My Newbie Questions

[pwired]

I'm coming from another cms which I liked a lot first but found out later that it is not scalable

after all plus the team decided to stop making it compatible with php 5.4. Their next cms

has a long learning curve, has slow online performance and simply has overkill for the websites

I am making for my clients. So I decided to abandon ship.

After evaluating a dozen cms'es out there I find PW really a brilliant concept,

compared to the former cms I was using. But I am still trying to wrap my mind

around PW and still have some "silly" questions.

I'm sure that PW will be compatible with php 5.4, but what about the future ?
Is it possible with PW to maintain php 5.x compatibility your self ?

Nobody can afford a second time losing a battle with deprecated functions in a cms core,
the back and frontend stop to work and see your clients walk away to other designers.

I installed PW 2.2.9
When I am in the Admin and go to Setup => Templates => fields => body
the only things I see you can edit here are label, description, visibility, and column width.
I know I am missing the point here so pardon my question but what's the practical use of this ?

Where in the PW admin can I actually edit parts of html, js, cms, or php ?
Where can I edit the position of these parts inside a website page ?

I don't see (yet) a clear distinction between backend and frontend.
How in PW can I give a client his own login and send him directly to parts

or pages of a website that he is allowed to edit ?

Is it possible to make a certain area of a webpage editable so that a client
can edit such an area on a webpage directly with his browser ?

How can I change the part processwire in the admin link

www mysite dot com/processwire to something else ?

Thanks in advance.
 

[SiNNuT]

You state that you think PW has a brilliant concept but judging from some of your questions i don't think you (fully) understand the concept. In no way is this meant to sound harsh but in this case i really think you should take some time and study some of the docs and wiki stuff. Follow some tutorials like, 1 and 2, this really helps to get a grasp on how things like, fields, templates, templatefiles and pages work in the system.

[diogo]

Hi there!

You have a lot of questions there that will be answered if you go through the documentations and basic tutorials. Instead of answering to them I will point you to the most useful links for starting with PW. The point here is that, besides answering those specific questions, you will also have an idea of how the system works in general.

http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/Small_Project_Walkthrough

http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/Basic_Website_Tutorial

http://processwire.com/api/

http://processwire.com/api/cheatsheet/

There are two questions that you won't find answered on those links:

Is it possible to make a certain area of a webpage editable so that a client
can edit such an area on a webpage directly with his browser ?

While this  is possible through the implementation of an editor like http://aloha-editor.org/ by creating a module. The truth is that you won't find it implemented in the core.

Is it possible with PW to maintain php 5.x compatibility your self ?

 

I don't think that would be possible in any system. You can be sure that compatibility is one of Ryan's main concerns though.

[pwired]

I am just starting to find the pw wiki. Thanks Diogo for your links, they will give me a good start.

[Radek]

Hi, when i start with PW most importand things to realize was:

Custom fields belong to templates.

Every page have some template.

Templates processing data from fields and i can thrue template files (php) and API show/process data from fields to frontend.

Simple Example:

You can made field with name content (textarea for example).

Create file test.php in /site/templates and fill it with your html (head/body/....).

In admin create new template and select test.

In admin create some page and give it template test.

Edit /site/templates/test.php and add API function to show content field on place where you want <?php echo $page->content ?>

Now you can edit your page(content field) in admin and frontend show result.

This is very basic example, in real you can made it more clever.

I think you need read links posted above too and this forum is full of nice examples/tutorials/snippets.

[Joss]

Sorry, there is not a huge amount of the wiki yet - at the moment most of the useful information is either in the API (which is not as techy as it sounds) with lots of hints and tips in here.

There is sort of a long term project to get some of the useful bits from in here moved over as people come up with them!

[teppo]

Is it possible with PW to maintain php 5.x compatibility your self ?

 

I don't think that would be possible in any system. You can be sure that compatibility is one of Ryan's main concerns though.

First of all, ProcessWire is open source / free software, so there's no one stopping you from doing this yourself. The problem is that if something changes in future PHP versions enough to break compatibility with older versions, there's no way to predict what kind of changes this might require in the system itself and whether they're going to be feasible.

What you should keep in mind is that this is very rare and even though at some point new versions of ProcessWire will have to drop explicit support support for old PHP versions (in favor of supporting features brought by newer PHP versions), most likely old ProcessWire versions will continue to work even with latest versions of PHP for a long time.

[pwired]

 Edit /site/templates/test.php and add API function to show content field on place where you want <?php echo $page->content ?>

Now you can edit your page(content field) in admin and frontend show result.

Thanks Radek. So, does this mean that editing test.php is done outside the PW Admin ?

But this is exactly what I was looking for in my next cms as this is coding closer to the core (php) of the PW cms

instead of further away from it.

What you should keep in mind is that this is very rare

Teppo but this is what happened to the former cms I was using. It has lead to different forks, splintered communities, etc. Most of the times forks die off after some time. Anyway that cms wasn't scalable after all.

But as far as I understand Ryan is the only team member or am I wrong about that ? How long does it take to learn php enough to be able to maintain the PW cms core ?

[Radek]

Thanks Radek. So, does this mean that editing test.php is done outside the PW Admin ?

But this is exactly what I was looking for in my next cms as this is coding closer to the core of the PW cms

instead of further away from it.

 Yes you write your code outside PW admin in your favorite editor. This is way i like it too.

[diogo]

How long does it take to learn php enough to be able to maintain the PW cms core?

I was already answering to this question and Chrome crashed out of nowhere. I will take that as a sign and refrain to write it again...

[ryan]

But as far as I understand Ryan is the only team member or am I wrong about that ?

I may be the starter of the project but there are lots of team members here. ProcessWire is everyone's project. We probably need to highlight that more on the site. You don't see collaborators in the GitHub tree simply because of the current workflow--I don't [yet] use GitHub to merge pull requests directly. As a result, collaborators don't show up in that tree, but are always highlighted in the commit notes. 

Regarding PHP compatibility: ProcessWire is already compatible with PHP 5.4. It's unlikely that newer versions of PHP would break ProcessWire, but if for some reason it did, we'd update it. We will soon be dropping support for PHP 5.2, so that we can take advantage of what PHP 5.3+ offers. 

[pwired]

Ok everybody, thanks for your replies. I found the small project walkthrough and the basic website tutorial. That will give me a jumpstart to learn PW. What I want to learn in PW first is how to use a not published field or page and fill it with data and text that I can pull into other pages. This could be a not published field/page filled with prices (text) for products. This way a client has to edit only 1 source and some logic pulls it into other webpages. Another example would be to use a not published field/page and fill it with css, js and meta names as plane text and pull that into other pages where needed. Anybody can point me into the right PW direction how to do this ?

[Luis]

Please Check this: http://processwire.com/api/templates/

[pwired]

Thanks Luis. Yes, reading that page for the second time, now it makes sense ! Was a bit desorientated with PW at first. Now it starts to look real promising. This week-end carnaval will take off here. No parking place anymore in a 1 km radius. Places full with dressed people, alchol, party, you name it. I'm gonna fill my fridge and close the door until monday and dive into PW