My First Site - Stony Websites

[Joss]

I have just finished (ish) my first Processwire website:

http://www.stonywebsites.co.uk/

It is a very basic site, but it uses Twitter Boostrap for the framework and also the Bootstrap Carousel on the front page.

Graphics are all mine, though I am no artist, I am a writer and composer, so be kind.

This was a rebuild of a site that was originally on Joomla with Seblod, but I decided to move to PW.

One Problem:

I used the Profile Exporter to move the site from development. But I had one issue - the paths to the images were wrong.

The site was developed in a sub-directory on my local machine, and the image paths had that sub-directory as part of their address.

I assume that on the dev site I had something wrong somewhere - what should I have done to stop this happening?

Joss

[neildaemond]

Hey, the art is better than anything I could draw~ But it DOES give me a bit of a clip art feel, perhaps photography would be more effective? Works well as icons though.

I think its good you help write copy... I'm just starting out, and copy is where project flow really suffers a lot of variance depending on the client~ I'm looking to better that process

Also, I noticed a little typo:

"who has been in the advertising, marketing and media world for thrity five years"

[Soma]

The only way to prevent this issue is to install "PageLinkAbstractor" module and it will give you additional options on textfields. This will parse urls and add subfolder on runtime. http://modules.processwire.com/modules/page-link-abstractor/

[onjegolders]

Nice work Joss, pretty damn good for a first site with PW!

Need to get that spellchecker on though

Were the images you're talking about from image fields or from TinyMCE?

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings Joss,

Very nice job Joss. Glad to see you succeeding with ProcessWire.

This is good proof of both parts of site-creation: you are good at Web design; ProcessWire helps us build sites quickly.

Hey, if a musician can build a site like that, there's hope for a technical writer like me!

Thanks,

Matthew

PS: I'm rooting for Joss, as I'm somewhat personally guilty in suggesting he try a new CMS.

[Pete]

I like the fact that ProcessWire is attracting creative people who have skills other than web design and programming (not that there's anything wrong with us who fall into that category) - I mean it all helps in that it brings together people with different views, approaches and suggestions which can't be bad.

Nice site - good job on the graphics as I'd be hard pressed to create anything like that myself, and I'll refrain from mentioning a spell checker until I check my own site

[alan]

Nice site Joss and a belated welcome to PW.

I was interested to see you used the Profile Exporter to go from dev to production. I've not used it yet. And when I go from dev to production I just copy files and then export/import the database (I was introduced to Navicat ($100 or so) a year or so back and have LOVED not having to use phpmyAdmin ever since).

Good luck and enjoy using PW; I'm sure you will!

[Joss]

Thanks everyone - and yes, I do need to do some proofreading, but I thought I would get the site up for the fun of it.

Alan - the reason I wanted to use Profile Exporter was basically to make sure I knew how it worked. The demo I am working on at the moment is one of several I hope to roll out to local companies as a profile, so I want to get used to working that way.

Pete - the only problem with us creative rather than techy people is that we can be really annoying about insisting everything is as far from technical as possible!

Matthew - yes, its all your fault, and we are waiting for your site!

And it is quick, I did the site in just over one long day - though the graphics already existed, of course!

Neil - thanks. I wanted a slightly clip-arty approach for this site basically because all the other local design companies have the same boring photos of companies on their sites. I do also do photography, however, so I will also go that way where needed, but they will be more creative than most. (Neglected and unfinished portfolio site: http://sanglier.co.uk/photo-blog)

On the image paths

this was with TinyMCE and I notice is a known issue.

Soma, I will look at Page link abstractor, but there also maybe some settings that can be done with TinyMCE itself using relative_url and document base url and so on. I did try a few combinations last night, but without any success.

All I know is that with Joomla, when you look at the html of TinyMCE in the backend administration, the URLs to the images are identical to how they would be in the front end and are always relative to the root of the joomla installation, ignoring whatever directory it happens to be in. Consequently, moving joomla (apart from a log and temp directory setting) is painless in that way.

I am going to do some more digging this morning to see if I can find out how Joomla avoids this problem.

Thanks everyone

Joss

[Joss]

Oh, a note to Ryan:

This site is interesting because it is a direct rebuild, almost word for word, of a Joomla website.

Doing some very rough tests this morning, it is MUCH faster than the Joomla version.

So, plaudits to you for your core software.

Joss

[diogo]

Playing the devil's advocate: was Joomla's version the most recent?

[Joss]

HI Diogo - it was the most recent of Joomla 2.5 plus Seblod, which is a very powerful, but slightly overwritten CCK system.

The actual version of Joomla was something called Square 1, which was a stripped down version of joomla with almost all of the plugins and components removed. This was very definitely slicker than the normal Joomla, but unfortunately , the developer has decided to stop working on it.

On the front end of the site, I had Mootools turned off and removed as much superfluous styling as possible. Like the new version, the template was based on Bootstrap, so that side of things was pretty much the same.

Unfortunately, I didn't do rigid testing to make a strict comparison before I tool the original site down, looking at resulting page sizes and so on, but on overall speed, it is noticeably faster.

I have been using Joomla 3 locally, but not in anger since Seblod does not yet run on it. But to be honest, if I can do eveyrthing with PW that I could do with Seblod/Joomla I will be happy.

There are somethings with PW that I am missing. With Seblod I was able to customise the way forms looked so that I could really aim them at the end user. That would include not just how I laid out fields, but how I added help information to the forms and so on. But it is not a deal breaker. I also notice a couple of attempts at Bootstrap admin templates, though they are incomplete yet, and that I find very interesting.

I have a thing which I call the Two Big Buttons interface idea. Basically, it says that when a user enters a site administration, they should be confronted with the choice of either Managing or Creating. What they can create or manage is down to permissions, but the entire user interface can be basically thought through using that idea.

However, I am not techy enough to actually put that into action!

Joss

[ryan]

I used the Profile Exporter to move the site from development. But I had one issue - the paths to the images were wrong.

I develop my sites locally from subdirectories. When I migrate to servers, usually they go to root, so I have the same problem. However, the fix is really simple. Load the DB dump file (whether from PhpMyAdmin, mysqldump or the profile exporter) into a plain text editor. I use TextWrangler. Then do a search and replace:

search: "/subdirectory/

replace: "/

Note the leading leading quote ("). That just ensures that it only matches the subdirectory name at the start of an attribute. That's only necessary if you have other pages in your site carrying the same name as the subdirectory.

Personally I think this method is simpler and better than the overhead of having something else manage it for me (like PageLinkAbstractor). But if you are regularly transitioning the same site back and forth between dev and live, then more automation for the issue might make sense.

[Joss]

Hi Ryan

Just for interest, how would you do this if you were going the other way around - developed at the root and then found you were installing into a sub-directory?

I have been puzzling out trying to figure out why Joomla doesn't have a problem here, or rather, how they work round it.

When you insert an image into TinyMCE, the path is relative to the joomla installation - so, it is always (for example) /images/somedirectory/someimage.jpg - and that stays true where ever Joomla is installed. That address works for both the article at the front end and for editing the article in the administrator back end.

I assume that a base URL of some description is being passed on the page so it always knows where it is.

Looking at TinyMCE docs, they have various config options for base_url, document root url, relative urls (true or false), convert urls and so on. It strikes me that the solution is far simpler than a plugin, it is just a case of the page (dom) knowing where it is.

Great in theory, but I haven't the foggiest idea how to work it out!!

Joss

PS: Sorry if I am repeating myself - I think I am getting old. Must go and play some therapeutic blues immediately!