PAGEGRID – A visual page builder for ProcessWire – V1 Release!

[jploch]

PAGEGRID – A visual page builder for ProcessWire.

Design fully responsive websites (or parts of them) without writing any code. Use ProcessWire's native templates (and fields) to create your own blocks. Rearrange and resize items in a visual way and use inline or modal editing to quickly edit the content of your website. 

Try PAGEGRID for free

PAGEGRID is not free software. However, you can try PAGEGRID on your local machine or on a test server as long as you need to make sure it is the right tool for your next project. … and when you’re convinced, buy your license.

Get it here

Download from GitHub
Download from Module Directory

Requirements

• ProcessWire 3.0.210 or greater

Installation

1. Go to “Modules > Site > Add New“ in your admin
2. Paste the Module Class Name "FieldtypePageGrid" into the field “Add Module From Directory“
3. Click “Get Module Info“
4. On the overview, click “Download And Install“
5. On the following screen, click “Install Now“

More install options

• Module install guide
• Site profile install guide

Get up and running

• Quick start
• Create your own blocks or install the PageGridBlocks Module (installs premade templates and fields for PAGEGRID blocks).

What's PAGEGRID?

• page-grid.com – Get to know PAGEGRID.
• Documentation – Read the official documentation.
• Issues – Report bugs and other problems.
• Forum – Whenever you get stuck, don't hesitate to reach out for questions and support.

Why I build it

ProcessWire is super flexible in itself and lets me build whatever I want. But building a custom website can be a lot of work. For some projects, I've ended up using a lot of templates and fields. To make my pages more flexible, I sometimes build my own little page builder based on the RepeaterMatrix or PageTable module. While these page builders were great for the specific site I was building them for, they were never flexible enough to be used for new projects, so I ended up customizing them frequently. The more complex they became, the harder it became to use them for my clients. After playing around with some WYSIWYG page builder tools, I realized that while they can save me a lot of time, they can also be very limiting or have expensive subscriptions and somehow tie you to their ecosystem. So I decided to build my own page builder based on the most flexible CMS I knew.

Concept

This fieldtype Renders block templates and adds drag and drop functionality in admin, as well as enable inline editing for text, and file fields. It also let's you manipulate CSS in a visual way to design fully responsive websites (or parts of them) without writing code.

The fieldtype comes with an optional style panel to manipulate CSS properties directly on the page. You can customize the panel or disable it completely from the module settings (and just use a CSS file that you include in your template). The data to style the items is stored directly on the item using PW's meta data (no extra fields are created).

Don't want to give your client all that power? Use ProcessWire’s powerful permission system to control what your clients can edit. You can then also grant access individually to the style panel, resize or drag functionality using ProcessWire's build in permission system.

Features

• Blocks are just pages
• Blocks are defined by native PW templates and fields
• Manipulate CSS grid or flexbox based layouts in a visual way to design fully responsive websites (or parts of them)
• Encapsulated frontend code (PAGEGRID renders the template of your frontend inside an iframe in the backend)
• Design and editing features can be disabled for certain roles (using ProcessWire's build in permission system)
• Inline editing of text, textarea, TinyMCE (supports latest version), ckeditor and file fields
• Simply drag and resize to manipulate grid items directly inside the backend
• Manipulate grid columns and rows directly on the page (use any number of columns you want)
• All style manipulations are saved as JSON and used to generate dynamic styles that you render in your main template (no inline styles)
• Nested groups/grids (child pages of nested blocks are created under group parent)
• The style panel supports adding custom classes and assigning styles to them. These classes can be used globally on all pages (a css class is also a page)
• The style panel supports selecting html tags to style tags globally across the whole site
• Global blocks work with page reference field (changes on one page, changes all blocks on all pages)
• Manual and auto placement of grid items
• blocks and nested blocks can be cloned 
• Redo/undo and copy/paste shortcuts
• Editing block items in modal sidebar immediately updates frontend (Ajax Save).
• Define custom icons for your blocks via native template settings (template -> advanced -> icon)
• Automatic page save (Changes are getting saved via ajax, no need to click the save button)
• NEW: Option to automatically load lazysizes lazyloader (V 0.1.0)

