Weekly update – 12 February 2021

[ryan]

A couple weeks ago there were a lot of ideas about page builders and different approaches in ProcessWire. Some really interesting ideas actually, and great proof of concepts as well. The conversation started moving faster than I could keep up with, and I think Teppo's summary in ProcessWire Weekly 351 is a great overview, if you haven't yet seen it. These are so great in fact, that I don't think anything I build could live up to what some of you have already built. In part because my focus is more server-side than client-side development, and I can clearly see most of these page builders are much more client-side based than I have expertise in (though would like to learn). Whereas some of you are clearly amazing client-side developers; I'm blown away by what's been built, and how quickly it happened. 

One struggle I have with page builders is that I don't have my own good use cases for them, with the projects that I work on. Others here (like Jonathan) already have a lot of good use cases. Clearly there are a lot of benefits. I'm fascinated and enthusiastic by all of it, but can't envision how or if I'd use such a tool in my own projects. And having experience with (and particularly close use cases for) a tool is important in hitting the right notes in building it.

Likely page builder support belongs in ProcessWire in some form or another, and ProcessWire can be an excellent platform for it. But the actual page builder needs to be designed and built by the people that have expertise in the tools needed to build it, and by the people that will actually use it. I think it should be a community collaboration. For anything needed to support this on the PHP side, count me in. I don't think I've got the background to "lead" the development of the page builder, but I do think I've got plenty to contribute to it. 

I'd also like to continue building out existing tools like Repeater/Matrix to further support page builder type use cases. I'd like to rebuild and move the auto-save and Live Preview features from ProDrafts into the core, which should also help support some of these page builder cases. Whether these will eventually apply to the larger page-builder project, I don't know, but they'll be useful either way. 

What are the next steps? Who's interested in working on this? Let's keep the conversion going and move forward with it. 

[DV-JF]

Hey Ryan...

you're impressing me - now you can also timetravel ?

Thank you for your update!

[Ivan Gretsky]

Good day, @ryan!

I'm in! As for now I always used Repeater Matrix for content builders as @Jonathan Lahijani, my first approach would be to develop additional features on that side first. So lots of us already using this pro module could do it even better. I started a topic in Repeater Matrix forum to gather wishes you could help us with.

Everyone else interested, please contribute!