Just a short appreciation note

[Adam Kiss]

Yo Ryan and everyone,

I don't use ProcessWire anymore for new stuff — the size and scope of the projects makes using a database nonsense — but there is one half internal system that happily chugs along, for 7 years now (I think? Maybe 8 years?)

Latest page ID created was 38047 ?

So, thank you for everything — mostly for keeping my job while "new system" isn't happening ?

[pwired]

That reminds me what I proposed before, make 2 versions of Processwire:

1) a version just for small websites, without cmf, no database or an xml database
2) the current version with the powerful api for both cmf and cms

[Adam Kiss]

@pwired — there was a time when I'd agree with you, but there are quite a bit of options for I ❤️ PW devs out there - for flat file CMS at least. So in the end I'd say that ProcessWire and its community are better served by focusing at its one thing.

[wbmnfktr]

Kind of...

Works with some automation pretty nice and easy. 

[pwired]

Quote

for flat file CMS at least.

Yes luckily there are quite a lot of them. However, none of them have the beautiful back end like Processwire has. Oh well, I guess you can't have it all.

[dragan]

7 hours ago, Adam Kiss said:

the size and scope of the projects makes using a database nonsense

Care to elaborate about such projects? i.e. some insights into the pros/cons of PW, or just general infos (what worked well, what didn't; what general dev route you were taking instead, bottlenecks or overhead etc). 

[Adam Kiss]

On 9/26/2019 at 8:20 PM, dragan said:

Care to elaborate about such projects? i.e. some insights into the pros/cons of PW, or just general infos (what worked well, what didn't; what general dev route you were taking instead, bottlenecks or overhead etc). 

Not a problem — I create (and/or manage) around 20-25 sites a year. These are tiny, 1-5 page promo sites, all with bespoke, one-off design, and are either fully static, or connecting to a single "registration" system (which is atm running aforementioned PW). 90% of these are for an event, or an event series, so they start, last a while, and end anywhere between two months and half a year. I'm the only person editing them, and most of the edits happen straight in code. ATM, they are 99% built on Eleventy - https://11ty.io, and the fully static ones are built and deployed via Netlify, and the ones which are connecting to the registration system (via tiny bits of PHP) are deployed from the Github CI/CD to our own servers.

I also (actually started this year) created/manage few long-term sites, which I've build on Kirby — It's basically a spiritual brother to ProcessWire, but fully file based, so it fits my development process better - I can sync the website up and down fully with git, without any need for managing the database.

As for the system itself, I'll write up a blog post about it (probably) when I finish it, so I can post it here / send it to you later, but the short of it is I'm moving it to Laravel due to builtin support of PostgreSQL, queues and testing, and the rewrite will allow me to introduce a couple of design changes to overall system, which would actually be possible with PW as well (probably…), but if I'm going for a rewrite, I might as well go full rewrite.

[Mikie]

If anyone hasn't seen it, https://www.11ty.io is pretty amazing for static sites, it gets a lot of things right in my opinion. Much less opinionated than other static generators, allows swapping template languages on the fly throughout or on a page by page basis, and the systems for page data are super powerful and flexible. I just build a startup marketing site with it, a few of the cool things I did were: read filesystem and parse image files to create a globally accessible images object with width, height, ratio data for use with mixins to ouput lazyload containers; parse a csv file to build a really complicated pricing table... no more client requests to change wording on x row, they just edit a google doc I set up for them, I download and drop in the assets folder, rebuild and done!

[tpr]

I have also used Eleventy to convert some sites to static, used together with Netlify to automate the build and deploy process. It's also a great tool if you need to just generate some complex html (or actually any type of textual document). I even used it to generate .NET model files based on a list of properties to save time.

[Sergio]

17 hours ago, Mikie said:

did were: read filesystem and parse image files to create a globally accessible images object with width, height, ratio data for use with mixins to ouput lazyload containers; parse a csv file to build a really complicated pricing table... no more client requests to change wording on x row, they just edit a google doc I set up for them, I download and drop in the assets folder, rebuild and done

Super nice! I'm more of a Hugo user, but I have to take a look on 11ty for a next project.