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The Unofficial ProcessWire Docs


SiNNuT
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I'm not sure that this has been posted here before but via Twitter i stumbled upon this site:

The Unofficial ProcessWire Docs

I also like the post that explains why this site was made. Making, maintaining and updating great docs is hard work and requires a lot of effort. The api docs on processwire.com are a good start but i agree with what is said in aforementioned blogpost. The unofficial docs site seems like a nice addition to the PW community; a place with nice how-to's, useful tips, plug-in docs, etc.

It already seems populated with some pretty interesting stuff (especially for those of us who aren't already PW guru's)

I would encourage everyone to visit the site and possibly start contributing.

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Interesting. I think what we really need regarding documentation are:

a) Finish the tutorial (http://processwire.c...ct-walkthrough/) and putting it to the site also, as a first "getting start" section. I am hoping to find time to help Ryan with this one.

B) Creating "what's next" section, which has helpful links to other resources and tips how to continue after the first tutorial.

It's great to have more resources, but always little worried about disinformation. In the introduction post Clinton writes:

I do have a few minor PW pet peeves. One is the handling of users, which is often fairly easy to use, but doesn't always make sense when trying to distinguish between front-end and back-end users. But I've heard Ryan is working on a new user concept, so I'll forget about that one. The next one is the MASSIVE number of files and directories PW creates. Uploading and downloading takes a long time. I believe however that this is also being worked on, and shouldn't be a huge problem down the road. Overall, these are fairly minor issues.

There ain't no new user concept coming, that did happen already in version 2.1. The massive number of files and directories PW creates... yes, PW creates a directory per page and that is a problem that is going to be addressed. Not sure what he means with files there and upload / download speed doesn't have anything to do with the fact pw creates a folder per page.

Truth is that if anyone wants to contribute, I am sure we find good place for those from the official site also (where most people would find them, most probably). I don't have anything against unofficial docs / blogs / wikis etc, but currently we are so young project, that there is very easy to contribute to the official stuff also. I think we need to better address and communicate this when we get the new site launched.

Don't want to sound too picky though - great to see more and more PW resources out there. It tells that we are growing fast! Hopefully the unofficial docs project will keep up the great work they already have!

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I think that site is worthwhile and adds value so long as the info is original and safe. I like that what he's put there so far is good info for the most part. For instance, I like that the recent contact form post isn't just another contact form, but one that integrates use of recaptcha with it. I did have some corrections for him on that, replied to in the comments, but did like seeing this different approach for a contact form. Also thought he did a good job with the SEO tricks article.

We setup the Wiki for this purpose a couple months ago (http://wiki.processwire.com), and I'd rather see this sort of content grow from there. It's wide open for anyone to contribute. But so far, no action there (other than some occasional spam I've been cleaning out). I don't know how to motivate people to contribute in that respect. People to write this stuff are few and far between. :) So even if it's not under the processwire.com umbrella, I like to see that Clinton is going out there and writing stuff. I support just about anything that helps to communicate ProcessWire to a broader audience. My only concern would be (like Antti mentioned) incorrect info that we don't have the ability to fix--that potentially increases our support burden. But I'd rather have people write than not, so think it just goes with the territory. Overall it's just great to see the enthusiasm for ProcessWire. More sites talking about it in depth is probably a good thing for growth.

The massive number of files and directories PW creates... yes, PW creates a directory per page and that is a problem that is going to be addressed. Not sure what he means with files there and upload / download speed doesn't have anything to do with the fact pw creates a folder per page.

Not positive, but I think he might have been talking about the quantity of files/directories included with a PW installation (i.e. under /wire/)? So the upload/download time might be related to migrating a site from dev to live? Though the info is probably still incorrect as PW is pretty lightweight compared to most CMSs in this regard. But we do have the likes of TinyMCE and others that contribute to quantity of files. I use rsync for migration which makes things happen in an instant, but I have seen some FTP clients that pause between every file, and a few slow FTP servers that pause between files. So something like migration speed is probably speaking more to the web host, connection or client. If one has to deal with any issues here, something like quantity of files becomes a factor in migration speed.

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Ah, totally forgot about the wiki. I agree, that would be a great place to add some quality stuff. As mentioned above; a great start would be to finish the project walk-through. It's already a nice intro, adding some stuff about page relations (page fieldtype) to efficiently manage your content and possibly url segments would be great.

I'll see if there is anyway that i can contribute.

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As a bit of a MediaWiki learning experience i've put the project walktrough on the wiki. Not sure if this is the place where it ultimately resides, but anyways.

http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/Small_Project_Walktrough

The wiki could do with a bit of syntax highlighting. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi

Maybe later on i can actually contribute to the actual content of the tut.

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Hey chaps

I've implemented the syntax-highlighting extension, not that it works automatically unfortunately.

You can get an idea of how it works by editing the wiki page SiNNuT created and look at the tags wrapping the code. I probably went overboard adding the line numbers to some of the one-liner bits of code, but thought it best to leave it in for now until people have a look at it.

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Thanks for adding that Pete, it seems like a nice addition. Those are some smart line numbers too! Somehow they manage to avoid being copied/pasted. Most sites don't do this, I've been annoyed many times copying/pasting bits of code only to have to clean out all the line numbers that pasted. No such problem here--nice :)

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We setup the Wiki for this purpose a couple months ago (http://wiki.processwire.com), and I'd rather see this sort of content grow from there. It's wide open for anyone to contribute. But so far, no action there (other than some occasional spam I've been cleaning out). I don't know how to motivate people to contribute in that respect.

