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This is old (2012) but interesting thesis that compares ProcessWire, WordPress and Drupal for building customer support website: http://media.tkk.fi/visualmedia/publications/msc-theses/DI_N_Beilinson_2012.pdf

I've already read 19 pages and (to me) it is a very enjoyable read.  Thanks for the link.  I've downloaded the pdf for further reading on my iPad.

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This is old (2012) but interesting thesis that compares ProcessWire, WordPress and Drupal for building customer support website: http://media.tkk.fi/visualmedia/publications/msc-theses/DI_N_Beilinson_2012.pdf

A quote in the conclusions section:

"From the platform possibilities ProcessWire was best suited for the task due its developer centered approach by making the design part of the site the responsibility of the developers. This responsibility also brought the desired freedom to change the platform in the ways needed."
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Great interview!

ProcessWire is not “competing with the market”, so much as it is competing with itself. I don’t really pay attention to what other CMSs are doing (and haven’t since PW2 was released more than 5 years ago). Instead I focus just on how we can improve, what we can do better, what we can make faster, and how we can ensure our users always associate using ProcessWire with joy.

This is pretty darn important, and is probably one of the most important things that sets PW apart.

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^ yup. It does confuse people when we say we're not making a concerted effort to compete with other systems, but I think doing our own thing means we can stand back and consider what the user base really will find useful instead of chasing all the features in system X.

If gives you a lot of freedom doing it this way.

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"jQuery-Based API" - that's where the comparison to jQuery bears potential for misunderstanding. A few people seem to skip the word "inspired" and make PW accidentally JavaScript-based. As a developer reading that list, not knowing PW, I would be rather alienated.

Just thinking out loud - could we as the community find a one line pitch for ProcessWire's API that evenly matches without causing misunderstandings like these? "PW comes with an easily approachable and powerful API"? I know, neither short nor "sexy". But precise  ^_^

/edit: When pitching PW to my customers (or potential ones) I compare it to "modelling clay" - a thing/tool that can be shaped in any desired form. Just ignore the shortcoming of this comparison, the connotation of "toy" ;)

Edited by marcus
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I don't think any changed wording will completely solve the problem of people leaving out vital details, but the line in question could be easily ammended to include the PHP keyword:

  • Easy-to-use, jQuery-style API for PHP
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jQuery-inspired is in my opinion the best short description of our API. "An easily approachable and powerful API" is way too generic, especially since the jQuery connection is actually an important point. ProcessWire's API is modeled after jQuery, after all, the general idea being that "if you know jQuery, you'll learn ProcessWire development in no time".

On a related note, personally I prefer to discuss it as the "developer API", not just API. On a couple of occasions I've had to specifically explain that ProcessWire doesn't actually expose a public API automatically. The Finnish translation ("rajapinta" vs. "kehittäjärajapinta") seems to be even more prone for misunderstandings :)

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Here's an article that is mostly about Concete 5, but makes some comparisons with PW - maybe some ideas in there!

http://www.spiria.com/en/blog/websites/concrete-5-top-user-friendly-cms

Note that Guy also wrote a dedicated PW post:

http://www.spiria.com/en/blog/websites/processwire-light-powerful-elegant

Not sure if that has been posted here before or not.

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Thanks for the kudos Peter:

http://significatojournal.com/bliss/an-exaltation-of-creativity-and-bliss/the-significato-journal-is-now-a-mobile-first-responsive-website/

Of course, I also continued to build the system with “ProcessWire,” the Content Management System (CMS) and Content Management Framework (CMF) that is, in my opinion, a power-user’s dream system. I love it! It’s incredibly flexible, fast, powerful, and easy to use. If you feel boxed in and frustrated with WordPress or Drupal, try ProcessWire, at http://processwire.com.
 
My darling wife, Kimmy Sophia, who is the content curator for Significato, also finds it very easy to use when she’s posting articles in the backend.
 
ProcessWire uses PHP and the ProcessWire API for its template files, rather than inventing a new template tag system. One can build standard websites of any type, as well as ultra-sophisticated web database applications. It is primarily a “developer’s CMS,” in the sense that it requires expertise to create a website that is then easy to use for end-users. However, for developers, it is, as I said above, a dream. I should wax poetic.
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Here's an article that is mostly about Concete 5, but makes some comparisons with PW - maybe some ideas in there!

http://www.spiria.com/en/blog/websites/concrete-5-top-user-friendly-cms

Can someone explain this to me?

"Concrete5 is one step above Processwire in terms of on-the-fly Web-page adaptation."

I'm interested in this "on-the-fly Web-page adaptation" which I do not seem to decode.

And just to comment on this: "version 5.7, which proved to be incompatible with previous versions. In other words, a site built with version 5.6 cannot easily be upgraded."

I chose ProcessWire to avoid this sort of issue in the first place. We have to spend too much time upgdating things anyway...

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Can someone explain this to me?

"Concrete5 is one step above Processwire in terms of on-the-fly Web-page adaptation."

I'm interested in this "on-the-fly Web-page adaptation" which I do not seem to decode.

And just to comment on this: "version 5.7, which proved to be incompatible with previous versions. In other words, a site built with version 5.6 cannot easily be upgraded."

I chose ProcessWire to avoid this sort of issue in the first place. We have to spend too much time upgdating things anyway...

I am not completely sure either, but here are a couple of links that mention the concept:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/xingx/tic1.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1407778&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D1407778

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-74784-0_17

Without really having read these, I think an example might be serving up smaller images for mobile devices, or maybe he is talking about AWD vs RWD? Maybe I need to read some more, or maybe Guy will chime in and explain!

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Perhaps he's talking about this:

http://documentation.concrete5.org/developers/working-with-blocks

https://www.concrete5.org/documentation/general-topics/blocks-and-areas

But it could also have been this, for example:

Mobile Web 2.0: Developing and Delivering Services to Mobile Devices

https://goo.gl/nNGPhW (google book link)

Service-Oriented Computing: 11th International Conference, ICSOC 2013

https://goo.gl/ubfTBJ (google book link)

Differently in both cases, "on-the-fly"/"on the fly" is not necessarily better. It depends, like for a lot of things.

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I'd say that it's definitely about blocks: concrete5 makes it quite easy to create unique page structures on the fly. It's not like we couldn't do something similar with ProcessWire, but in the case of concrete5 it's a built-in, original core concept, and thus it's no surprise that they excel in this area. Some of their UI's still look really ugly and amateurish, but putting that aside, it's a great product in many ways.

That being said, personally I'm not such a huge fan of this strategy. I'll admit that it does empower the content editor and give them a lot of sway on the way the site looks, but that's actually a double-edged sword: sometimes it works out just fine, but sometimes the site ends up being a total mess. Especially for sites with a bunch of content editors and a lot of content, a well planned structure and information architecture is a must :)

I remember looking into concrete5 a few years ago, the main reason being the way they handle page blocks. Their concept is nearly identical with our old in-house CMS (page blocks, content areas, all of that) and when we decided to move on, concrete5 seemed like the obvious choice. For various reasons we ended up with ProcessWire instead, and I'm glad we did.

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Thanks for the answers adrian, Christophe and teppo! I also think "blocks to create unique page structures on the fly" is the right answer. However, in this case Concrete5 is NOT one step above ProcessWire in this area, because we are talking about two completely different concepts regarding frontend development, so they should not even be compared in this manner I think. Maybe that is why I didn't get close to decoding this sentence :)

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