Turn-key profiles are definitely one of our paths to growth - Ryan

[Joss]

Just quoting Ryan from another thread here and I think In many ways profiles are possibly THE most important path to growth

 

Although, ironically, the most major users of the system will tend to be people who DONT use profiles, their very existence will probably be how they hear of PW in the first place.

 

The profiles I would see as most important, with that in mind, are (in no fixed order):

 

• Ecommerce (demonstrating the full potential of a eCommerce module)
• Blog (extended version of the one Ryan created with pre-installed things like DIsqus, galleries, Facebook/Twitter, feeds and so on)
• News/Magazine system that allows for multi-authors, a proper editorial process and editors for specific categories (are user-groups saved in profiles?)
• Some sort of community system with "communities" or "groups" (depending on how you call them) - each having their own wiki, simple board, blog and so on and the ability to make some or all of it private - completely over the top this one!
• Extended business/brochure site with very simple "news/blog" system, product/services, gallery and so on.

These profiles should be put together in such a way so that different CSS frameworks and designs can be slipped in with ease. (Is that possible?). So not like the way I have been doing it!

This little group (with perhaps one or two more) could be good community designed projects. That would achieve two things (with any luck and a following wind):

• A bench mark standard of profile design that will help others who want to create profiles
• A handful of trusted an maintained tools to get less technical users off the starting blocks
• Encourage others to create profiles

(where did that third one creep in from?)
 

[diogo]

• Portfolio

Joss, I hope you don't mind that I add one dot to your list

[Joss]

hehe - yeah, I kind of went blank after writing the first one. It was one of those things where I thought "I can think of loads of these," then wrote ecommerce and ..... and.... and .....

Brain freeze!

[diogo]

Happens a lot

It can also get more particular:

• photographer website
• microblog
• music band website
• public bookmarking system

and so on...

[Soma]

Annd who will build this. One big problem (no not again soma) I see and why I havent done any is it will bring in a lot of support an problems. In that one profile may not the way person x needs this and that. Also the way the profile is built may just one way to do it and either too advanced or too simple and could lead to many frustrations and people asking for things they can't build with your profile. It's like buildig a shop that in the end isnt flexible enough because its prebuilt and making it all configurable is hard and ends with being limited at best.

I'm not saying dont do it. But just saying why I havent yet. I love PW for the fact it is so simple to build these things from ground up the way I need it. Thats me. But I see a lot of new people building now sites with PW that have no php or coding skills at all before.

I think best way is to have better docs and tutorials on how to build a simple blog or portfolio. So to say there isnt really much. This is pw not wp.

[Joss]

Hi Soma

Oh, I quite agree with that, and I think most developers will look at a profile and say "oh, good, it can do that," and then take their own direction.

And that is the best way to use PW.

What I am picking up on here is using profiles as a way of promoting ProcessWire and what it can do, and perhaps giving some less developer orientated users a starting point. But it is the marketing advantage from these that I see as most important.

As a side issue, if they are created cleverly enough, (like Ryan's Blog Profile) then they become a useful source of snippets!

And of course, documentation - well, you know what I think about good docs already, so I won't bore the world again with that!

[Soma]

Yes we also discussed on profiles and how well they would serve as starter tools and of course marketing tools. I completely agree with this. And PW profiles make it really easy to build and export a setup (without permission and users).

What I think would be best to keep them really simple and see them as kick-starter examples and resources to look at and learn. Ryan's blog profile is a little a different beast and goes very far already, with css framework to change "easily". Also the Skyscraper is a really cool resource that finally is now updated and people love it to see how it's done.

Another thing we discussed (antti) is also the possibility to add functionality through modules. By installing them they setup fields and templates needed and builds a basic setup, along with some snippets it would also be possible to have blog, news, galleries etc in one click ready to then adapt. This would allow much more flexibility than just a profile that then misses the blog section and there's no way to install 2 profiles melted together.

This is fun to discuss, lot's of possibilities and so few time

[Pete]

Soma, before I read your reply HTML Kickstart came to mind so your use of the word "kickstarter" amuses me as we were thinking along similar lines

I think it would actually be better if we had a few profiles as really basic templates and picked a few main frameworks. So as an example off the top of my head, one of us builds the gallery profile in the PW admin, then chooses HTML Kickstart and does the front-end templating. Someone else (or the same person) then re-does the front-end template in Skeleton, then in Twitter Bootstrap and I think that that would actually create some very simple starting points in 3 mainstream frameworks for people to run with.

Again, this is possibly more useful for devs but at least with two of those frameworks (Twitter Bootstrap and HTML Kickstart - Skeleton would take a bit more work as it's more streamlined), but it would also give less technical users a good starting point too.

What do you reckon to that?

[MarcC]

The main thing I learned from using these sorts of things in the past is that I am going to be supporting it, as far as my clients are concerned. This includes admin themes, too. So, I'd almost rather say to a client, "go and stuff your ecommerce shop" (not really using those words of course) than "no problem, got an ecommerce profile right here." I've used the blog profile successfully, but I don't want to go back to being one of those big CMS guys with the world's largest toolkit and zero time to customize the hundreds of different layout frameworks and settings associated with each--to say nothing of actually adding new features.

