page slots

[porl]

Hi all.

I have had a brief look at Processwire, and I must say I am impressed.

I am in the process of evaluating different options for a new site for my employer. Initially I was looking at such CMSs as Concrete5 or Apostrophe. All of the solutions I looked at were either limited or bugged in some way that I believed would become a major issue for the people who would be adding content to the site.

I began to think I would have to try and implement it all myself in a framework such as Symfony. Thankfully I found this site before it was too late.

My question is (and maybe it has been answered elsewhere) how difficult is it to implement something like the page "slots" that many other systems use? I don't want to give them just large WYSIWYG blocks, as I believe that is part of the problem with their current site (consistency for one). I love the slots idea (add a title block; add an image block etc) but I'm not sure if this is easy to do in Processwire

I'm probably just missing something obvious, but I'm not sure how I would go about making templates that can accept user definable fields (as opposed to field contents). Is this something that Processwire does? I admit I've only had time to look briefly so it may already do this.

I saw some mention of this functionality in the "repeatables" topic, is this what I should be looking at? I need something that a non-expert can easily work with as I won't be the primary content editor once the site is live.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I really hope I can use Processwire for this site (even though I just finished getting used to the Twig templating engine which I love).

PS. I'm in my mobile so I'm not sure if I can edit the initial post to add this, but I forgot to say that in browsing the forum here I have found this to be easily one of the friendliest development communities I have seen. Nice work everyone.

[diogo]

Hello and welcome to the forum

I love the slots idea (add a title block; add an image block etc) but I'm not sure if this is easy to do in Processwire

This is exactly how Processwire is designed to behave. All the fields in the CMS are custom. You just have to create them, give them a field type (image, textarea, checkbox, etc...) and populate the templates with them. then, you had the template to a page, and all the fields are there to be easily edited.

even though I just finished getting used to the Twig templating engine which I love

You will see that it is very easy to get used to templating in PW. To make it short, imagine that you created a field called "client_email". You just have to do echo $page->client_email to output it on the site. Beyhond this, it just gets much more powerful.

[porl]

Thanks for your quick response. I'll look into it further to see how it behaves (with my 'non-expert' goggles on)

[apeisa]

I think it might be little different what you are after. How concrete5 and apostrophe does basic text & image placement is pretty nice and much better than TinyMCE or any other "big content area" method. But if you go beyond "text & image placement" then the method what ProcessWire, Drupal and Expression Engine does is much better. With "drop content blocks here and there" method you do end up with same end result than always using just single TinyMCE field: huge bunch of content without any (or very little) metadata baked into it. If you use more structural cms (and use it "right") then you end up "slicing" your content into smaller pieces. This allows you to build much better websites in the long run. You can easily build tiny applications around your content (see Ryan's Skyscrapers site: http://processwire.com/skyscrapers/ - which would be pretty much impossible to build, if your content is build with just huge text areas) .

Other area where easy "text and image placement" falls short is when you do want to use your data in different context. The way you positioned your images inside your text elements probably doesn't work in your mobile site, or in that nice flash application that uses same data.

Of course there are times when we (or our clients) do need to mix some images inside their body copy - and the current way in PW is to use TinyMCE or Diogo's image tags module: http://processwire.c...ags/#entry10663 (or something similar).

[porl]

Thank you for the detailed response, Apeisa. I understand and agree with all the points you have raised. It is hard sometimes to get clients to see the value in such a structured approach but in the end I think it is worthwhile. I have enjoyed what I have found so far and even if I can't use it for this project I am sure I will use Processwire in others down the track.