ProcessWire for Community

[future_vision]

I am completely new to the paradigm ProcessWire brings to the CMS world so please forgive me if this question is less than intelligent. I'm not a programmer by trade either. Here is what i am looking to do. I am looking at building out a community site which will essentially consist of a parent site for the entire organization and individual sites for each chapter within the organization. I'm thinking that I can deploy chapter sites based on a defined set of templates/functionally to make it easy to get up and running and to keep an easy to maintain code base. How would I go about building something like this? I can see ways to cobble something like this together but i am wondering what a best practice would look like.

[Ivan Gretsky]

Welcome to the forums, @future_vision!

Please provide more details to get a (hopefully) good answer (an advice applicable to any question. I know))

1. Should the chapter sites have their own domains/subdomains or they will be all on one?
2. Do you need to manage access control to chapter sites or they will be managed by a single person/group of people?
3. How different/similar would the chapter sites be? Maybe even paste the chapter and the main site structure outlines.

The question seems too general, I suggest we narrow it down a bit.

[future_vision]

34 minutes ago, Ivan Gretsky said:

Welcome to the forums, @future_vision!

Please provide more details to get a (hopefully) good answer (an advice applicable to any question. I know))

1. Should the chapter sites have their own domains/subdomains or they will be all on one?
2. Do you need to manage access control to chapter sites or they will be managed by a single person/group of people?
3. How different/similar would the chapter sites be? Maybe even paste the chapter and the main site structure outlines.

The question seems too general, I suggest we narrow it down a bit.

1. Some already have their own domains but I would set this up independent of them. Probably as subdomains. It would be up to them if they want to redirect to their chapter page or just leave the chapter page as a general info page that points back to their own site. Ideally I would want to provide all the functionality they require so they can just migrate over.
2. At the top level there will need to be a super admin that can control the parent site, the initial deployment of the chapter sites and has ability to access the chapter sites in case the owner of the chapter site were to step down or become unavailable. 
3. If I could put together a solid set of pages, features/functionality I don't imagine they will differ much. There may be some distinction of chapters based on their focus. for example a set of chapters might focus on topic A and another on topic B. I guess, in that case, I should say their will be groupings of chapters. All chapters will have a large percentage of pages and features/functionality in common. Each chapter grouping may require extra pages and features/functionality but that will also be common with the other chapters in the grouping.

Hope this helps clarify things a bit. I'm just getting started with this project so there are a number of things I haven't worked through yet. This is largely a discovery process at the moment to determine which platform is going to work best for this project. ProcessWire seems super flexible and  could be perfect for this task especially since the community I am putting together does include a good size percentage of developers. The may appreciate an open source, developer friendly CMS with a solid API over Wordpress

[Ivan Gretsky]

It seems like chapter sites are to be rather independent, though alike. So you probably would like to have them each in separate installation (with different databases).

[Relatively simple stuff] To speed up the creation of a new chapter site you can develop a site profile and start each new one with it rather than from one of the default ones. But this way you will still have each site with non-connnected-to-other-sites files and will have to handle the updates to the site files separately.

[More advanced further...] You can run the sites from the common core though (see here, option 1), so you will have to update the core only once for all of the chapter sites.

[Try at your own risk] If the chapter site will have really the same template structure and will differ only with the database-stores content you could symlink all site/templates and probably site/modules folders to one common place.

But you will still have to manage changes made in admin area one by one... [That is only for the record. Never done it myself] Or use something like this or this.

 

[future_vision]

1 hour ago, Ivan Gretsky said:

It seems like chapter sites are to be rather independent, though alike. So you probably would like to have them each in separate installation (with different databases).

[Relatively simple stuff] To speed up the creation of a new chapter site you can develop a site profile and start each new one with it rather than from one of the default ones. But this way you will still have each site with non-connnected-to-other-sites files and will have to handle the updates to the site files separately.

[More advanced further...] You can run the sites from the common core though (see here, option 1), so you will have to update the core only once for all of the chapter sites.

[Try at your own risk] If the chapter site will have really the same template structure and will differ only with the database-stores content you could symlink all site/templates and probably site/modules folders to one common place.

