How much time is needed to learn ProcessWire?

[dan222]

Hi, I know frontend development and have previously created static sites, which are hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages.

I've been learning PHP because I want to do a little more than just static sites, but I do not have experience in the backend - e.g. hosting and databases.

I'm trying to work out my next steps now that I know some php - what is the time needed to learn to use Processwire to a decent standard (i.e. more than just templating out a blog)? What would be the advantage be in learning Processwire over something like Laravel?

Many thanks for any help or advice you're able to give.

[elabx]

3 hours ago, dan222 said:

What would be the advantage be in learning Processwire over something like Laravel?

I think ProcessWire's opinions are very worth it. The ones that I feel are right at hand are the selector API and the concepts associated with a Page. This allows you to reduce the amount of decisions you have to take and later execute, letting you go straight into making that real estate/portfolio/etc you want to build. 

I'd say that with very little backend experience you can build something nice and fast in ProcessWire, with a very advanced and minimalistic and powerful admin backend out of the box. I'd encourage you to give it a try, at least a couple days of work. Give ddev a try to setup your development environment. 

If you find yourself at trouble don't hesitate to write back, it's an awesome community!

[Jim Bailie]

Some first steps:

Have you gotten a working PW instance installed and running in a dev environment?

Once that's done, install Ryan's "Skyscrapers" site profile and study that. Maybe add some features or use it to setup an instance for a personal project.

And of course, there's PW community which is very helpful.

[TomPich]

For my first steps with PW, I found this Youtube playlist by Henning Heyne.
He builds step by step a simple blog, but by doing that, you get to grasp some concepts of PW that maybe a bit not intuitive but prove afterward to be extremely powerful (like a simple post category being a page in itself).

Hope that will help.

 

[wbmnfktr]

I quote myself here (source)

Quote

Works perfectly fine for non-developers
I won't call myself a coder or programmer - I just tinker around with code and have fun. When I started using ProcessWire, getting around was super easy, and learning the fundamentals took only a day or two. From there on, it was easy-going. It's impressive what you can achieve with only some if/foreach/echo in PHP/ProcessWire. I said it a few years back and still stand behind it: ProcessWire seems to be the easiest way to learn and work with PHP.

Probably the best way to start is:

• Read the docs: https://processwire.com/docs/
• Get familiar with the selectors: https://processwire.com/docs/selectors/
• Try the tutorials: https://processwire.com/docs/tutorials/
• Search the forums for common questions with google like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aprocesswire.com%2Ftalk+how+to+resize+images
• And give yourself a weekend or two

The moment you installed and broke your 10-20th installation of ProcessWire you will feel at home. And you should break* as many installations as possible to learn the foundation of pages, templates, fields, and go from there.

Use DDEV (all platforms) or Laragon (Windows) for an easy start. Best way to start with ProcessWire locally. Install the Skyscraper profile and take it apart - or try another site profile. That way you will learn how to use profiles and can build a routine to install ProcessWire. Maybe even creating a few instances with different profiles could help.

* have fun with the code, bend and twist every single part of everything to understand.

 

6 hours ago, dan222 said:

What would be the advantage be in learning Processwire over something like Laravel?

ProcessWire will give you a headstart, great UI to enter content, manage the site and modules, ProcessWire takes care of routing, permissions, and user management. ProcessWire is probably the easiest way to start learning a bit about PHP.

if/else/foreach/echo is everything you need to know to start.

[dan222]

Great, thanks very much all. I guess I just need to get stuck in and give it a go - I've been going round in circles for some time wandering what to learn, so really just getting stuck in to something, anything, will be a good idea! You've given me some good pointers so I'll get on with it, thank you.

[cwsoft]

On 5/9/2024 at 1:58 PM, dan222 said:

I'm trying to work out my next steps now that I know some php - what is the time needed to learn to use Processwire to a decent standard (i.e. more than just templating out a blog)? What would be the advantage be in learning Processwire over something like Laravel?

The learning curve and time depends on your definition of a „decent standard“ for your local development environment and operating system used. For example. I bought a new Windows 11 Laptop recently and just wanted to upgrade my dev environment I used for about 10 years now (Windows 10, XAMPP, VS Code with several Addons) to a decent standard on Windows, which is WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux), DDEV (replacing XAMPP), and installing all the stuff previously hosted on Windows in the WSL2/Ubuntu env co-existing with Windows 11. This took me about 5 days until I get used to Docker/DDEV stuff etc. 

