0rj4wr4 for your searching needs. 

[bernhard]

hi am*, welcome to the forum.

one thing to add may be that you REALLY have to invest time in planning your site structure. that's one of the most important parts when building sites with processwire. as everything is a page and every page has it's very own place to live!

if you did your homework here, seemingly complex tasks can get surprisingly easy. like in this example (https://processwire.com/talk/topic/13183-adopt-field-values-as-defaults-from-parents/): blynx built a module to inherit field values from parent pages, whereas in your template file you could just do this:

$foo = $page->closest("foo!=''")->foo

so you have to organise everything in a strict hierarchical structure - the pw page tree.

i would recommend you to do some test projects (https://processwire.com/docs/tutorials/hello-worlds/) and then share your planned site structure with the community. you will always find a helping hand here