PW 3.0.120 and continued site rewiring

[ryan]

This week ProcessWire 3.0.120 is on the dev branch. This post takes a look at updates for this version and talks about our work towards the next master version. In addition, we take a look at some more updates and screenshots for the new ProcessWire.com website:

https://processwire.com/blog/posts/processwire-3.0.120-and-more-new-site-updates/

[Noel Boss]

Great work @ryan! Especially love the new search!!! I also like the results view of the search alot, clean and with the smart ability to filter by kind. Thanks for listening to our feedback about the skyscraper ornaments. Also, love the API search!

What stands out to me is that the screenshots all together (with the exemption of the sites pages) look very uniform – mostly text, headings, lists. Very clean and organised, I like that, but visually there is not much to distinguish.

Now I get that you are focusing on the content and structure of the site - so it might just be to early for feedback on this topic: I think that especially on the marketing focused pages, focusing on presenting ProcessWire for new users, stakeholders and designers & marketing departments, more images and specially crafted pages would make sense. But I would even argue that for more developer oriented pages, some images would be helpful. I'm a visual person and nice images for blogs, even modules would go a long way in making the experience on processwire.com a pleasing and joyful experience.
Now I totally understand that you probably need support from a few UX and UI gurus but I guess, there are a lot of us from the community who would be more than happy to stepp in and offer support.

A few examples from pages I stumbled across the last couple of days:

• Well crafted homepage with gimmicks (feature-slider): https://ora.pm/home or https://craftcms.com 
• Nice visual blog posts: https://ora.pm/blog
• Visually appealing modules directory (with a nice touch for developers, the ability to sell your own modules): https://statamic.com/marketplace/addons 
• Presenting many features visually (nice menu on the left): https://craftcms.com/features/all 
• Blog, module and tutorials directory: The new Laracast website probably has a good middle-ground with nice graphical touches while still not to heavily reliant on custom visuals: https://laracasts.com/series 

One last thought, maybe "features" would be a better title for the "about" page because it's less about an organisation and more about a product. 

This is by no means negativ criticism, I really like the current progress of our new beloved CMSs home and would only like to offer some inspiration and my thoughts in hope that it helps boost PW.

Ps. Sorry for the double post on the blog – from now on I will only post here… did not think about it when reading the blog.

[ryan]

Thanks for the feedback. It's a little tricky to demo the site as screenshots as it really changes it from an interactive interface to a static image. Looking at the screenshots is kind of like looking at pictures of a house as opposed to walking around in it. It changes the scale completely to one that doesn't happen interactively, so definitely gives a different vibe than actually using it in the browser. But I'm also not one to go off and disappear for weeks at a time, so want to share what I've got every week, even if the viewing context isn't quite right.

Per the earlier posts about the site, I'm not trying to create anything graphically too divergent from what we've got already, just trying to evolve it to the next step, and hopefully a platform/foundation for some of the things you've mentioned, and potentially other people that know how to get there. So I'm a lot more focused on the development side (backend and front-end) than the design side, though also trying to get just enough design going to accommodate the content and various responsive layouts that it displays in. At the same time, I don't want something that's purely a mock-up or placeholder either, because I think phase 1 is replacing the current site and immediately after phase 2 is revisiting the design to make it more visually distinct (which is where we need the designers in the community), then phase 3 updating the Module and Directory sites to be consistent with all of it. 

I do like additional graphics like you mentioned with those examples, though I don't think some of those approaches (Ora, Statamic, Laracasts) are practical for us. Someone has to create those illustrations. I'm not an illustrator, and I don't think I can hire one every time I want to write a new blog post, add a new module, or add a new tutorial. So I don't feel like this level of graphics/illustration is practical or realistic for the PW site and we instead have to work with what we've got. The only real dynamic visual elements we have to work with are the screenshots submitted to the sites directory. But what might be practical is to have some visual elements/illustrations in the marketing side of the site, where we won't be constantly needing new graphics every week. But if there are visual elements we can add that really help to communicate the message then that's ideal. This will especially be the case with the homepage, which is something i'm not sure I'll even attempt a layout for, but may need a lot of help when it comes to that. 

[Noel Boss]

1 hour ago, ryan said:

But I'm also not one to go off and disappear for weeks at a time, so want to share what I've got every week, even if the viewing context isn't quite right.

Thats one aspect I love about how you handle PW and the community! The feeling of beeing left in the dark about the future is common for other nice projects and fules uncertainty about it. The constant high quality updates an Blogposts makes me very comfortable and trustfully in PW! Thanks so much @ryan!!!

I totally agree and 100% understand all your explanations above. My hope is that some talented designers and PW enthusiasts can support you on the design an UX side of things like @teppo constantly supports PW with very high quality content trough weekly.pw

I myself are not a designer but would love to help in implementing some of the designs and ideas on the frontend side...