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Marlborough Online

Kiwi Chris

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Kiwi Chris Sr. Member

Kiwi Chris

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Years ago before Wordpress had even been invented, I started work on a site providing information about my local region of New Zealand. Back then, most people were on dialup, and if you wanted a CMS you had to roll it yourself - if you could find a host that supported server scripting at an affordable price.

This year, with a quiet patch with essentially no paid work, I finally decided it was time to make the move from a home-grown CMS using an obscure scripting language to something more modern, so I could spend more time adding content and features, and less time maintaining the core CMS.

www.marlboroughonline.co.nz

I love Processwire because it works the way I think, and when I was first introduced to it, I was up and running within 20 minutes of reading the documentation, vs several hours reading Wordpress documentation, and still not entirely sure how to create my own fields and create a theme from scratch.

I come from a database programming background, particularly Microsoft Access, so being able to make fields and add them to a form or report, is the way I'm used to working, although it took a bit of getting used to Processwire not adding fields to a table by default, although I see Pro-Fields or custom field types can achieve this. (I haven't used Pro-Fields in this project as I'm essentially on a zero budget).

The site itself doesn't use anything particularly fancy. I use the following modules:

  • Map Marker
  • Form Template Processor
  • Social Share Buttons (With my own colour version of the button icons)
  • AIOM+ (This is particularly handy as I'm using a customised version of Bootstrap, and it handles compiling all the LESS files)
  • Jumplinks

The biggest task was importing all the content from my existing CMS, but since I wrote it, it was easier than dealing with some third-party CMS.

The site had been around for a long time, and had numerous inward links including a number from Wikipedia, and I didn't want to break them in the conversion.

If you're converting a site to Processwire with a URL structure that can't be replicated in Processwire, Jumplinks is a must-have module, as it handles complex URL redirects very nicely.

The site has quite a bit of content, much of it which needed updating in addition to changing the CMS, so there might be odd bits that don't look right, but that's certainly not Processwire's fault.

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Mike Rockett Hero Member

Mike Rockett

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Glad PW worked well for you :) And thanks for the Jumplinks recommendation. Did you make good use of wildcards? v2 is, sadly, being pushed and pushed as I just have too much on the plate these days...

Edit: I see you're using ID-based jumplinks. I assume you used mapping collections / destination selectors?

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Kiwi Chris Sr. Member

Kiwi Chris

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On 7/25/2017 at 4:00 AM, Mike Rockett said:

Glad PW worked well for you :) And thanks for the Jumplinks recommendation. Did you make good use of wildcards? v2 is, sadly, being pushed and pushed as I just have too much on the plate these days...

Edit: I see you're using ID-based jumplinks. I assume you used mapping collections / destination selectors?

This was coming from an old CMS.

I used Source: index.mvc?ArticleID={id} Destination: [[wid={id}]]

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Kiwi Chris Sr. Member

Kiwi Chris

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Update: In addition to the modules previously mentioned, the site now uses Padloper to add shopping cart functionality, and PaymentStripe and PaymentInvoice modules.

I've also made some modifications to the MapMarker module so that I can use KML files from a separate files field as map overlays. This is really handy, as I can use Google Earth to define paths and areas that I can overlay on the map, which I can export and display with Processwire.

In the process, of implementation with the payment modules, I discovered an issue with module dependencies and the modules cache in the database, which I've discussed and resolved here:

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/19606-class-not-found-error/?tab=comments#comment-170031

 

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