PW 3.0.47: Roadmap 2017 + Happy New Year!

[ryan]

Happy New Year! Looking back over the last year, it's been a really great year for the project, and wow has it gone fast! In this post we'll look back at some of what we've accomplished over the last year, and–more importantly–introduce and review our 2017 roadmap. Today we've also released version 3.0.47 dev, which doesn't add anything new feature wise, but does contain several optimization and bug fix comments.

https://processwire.com/blog/posts/roadmap-2017/

[apeisa]

Great blog post Ryan, thank you! Great year behind and even better coming!

What comes weekly news, I think maybe @teppo and PW Weekly could report interesting new stuff from dev branch - instead of full blog post by @ryan each week?

Also I think what would really help PW as a community project is that modularity would be more easily seen from code repositories also. I mean separation of /wire/ from rest of the stuff, keeping admin as own project and making several core modules as their own projects (although they could be "essentials" that would always be installed with ProcessWIre).

What comes to Avoine, I hope I found time to write case story about how we use ProcessWire as backend solution to our member register platform Avoine Sense. Sense was released early 2016 and it already hosts about 10 member registers that together hold about 150 000 members.

Feature-wise Sense already has newsletters, custom reporting tool, invoicing, model based templates/fields, background jobs, client specific procedures build by chaining actions (ie. create excel, connect ftp, deliver file and finally send sms to admin), full read/write REST API with Oauth2 authentication, mobile application, embeddable login/edit forms etc...

ProcessWire has been amazing platform for our application development (currently we have 4-5 developers working on it). I strongly encourage that you all consider ProcessWire as a viable alternative for serious application development also. It is perfect platform for building dynamic websites, but it is also pretty brilliant platform for application development!

[BitPoet]

I can only concur that this has been a great year. It was nearly impossible not to get infected by the momentum of PW's development. Love (that's an understatement) the JS $pages API plan, and the pages export/import function could even be a solid base for native staging support, just by hooking into the proper PW actions and filling a staging actions table.

You're absolutely right, @apeisa, PW is much more than just a brilliant website platform. Our intranet site really does some "heavy lifting", consolidating information from the ERP system, the DMS, personnel and operational time keeping, financial accounting and a few proprietary databases. That way, it also serves as the middleware for a big, distributed test run database. Like Sense, it drives a few chained workflows, e.g. for bridging the feedback gap between dunning proposals and our sales managers. All our intra-company course scheduling/booking runs on PW too, including supervisor approval, and it was surprisingly easy to implement. HR was over the moon with PW's ease of use.

For 2017, we're planning a site that provides our customers with all the publicly available documentation for the machines and plant parts we sold them, requiring just a QR code scan on their side. Setting up a working (UIKit styled, multilingual) prototype only took me a few hours and really impressed our sales guys

If 2017 is going to be anything like this year, it's going to be a blast. Thank you @ryan!

A happy, healthy and inventive new year to everyone!

[Mike Rockett]

Ryan, I can only agree with you - 2016 has been a great year for ProcessWire. Ever since I began working with it, I've been excited at almost every weekly update, and the system is growing to be more and more mature every step of the way, without losing sight of the ProcessWire philosophy.

For next year, I'm most excited for the following: new admin theme (the idea sounds really good); image/photo tools upgrades; new website; import/export tools; and CKEditor image upgrades.

In terms of the schedule-change for updates, I do think you're on the right track. However, I can only imagine that the weekly activity on the GH repo would not reduce excessively, and so perhaps someone who's lingers around the repo often enough could write brief posts for the blog, discussing various fixes, patches, and small feature-releases. I'm not sure what your plans are for the blog on the new website (which I'm most excited about, as you could well-imagine), but perhaps it can be split into feature and non-feature posts, the former of which would be written by you and authors who do case-studies on specific things, like Benjamin and a few others have done in the past when there was no weekly update from you. From my side, I think this will assist in growing our already-thriving community, and keep the momentum you discussed in your post. Thoughts?

Happy New Year to you and the rest of the community - wishing you all the best for 2017 and beyond. ?

[ryan]

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However, I can only imagine that the weekly activity on the GH repo would not reduce excessively

It would just depend on what's being worked on. I generally don't push stuff to GitHub until I know it's solid. If working on something that's going to take a couple weeks to get to that point, then I'll avoid having it appear on GitHub because it wouldn't be ready. Since plans for 2017 include a focus on some things that may go beyond the usual weekly timeline focus, I'd say that weekly activity on the GH repo would reduce a lot when these things are being developed. Of course, activity on the core code wouldn't be reduced at all (likely increased), but the frequency of commits that appear on GitHub would be reduced. 

Quote

I'm not sure what your plans are for the blog on the new website

Plans are to keep it roughly as-is. But since it's now ~130 posts, it's time to add a few more things like categories, related posts, next/prev post links, etc. I also want to upgrade it to be more guest-author friendly, so that it includes authorship information like we have in the tutorials (example). 

[bernhard]

uikit 3 is now available as beta: http://yootheme.com/blog/2017/01/09/uikit-3-beta-released

would be a perfect timing for a new admin *dreaming

[szabesz]

Hi, @bernhard Have you seen this thread?

 

[bernhard]

no, don't have enough time to follow the forum atm. i just saw some nice previews of uikit3 and was supposing that uikit 3 is as solid and awesome as uikit 2 was

whatever framework it will be... I'm with you that any kind of framework will make it easier to collaborate and/or to get the context of how everything works in the admin more quickly.

[LostKobrakai]

29 minutes ago, bernhard said:

whatever framework it will be... I'm with you that any kind of framework will make it easier to collaborate and/or to get the context of how everything works in the admin more quickly.

I'd like to contradict. The admin themes we have really need a css overhaul and cleanup (and maybe docs), but a prebuild framework is in my opinion not the way to go. Because it's not developed internally every special usecases the admin does have will feel like a hack to the framework. Framework + custom workarounds will always be bigger (more code / more maintainence) than a customized solution. It's also a matter of branding. True, one can add custom colors to UIKit, but in the end it's probably still noticable enough that it's UIKit. 

Also consider all the markup in core and 3rd party modules, which are needed to be supported the the admin theme. I doubt any prebuild framework is bendable enough to support that level of custom markup coming from our side.

[szabesz]

@LostKobrakai Lots of valid points, still...  I think this option should at least be considered by taking a close look at it. 

7 minutes ago, LostKobrakai said:

Framework + custom workarounds will always be bigger (more code / more maintainence) than a customized solution. It's also a matter of branding.

What if the chosen framework can be extended, rather than hacked?

[bernhard]

16 minutes ago, LostKobrakai said:

but in the end it's probably still noticable enough that it's UIKit. 

i would not see this as a problem. but i also don't want to discuss this further - uikit is just a personal preferation of mine. ryan will have to weigh all pros and cons and i'm sure he will take a great decision

[Neeks]

Just want to give a big thanks you to the processwire team! And all the hard work that has gone into the PW this year! Really grateful for how well this project has been developing and how much thought and handwork goes in behind the scenes.

I am really looking forward to those native import / export features!

As far as JavaScript rest $page API's goes you might also want to look into a GraphQL implementation, it seems like an ideal way to cut down on the network chatter for headless CMS's, and is becoming an emerging standard.

 also see:

[mikeuk]

[edit] move to more recent thread, my mistake. https://processwire.com/talk/topic/15591-steps-to-greater-popularity-and-better-promotion/