This is curious.... experimenting with Processwire

[mikeuk]

Hi all

This is curious. After spending quite a lot of time using, learning and advocating Drupal as an API interface rather than template builder, I come here and find Processwire seemingly having been doing this all along.

I often thought Drupal became heavy and bloated from a page loading point of view, with so many users using modules (Views, Panels, themes with sub themes, etc) that control layout. So I thought, hang on, shouldn't we be making the template statically and adding the bits we want to it? Followed that route for a few sites, but found little interest in the idea from others.

So here I am, experimenting with Processwire and it seems the whole ethos is that approach. Or I am a lot less smart than I thought and completely misunderstand this system.....

[diogo]

I think you got it right. What PW does is quite simple, you're probably just having trouble to accept that this is so different from what you are used to with Drupal. PW is actually a Framework in its essence, the CMS is just a nice extra that was built exactly with the tools that the framework offers. Resuming, you can and should use the CMS to build your sites, because it makes your life and especially your clients life easier, but what you are using is actually the framework and its' API.

Because the main goal of PW is to let you built your templates without interfering, you are also quite right that it feels like building static templates. This is of course just a feeling — in reality PW injects a set of objects, and also includes some helpful files in your templates — but the truth is that you almost don't feel its interference because nothing is outputted, so you could even output only static content if you wanted.

By the way, welcome to the forum, I think you will have a good time here with us

[mikeuk]

By the way, welcome to the forum, I think you will have a good time here with us

Thanks. very close to starting a project so may well need the forum to get things right. Will also be nice to get back to some PHP as Golangs been the recent diversion (Hugo).