Suitability of Process Wire

[darrenw]

I have using Wordpress for the past few years, and stumbled on ProcessWire. I was after views anyone may have on the suitability PW for my project, which is:

- currently I have about 150 paid subscribers who have access to underlying content

- around 600 pages

- use vertical fly out menu (but am OK with the PW website vertical menu)

- blog with an additional 1000 pages (I send a regular newsletter)

- am interested in having relationships between data (i.e., similar to the demo on skyscrapers - city, when built etc). 

- I currently use google custom search but would like to move to Algolia. 

I don't like all the plugins with Wordpress (e.g., here one day gone the next) and find it quite slow compared to PW and similar. 

Hence, I am looking for a faster load times and a pure CMS. I'm not a programmer or designer, but prefer to look after the IT side myself, and have done so with WP for the last 6 years. I don't necessarily need a 'pretty site'' - more interested in the functionality. In an ideal world, I would like users to be able to preset certain preferences around which content they are interested in. 

I have been in and had a read on other options: Kirby, Grav, Simple CMS, SilverStripe etc etc. But PW seems to be the most suited due to the simplicity and flexibility with fields. 

I have loaded up PW onto MAMP and had a bit of a play to see how it all works. 

I would appreciate any comments to assess the suitability of PW. Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

[clsource]

Hi welcome to PW!.

If you need a case study look at this

 

hope it helps

[szabesz]

Hello and welcome,

6 hours ago, darrenw said:

I'm not a programmer or designer

Well, ProcessWire is perfectly suitable for such a site you described (actually for any website you might happen to build...), but it is not the sort of CMS you can just click together like a WordPress site. Sure, creating your database entities (Pages and Fields) is a piece of cake even for beginners, but you will need to spend time on actually writing code to Wire things together. Learning ProcessWire based development is a sort of linear learning "curve" (linear curve? huh... ) but takes time and patience nonetheless. However, it is also a lot of fun, especially when discussing things here in the Forums 

Edited November 25, 2016 by szabesz
typo

[darrenw]

Thanks for the warm welcome! Also, thanks for your comments CLSOURCE and SZABESZ. With regards to the case study, that was one of the reasons that I investigated PW further, particularly the comparison table towards the end of the case study - thanks for this. SZABESZ, thanks for letting me know about the coding side; I'll have more of a look into what is required. I guess over the 6 years or so with WP, I did some basic CSS, html, so it does not faze me to get into the coding side a little. But I'll confess I don't know much! But happy to learn. So, I might go back to the case study (CLSOURCE) and focus a bit more on what is required for the programming side - thanks again. 

[szabesz]

You are welcome. Now some more specific pointers you might want to check out:

newsletter subscription:

https://github.com/justb3a/processwire-newslettersubscription

dealing with surbscribers:

relationships between data:

http://blog.mauriziobonani.com/processwire-basic-website-workflow-part-1/

Forntend users:

 

Do not be afraid of using modules, but always look for ProcessWire 3.x compatibility...