Now, the thing I really do like about turnkey profiles is that I can personally learn from them. In fact I wish there was a way to have an interactive demo profile, where you could go in, change some code on the skyscraper site, and see what it affects, rather than downloading it and creating yet another PW install + database setup. But I'm sure that's no small project.

[Joss]

Just a quick question about modules (an area that I really haven't explored properly yet and I suspect might be a little beyond me):

Can you use a module to create a system? For instance, a news system with its own categories and fields and index pages (and an example article, I suppose).

So, you would install it and voila, you have all the correct fields and templates ready to go (more or less).

I know this might not work as a particularly useful download as it may cause conflicts, but I would find it useful for myself to replicate functionality in a new site.

[Pete]

@Joss: Yes you can - a few of the modules in the directory add fields already during installation and it would be trivial for them to add pages at the same time.

However this would fall more under the realm of a site profile I think since if it is to do with new sites a site profile will also set up your page structure, templates etc.

Take a look at this: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/530-profile-export-module-also-upgrade-pw-20-to-21/

[Joss]

Evening Pete

The reason I asked is that with a profile you are setting up a site from scratch.

But what if, for instance, I have a basic brochure site and want to add a simple blog to it? With a module I can install a nice neat, ready to go system with very basic templates - I would have to do some extra work to get the template files as I need them for the site, but at least half the work will have been done.

As I mentioned, this is possibly a bit impractical for someone to use as a "download and install a blog" since it would have bits missing, but very useful for my own work, if you see what I mean.

Having said that, I suppose it could be useful for a third party as long as they appreciate it wont be completely plug and play and they are good with including stuff.

[teppo]

@Joss: like Pete pointed out before, what you're describing there is not only doable but actually very simple to do in terms of module development. In the most basic scenario you'd have a module with only the required methods and most of it's functionality would happen within ___install() and ___uninstall(). This way once the user installs that particular module, it would automatically add required fields, templates and pages via API calls.

At least in my experience it's quite common for a client to want new "apps" later on, when site has already been built. In my opinion it would definitely make sense to have a library of "app profiles" (perhaps not the best name, but you'll get the point I hope..) that you could install via simple installer module, possibly even complete with basic "skeleton" template files.

Sorry, I know I'm being more than slightly heretic here, but I'm not really promoting the use of modules which create their own markup -- more like modules pointing out that you could use this kind of very basic markup and modify it to your needs. Granted that ProcessWire makes building these kind of things from scratch very easy, still especially for simple, repeatable things these kind of modules could cut boring manual work (making developers happy) and unnecessary costs (making clients happy) and so everyone benefits.

Of course this mostly applies to things like news and events etc. which most of the time fit the needs of multiple clients after only superficial modifications (CSS)

Regarding original post, I believe that having more ready-to-use profiles is a good thing and something ProcessWire will really need to grow and reach more (especially less technology-oriented) users. One of the things that make our dearest competitor WP so compelling is the fact that you can simply pull out complete template if that's what you're looking for; we should keep in mind that even though PW makes building state-of-the-art hand-made sites very easy, it's not always what a client/user will want and/or would be ready/interested to pay for.

Those hand-made piece-of-the-art websites are what I'd prefer to create all the time, but sometimes that's just overkill. Not to mention that sometimes even us developers would prefer to take something basic and just start using it. Anyway, this is just a quick thought and I'd love to elaborate it further, but now I'll have to run to a meeting

[casey]

This is a very interesting topic. I'm a third party theme developer for WordPress (simplethemes.com) but by no means a purist. I just wanted to chime in and say that I'd be more than willing to collaborate with a few developers and more experienced PW users to bring some of these to life.

[apeisa]

I think pw would benefit hugely from well done commercial and/or free profiles.

[Pete]

I had a chat with ryan about this a while back and I hope he won't mind me mentioning this, but some commercial profile ideas (real estate etc) would benefit hugely from the inclusion of FormBuilder. It's win-win in that case as ryan sells a FormBuilder license with every sale of that theme and the theme developer makes money as well.

So if you've got any ideas where you think a complex theme is going to give you a headache in terms of forms then think about how you might do it packaging FormBuilder along with it to handle that aspect.

Of course there are some logisitcal things to work out there, but it's something to bear in mind and certainly opens up some possibilities.

For those that are curious, I originally arrived at that conversation with ryan when a few of us were discussing a real estate profile late last year (I still plan to do more work on that, but have been sidetracked with client work). Of course, when you see the Skyscrapers demo it's easy to see how it's possible to build these sites, but I thought that FormBuilder could take it one step further - allowing potential buyers to fill out details, show interest in certain property's etc and essentially create a sort of mini back-office for real estate staff (dammit, they're Estate Agents in the UK - feels wrong every time I type it the US way ).

Just some more food for thought that might give you a few ideas

EDIT: @casey - I'd be happy to help out on that side of things. It takes me far too long to be happy with any design I do myself so if there's room to collaborate with you doing some design work and me and a few others on the technical side of things then I'm all for that!