Changelog

• V 0.1.0: Feature: Option to automatically load lazysizes lazyloader (Module Settings > Plugins).
• V 0.1.5: Fixed bug: Tabs not working when editing items via modal panel.
• V 0.1.6: Fixed bug: Setting height in VH unit was not working.
• V 0.1.7: Feature: Option to hide save button (and use automatic ajax save ) if there are no other fields than PAGEGRID on the content tab (Module Settings > Interface).
• V 0.2.0: Fixed bug: Custom block wrapper element <p> was not working with inline editor.
• V 0.2.0: Fixed bug: Inline editor would sometimes not save after clicking cancel and then edit item again.
• V 0.2.0: Feature: Now it's possible to add classes to elements inside richt text fields via style panel.
• V 0.2.0: Fixed bug: Inline editor was not working after first item was added to the page (needed reloading the page).
• V 0.2.1: Feature: Updated PageGridBlocks Module: Using TinyMCE as the default editor.
• V 0.2.1: Feature: Updated PageGridBlocks Module: Group/container wrapper element can now be changed to <div>, <section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <nav>.

Thanks to everyone who helped me improve my coding skills and for the support of this great community! Special thanks to @diogo for the valuable feedback and @ryan for this great CMS and his support for the PageFrontEdit module!

[gebeer]

Looks Awesome. Thank you for sharing. Will definitely have a look.

As I understand it from the docs, every block is being wrapped inside a <div> element. I wonder if this would have negative impact on machine readability and therefore SEO since page markup is not really semantically structured anymore. Maybe I'm wrong, and it is semantically ok to have something like this?

div
    section
        div
            article
div
    section
        div
            article
etc.

I know that this is an issue with most page builders. They need that extra markup.

[jploch]

On 1/19/2023 at 10:43 AM, gebeer said:

As I understand it from the docs, every block is being wrapped inside a <div> element.

@gebeer Every block gets wrapped by an element. The default is a "<div>", but the wrapping element can be changed to something else than div. See here. You can even let users change the element tag in the Style Panel. (Note: The markup inside the wrapping element is based on the template file the developer created in the "site/templates/blocks" folder).

For me using "<div>" as an element for layout/design seems semantically fine. Divs are defined to not convey any meaning (i.e. they don't alter the "structure" of the document). Actually a lot of (CSS) frameworks and websites are build like this. Having those HTML5 tags like article, section, nav, etc. inside divs. But yes you can change it ?

[nabo]

Thanks for this module, it seems great, but if I try to install I got this error ?

Error installing module - FieldtypePageGrid
Modules: Unable to install module (FieldtypePageGrid): Can’t save page 0: /pg-items/: It has no parent assigned

 

[jploch]

@nabo Sorry for the trouble. I was able to reproduce the error (installation was working locally but not on my production server). This should now be fixed. Please update the module.

For those who have problems with the installation of the module, please make sure that you update to the latest version

[nabo]

On 1/29/2023 at 1:44 PM, jploch said:

@nabo Sorry for the trouble. I was able to reproduce the error (installation was working locally but not on my production server). This should now be fixed. Please update the module.

For those who have problems with the installation of the module, please make sure that you update to version 0.0.98 

Now it works!!!!

Thanks, now I can start play a bit ?

[jploch]

There was a bug when editing the slider block (from PageGridBlocks module) in modal window. This is now fixed. Please try the lates version of "FieldtypePageGrid".
You can add items to the slider from the children tab. Here I am adding an image but you can add every allowed template (configurable via permissions):

Note: this block uses glide.js, a small and flexible vanilla JavaScript slider and carousel.

[eydun]

The video-file in your latest post does not work for me.

[jploch]

@eydun what browser are you using? It's a mp4 file and should work on most browsers.

EDIT: The forum seems to have problems with mp4 files. I added it to youtube instead..

[jploch]

Checkout the new PAGEGRID online demo ?

Now I'm working on a couple of video tutorials to highlight some use cases and features. I also added a changelog to the first post so you can stay up to date. As I use PAGEGRID for some of my own projects, I'll be updating the module to meet my needs. But I'm also interested in your feedback.

What features would you like to see in PAGEGRID?

[uliverse]

Very cool! I just found this module and tried the demo. I am amazed how well it already works! Wow!! This could definitely be a game changer for some because it brings so much design flexibility to PW (of course the purists among us cringe inside ?). I have been hoping for some solution like this and will definitely look into it more. Thank you for sharing!