When I first tried Processwire a year ago with a specific project (event booking system for 1-10 departments with 1.000 users/department) in mind, where I didn‘t want to implement authentification, logging, permissions, database queries in vanilla PHP myself, it took me a weekend to go from project idea to a working demo for one department with my existing PHP knowledge (last PHP project was in 2018). I just installed a default site template with delayed output strategy, read me through the API and tutorials and asked questions in the forums and the demo turned into pilot tests after about 2 weeks and went live with three departments after 4 weeks. Up to that time I wrote three modules (two publicly available from the PW module store) and one backend module for private use.

So to recap. If you just use your existing local dev env, you can get results fairly quick using the PW API and the snippets in the tutorials. Another great resource are the code comments in the PW core files on Github. If you want to upgrade your local dev env to some decent/recent setup, it will take somewhat longer. The extra time I spend with setting up my local dev env amortized about 1-2 weeks later, due to the better workflows and toolchain like DDEV/WSL2, which I won‘t miss anymore.

Cheers cwsoft

Edited May 10 by cwsoft

[dan222]

2 hours ago, cwsoft said:

The learning curve and time depends on your definition of a „decent standard“ for your local development environment and operating system used. For example. I bought a new Windows 11 Laptop recently and just wanted to upgrade my dev environment I used for about 10 years now (Windows 10, XAMPP, VS Code with several Addons) to a decent standard on Windows, which is WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux), DDEV (replacing XAMPP), and installing all the stuff previously hosted on Windows in the WSL2/Ubuntu env co-existing with Windows 11. This took me about 5 days until I get used to Docker/DDEV stuff etc. 

When I first tried Processwire a year ago with a decent project in mind, where I didn‘t want to implement authentification, loging, permissions, database queries in vanilla PHP myself, it took me a weekend to go from project idea to a working demo for my clients with my existing PHP knowledge (last active PHP project was in 2018). I just installed a default site template with delayed output strategy, read me through the API and tutorials and asked questions in the forums and the demo went into pilot tests after about 2 weeks and live after 4 weeks. Up to that time I wrote three modules (two publicly available from PW module store) and one backend module for private use.

So to recap. If you just use your existing local dev env, you can get results fairly quick using the PW API and the snippets in the tutorials ore from the comments in the PW Github repo. If you want to upgrade your local dev env to some decent/recent setup, it will take somewhat longer. The extra time I spend with setting up my local dev env amortized about 1-2 weeks later, due to the better workflows and toolchain like DDEV/WSL2, which I won‘t miss anymore.

Cheers cwsoft

Thanks. I'm a bit dim, so 2 days, 5 days or even 4 weeks sounds incredible to me, I was thinking more in terms of how many months! Anyway, your timescales sound promising, thanks.

[wbmnfktr]

In case you have time this weekend:

• Saturday: enjoy a day reading the docs and tutorials
• Sunday: enjoy a day of tinkering with the installation, a site profile, maybe first steps

In addition to that I recommend this 10 year old video:

ProcessWire looks way different nowadays but the steps are the same. And you can see how easy it is (or can be) to get started.

[bernhard]

This might also be helpful, I don't know, I tried ? https://youtu.be/ncS36UqaBvc?si=SYhVc_qcaN5lneDP&t=355

All the best for your journey!

[dan222]

On 5/10/2024 at 5:46 PM, bernhard said:

This might also be helpful, I don't know, I tried ? https://youtu.be/ncS36UqaBvc?si=SYhVc_qcaN5lneDP&t=355

All the best for your journey!

Thank you

[dan222]

On 5/10/2024 at 3:49 PM, wbmnfktr said:

In case you have time this weekend:

• Saturday: enjoy a day reading the docs and tutorials
• Sunday: enjoy a day of tinkering with the installation, a site profile, maybe first steps

In addition to that I recommend this 10 year old video:

ProcessWire looks way different nowadays but the steps are the same. And you can see how easy it is (or can be) to get started.

Thank you, looks like there's loads of helpful things to be getting stuck into!

[cwsoft]

@dan222You can get working a project in mind with PW quite easily by just using some basic features. I learn and discover new things every time I am using PW or read forum threads even after one year of using PW. Pretty sure I discovered only 30-50% of PWs goodies yet. 

[dan222]

Just to update, it didn't really take me long to get the hang of the basics of Processwire, I found the Hello Worlds tutorial really useful to get the general idea, and also found the docs were pretty good. I'm pretty sure I'm only using Processwire at a tiny fraction of its capabilities, but I've managed to make a site for a client where they can update their blog themselves, and didn't have any issues I couldn't resolve by searching the forums, the community seems really great and looks like it has been great for years. Thanks very much to everyone for your helpful advice and pointers.