Ryan, I can remember a discussion about putting this thing up, but somehow I've completely missed the fact that it already exists. Will take a closer look and participate if there's anything I can help with.

By the way, should there perhaps be some kind of "advertising" about this somewhere in case that there might be others like me who'd like to contribute but just didn't know that they could? :)

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By the way, should there perhaps be some kind of "advertising" about this somewhere in case that there might be others like me who'd like to contribute but just didn't know that they could?

Absolutely, you are right about that. It's in that unusual state of there not being enough there for me to want to advertise it too far beyond the forum. But the only way to get more there is to advertise it. :) Sinnut's addition really helped I think. We will definitely include this in the new site's navigation (initially as part of the docs/support navigation).

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What should be the general structure/format of an article? I have a nice collection of advices from you, guys, which I gathered on this forums. And I think at least some of them could be converted into small wiki articles. But I'm not sure whether it is a good thing to duplicate information from the forums anywhere else. Also not sure my language skills are bearable enough to contribute to wiki.

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What should be the general structure/format of an article? I have a nice collection of advices from you, guys, which I gathered on this forums. And I think at least some of them could be converted into small wiki articles. But I'm not sure whether it is a good thing to duplicate information from the forums anywhere else.

Very good points. Some consensus on this would be most helpful. FWIW my feeling would be to reuse forum content, and link back from wiki entries to original forum threads, in case users wanted to see the original context.

In terms of language skills, whether because English is a second language or because a native speaker is just not confident, sensitive editing to improve readability in a wiki context should be acceptable to all. (See, my English is rubbish, and I am English! :-[ )

And anyhow, given the multilingual abilities of PW, there is no reason why the wiki shouldn't eventually have content in other languages. (?)

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It's easy enough to revert (which I've done), as has Ryan, previously.

But so far, no action there (other than some occasional spam I've been cleaning out).

I expect that there is the facility to block IPs etc in the software, which maybe should be looked at?

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Maybe we should take some precautions for this kind of anonymous shit?

IMHO anonymous users shouldn't be allowed to make edits. Requiring users to register can keep some of the spam away and it also enables us to see who's created / updated / edited / removed what (in other words proper version control and all of it's benefits.)

I expect that there is the facility to block IPs etc in the software, which maybe should be looked at?

It's possible to block individual IP addresses or IP address blocks in MediaWiki. If certain pages are targeted more often than others, it's also possible to protect those, though if I recall correctly only sysops can edit protected pages.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that even though blocking IP's is possible, it's not much of a solution; you can always find another public location, open WLAN etc. or simply use a proxy and thus IP blocking is mostly just wasted effort :)

Edited by teppo
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I agree with Teppo. It's really quick and painless to create an account on MediaWiki so why not make this a requirement for contributing to the wiki. For the most part this will do away with spam.

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  • 1 month later...

Just found some more spam on the Wiki, which I can't revert because it's a new page (called CrouchBoring488 - didn't want to link to it.) I found it through the 'Random Page' link, so there could easily be others. Is there a plugin or something for MediaWiki to 'report' a page, or something similar?

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Just found some more spam on the Wiki, which I can't revert because it's a new page (called CrouchBoring488 - didn't want to link to it.) I found it through the 'Random Page' link, so there could easily be others. Is there a plugin or something for MediaWiki to 'report' a page, or something similar?

Good find, I just deleted all the spam pages. But then got into the user accounts and discovered we've got nearly 500 spam accounts in there, all with spam profiles. I don't know how to clear that out short of going through them individually 1 by 1, and don't want to spend the rest of the day doing that. :)

Seems like MediaWiki might just need a little too much babysitting with the spammers. Unless somebody here knows how to administer MediaWiki (?), maybe we should just move the content that's there into the main site. And if anybody wants to submit new documentation, I can set them up with a ProcessWire account instead. I think MediaWiki was a good test, but doesn't seem like we're really using it for it's strengths enough to warrant keeping it. Though if anyone thinks we should keep it (and maybe knows how to clear out these spam accounts) that's fine with me too.

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It does need a lot of attention ryan - the other instance I occasionally upgrade and install extensions for has a lot of admin-level users that can keep on top of spam, as well as a barrage of extra plugins. Even then it's not foolproof :(

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Good find, I just deleted all the spam pages. But then got into the user accounts and discovered we've got nearly 500 spam accounts in there, all with spam profiles. I don't know how to clear that out short of going through them individually 1 by 1, and don't want to spend the rest of the day doing that. :)

Seems like MediaWiki might just need a little too much babysitting with the spammers. Unless somebody here knows how to administer MediaWiki (?), maybe we should just move the content that's there into the main site. And if anybody wants to submit new documentation, I can set them up with a ProcessWire account instead. I think MediaWiki was a good test, but doesn't seem like we're really using it for it's strengths enough to warrant keeping it. Though if anyone thinks we should keep it (and maybe knows how to clear out these spam accounts) that's fine with me too.

Sounds like a plan.

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  • 1 month later...

Hi Guys, ran into this topic doing a Google search.

I've been working on the blog for the past few months. Basically, it's to help out the community and have a database of quick scripts, ProcessWire developers, my friends and I can use.

I appreciate you guys taking a look at the blog. Also, I'm open to contributors for new posts. If you're interested, please let me know.

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  • 2 months later...

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