Start from the scratch

[medienstrategen]

Hello together,

I'm new here and have typical beginner question:

Focused on information architecture and content, I use Wordpress, because (as a one man show) I do not have to "fight" with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP together. Layout (themes) and plugins (form processing, sliders, etc.) for additional features are available out of the box.

Working with process wire: Do I have to do all jobs manually by hand (responsive layout, drop down menus, header sliders, ...) working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Or is it possible to use frameworks (like Bootstrap) and libraries (like JQuery).

 

Thanks a lot.

Martin

[teppo]

Hello there and welcome to the forum!

We do have site profiles for ProcessWire, so you might want to check those out. Generally speaking they're intended as a "starting point", and you will no doubt have to dig into both front-end and back-end work, at least to some extent. You might also want to check out our markup modules, which may provide some helpful shortcuts for your site building.

Since jQuery is just a front-end JavaScript library, you can easily include it on your site, just like any other 3rd party JavaScript library out there. Same thing goes for front-end frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation: ProcessWire itself doesn't generate any markup for you, which means that you can use any given framework to build your site.

ProcessWire is very different from WordPress, and developing sites with ProcessWire is similarly different. I would suggest giving it a try, but if you're looking for a solution that lets you simply start with a complete theme, install all required features as modules, and never touch code or markup.. well, in that case ProcessWire probably isn't the best option for you.

On the other hand if you're interested in learning how to build actually working sites and you're not afraid to get your hands dirty every now and then, you'll no doubt fall in love with ProcessWire and the awesome developer API it provides 

Hope this helps a bit.

[dragan]

PW is best suited for developers who want 100% control over the final product (and that of course requires/includes code - be it front- or backend).

The final product may be a website, a web app, a REST server - or anything web-based, really.

There are some themes floating around that you can use off the shelf (including some that are based on Bootstrap / Foundation), but if you are really "fighting" with HTML, CSS, JS + PHP, ProcessWire might not be your first choice.

otoh, you can take any HTML and build PW-templates quite easily. What CSS/JS framework you work with is completely up to you. There are no restrictions or limitations whatsoever.

There are many tutorials out there, plus forum posts that will get you up and running very quickly. https://processwire.com/docs/tutorials/

 

[pwired]

Hi and welcome to processwire. You should go through the forum channels and their posts because these questions are already answered many times. Processwire is a decoupled system, build around the concept that everything in the backend is "a page". You can use any css grid or php framework that you want to speed up your work. If you are new to these things I would suggest to start with the pocketgrid css as it is very easy to understand and work with.

Flydev has made 2 nice templates available lately for processwire, one is based on bootstrap

and the second one is based on foundation:

I have setup a preview of these templates here http://dev9.pe.hu and here http://dev8.pe.hu

Processwire gives you the highest freedom and power to build websites but like you mentioned you need to know html, css, javascript and php, and above all: the api of processwire. If you don't know this you will only be able to make simple websites with processwire. There are no professional templates for processwire like there are for wordpress. Why do you think wordpress has become so popular: pick a professional template, click it together and in only a few days you have a professional looking website. But this comes also with a price: wordpress isn't the safest system as it gets hacked a lot and wordpress needs a lot of plugins to get things to work. A good example is a multi-language website with wordpress. You need the wpml plugin for this to translate text strings. Not really functional as this solution causes a lot of database calls. You have to use the wpml search option to find the text strings in the database that you need to translate. And wpml is the best you can get for wordpress. That makes you rethink about wordpress. Processwire has multi-language already build in the core, a breeze to use and a real functional solution like it should be. Drop down menus and sliders are the least problems you have to get them in processwire. Right now I am putting the camera slider in a processwire website. http://www.pixedelic.com/plugins/camera/  This is only a matter of pulling the pictures from the processwire backend into the slider html/css. More effort you have to do for setting up your own forms because you need to know the api and php and a bit of abstract thinking. The good thing of processwire is that it makes you completely independent in making a website in any possible way you want or need. But for a non coder it takes time to get there.