But you will still have to manage changes made in admin area one by one... [That is only for the record. Never done it myself] Or use something like this or this.

 

Hmmm. I don't see chapters sharing data between each other but I can see them sharing  data with the parent site for use by any of the chapters in some cases. Let's take an image gallery for example. Each chapter would have their own image gallery but the parent site would have access to all of the images regardless of chapter.

Another more complex example might be projects. Each chapter might have a project(s) they are working on. In some cases they might want to keep the project secret. It won't be show on their site in this case. In other cases they may have completed a project and want toopen source it to the community in which case they would expose it  on their site and on the parent site.

[Ivan Gretsky]

A. If we stay in our separate installation per site realm we still have a number of options to do what you want:

1. Use multi-instance mode from the main site.
2. Get data from chapter sites via web service, REST,
3. ... GraphQL...
4. or maybe just RSS or Atom.

B. You can always go for putting everything in one installation and configuring access rights for editors with something like this or this too, but probably that'll make it only more complicated.

C. Finally you can go for writing a custom frontend admin for you chapter site editors while staying in the comfort of a single installation)) But that will take some time and sweat to do. I do not know the scope and budget of your project. Might be a decision worth considering.

[Kiwi Chris]

I've been building something a bit like this. It's not live yet, but you can have a look here: https://test.peloruspeople.org.nz/

It's built on Processwire 3.

You'll see a link to subsites on the menu, and each one has different content.

I use the restrict admin branch module so that different users can edit different sub-sites.

If this is along the lines of what you want, let me know, as I could always export it as a site profile.

I was just wondering  the other day if it might be useful to other people. I seriously under-quoted on the project, so if what I've done could be re-used, and I could recover some of my development time I'd be very happy.

Let me know if what I've done could be useful, and I'll see what I can do.

I still have a bit of work to do. The old site was running on a CMS I started on myself before Wordpress was even a thing, so there was all the content to import and update.

Processwire makes working on site functionality so much easier, and it's nice not having to worry about trying to maintain the core CMS.
 

[future_vision]

 

On 5/30/2017 at 8:50 AM, Ivan Gretsky said:

A. If we stay in our separate installation per site realm we still have a number of options to do what you want:

1. Use multi-instance mode from the main site.
2. Get data from chapter sites via web service, REST,
3. ... GraphQL...
4. or maybe just RSS or Atom.

B. You can always go for putting everything in one installation and configuring access rights for editors with something like this or this too, but probably that'll make it only more complicated.

C. Finally you can go for writing a custom frontend admin for you chapter site editors while staying in the comfort of a single installation)) But that will take some time and sweat to do. I do not know the scope and budget of your project. Might be a decision worth considering.

Thanks Ivan. The budget on this is "$0". It's all sweat equity and even then it might not be adopted. Either way it'll be a great learning experience if I tackle it and quite possibly reusable for other projects. You've definitely given me some things to think about.

[future_vision]

10 hours ago, Kiwi Chris said:

I've been building something a bit like this. It's not live yet, but you can have a look here: https://test.peloruspeople.org.nz/

It's built on Processwire 3.

You'll see a link to subsites on the menu, and each one has different content.

I use the restrict admin branch module so that different users can edit different sub-sites.

If this is along the lines of what you want, let me know, as I could always export it as a site profile.

I was just wondering  the other day if it might be useful to other people. I seriously under-quoted on the project, so if what I've done could be re-used, and I could recover some of my development time I'd be very happy.

Let me know if what I've done could be useful, and I'll see what I can do.

I still have a bit of work to do. The old site was running on a CMS I started on myself before Wordpress was even a thing, so there was all the content to import and update.

Processwire makes working on site functionality so much easier, and it's nice not having to worry about trying to maintain the core CMS.
 

Thanks Kiwi Chris. So, this is similar to what I want to do but both the parent site and the microsites will have a lot more functionality and sharing of content. The multi-instance mode Ivan mentioned might be an option. I'll need to be able to spin up a new microsites as needed and might even want to allow for some level of expansion on what I put together not that I could effectively prevent that is allow admin access at the microsite level. Definitely something to think about. Thanks for sharing.