Is ProcessWire right for my needs?

[Ade]

In order for you to answer this, I should give you some background first.

• I am not a web professional of any stripe. But I understand HTML and CSS and have kept up with them quite well. I have built static websites with only these languages.
• I have very little understanding of PHP, despite trying on and off over the years. I can understand simple statements, but if I use some example code, it must work as provided because I cannot alter it or add context.
• I once used Drupal for a magazine site, with my own theme. I am familiar with the interface but theming is extremely esoteric (and only seems to have got worse) and it can be very frustrating to implement anything a bit different.
• I have tried Wordpress and hated it; it made no sense to me and only got in the way of how I think. Why that is so popular, I don't know.
• I intend to set up a hobby magazine website and I want distinctiveness, flexibility, and expansion potential without going down a dead end and ending up out of my depth – mixed metaphor! – invested in a CMS which was the wrong choice for me.

Here is a short list of some of my requirements, those which I am not sure are met by ProcessWire.

1. Member log-in required for comments – its absence would be a deal breaker.
2. Potential for later integration with services such as donations or Patreon.
3. Taxonomy, ideally capable of building strong relevance between content.
4. Not forced to use blog-like next/previous article links, pagination, chronology, etc. (These seem to be difficult to avoid in Drupal.)
5. One newest article from each category in a “featured” section on the home page.
6. Custom image galleries for showcases in masonry grids.
7. Custom form building for a feedback form. (I would like to have control over the HTML but let the CMS provide the PHP as I have been successful in implementing PHP form processing.)
8. RSS feed.
9. Ability to paste Markdown into a content textarea. (I cannot get this to work in Drupal either, though.)

[BitPoet]

My personal believe is that ProcessWire would be the perfect platform for what you want to do, but you won't be able to completely circumvent a PHP learning curve. Since I don't know any platform or toolkit on the market that provides all the features you want without some programming (and the trend goes towards dropping pre-built solutions and requiring more programming, even with the "big players" like Sharepoint or Typo3), it's probably just a question of picking your poison.

I'll try to answer your points as good as I can, though others with more experience with the specific requirement may have even better ideas.

1. Member login is possible with the free FrontendUser module.
2. Donations could e.g. be achieved with Stripe (Patreon, from what I hear, is cutting down on its APIs and trying to monetarize things to a point of pain). There's a stripe payment processor that's part of the commercial FormBuilder module.
3. Taxonomy is an integral part of PW. Tagging, either with plain text tags or pages (the later even created on demand when you add a tag or relationship item) can easily be achieved out of the box, and there are free modules for things like creating two-way relationships between pages. PW's philosophy that "everything is a page" may sound a bit scary at first if you've worked with CMSes like WP or Drupal, but in the most simple case, a page is just a title field and auto-generated name living somewhere in the page tree.
4. You actively have to implement (yourself or with a module) the blog behavior. If you want it, it's pretty simple with PW's built-in selectors and pagination.
5. Really easy to implement. Add a "featured" checkbox to the templates that are relevant, call $pages->findOne('features=1, sort=-created') to your home template and render the returned page.
6. This is easy too. Yes, it too requires small bits of PHP, but most of it is still CSS and JS. Just a small step up from a static HTML page.
7. Again, FormBuilder might be a good choice here. There are a few more options out there as well, and you'll certainly get good responses here if you inquire with a specific example or use case.
8. Rendering an RSS feed is possible (though I haven't used those in a long time) with free modules, it just needs a tiny bit of (well documented) programming.
9. Just add PW's core Markdown Textformatter or (if you want to mix Markdown and HTML) install and add TextformatterMarkdownInMarkup in the field's configuration, and it will convert the markdown when the contents are shown in the frontend.

One thing I'd like to add: you'll certainly not find a CMS with a more friendly and helpful community than PW.

[da²]

5 hours ago, Ade said:

I have very little understanding of PHP, despite trying on and off over the years. I can understand simple statements, but if I use some example code, it must work as provided because I cannot alter it or add context.

This is where you'll have to put an effort, building a site with ProcessWire needs code. But PW has a fast learning curve compared to some other CMS, API is easy to learn, and creating your own project is a good way to learn to code. 🙂

[cwsoft]

5 hours ago, Ade said:

• I am not a web professional of any stripe. But I understand HTML and CSS and have kept up with them quite well. I have built static websites with only these languages.
• I have very little understanding of PHP, despite trying on and off over the years. I can understand simple statements, but if I use some example code, it must work as provided because I cannot alter it or add context.
• I once used Drupal for a magazine site, with my own theme. I am familiar with the interface but theming is extremely esoteric (and only seems to have got worse) and it can be very frustrating to implement anything a bit different.
• I have tried Wordpress and hated it; it made no sense to me and only got in the way of how I think. Why that is so popular, I don't know.
• I intend to set up a hobby magazine website and I want distinctiveness, flexibility, and expansion potential without going down a dead end and ending up out of my depth – mixed metaphor! – invested in a CMS which was the wrong choice for me.

You need at least basic PHP skills and read through some ProcessWire tutorials before you could answer the question yourself. PW has a great community answering questions fast and trying to help and some great tutorials but less good out of the box frontend templates with a big wow effect for free. 

I would recommend to set up a local PW installation with a basic template first, read through the template, page, fields tutorials available and try to add some own templates e.g. showing some news extracted from child pages etc. PW has an easy API allowing to do amazing things, but you need some basic knowledge of PHP at least to have fun.

Finally, you will never know if PW fits your needs unless you try to setup a small project with it and make your own mind out of it. No easy answer, sorry, but I would just try out myself and see what happens.

Cheers cwsoft

[mel47]

Hello @Ade

I can give you my opinion as a non-professional, building websites (now at the fourth, over 6-7years) on my free time for organizations I work as volunteer.

As others said, you will definitely have to learn PHP but honestly my basic knowledge of loops and functions is quite enough to do get a pretty impressive result. For sure, you will need to invest time, way more than those experienced people. And code will not be as optimized, but it works... However I can't emphasize enough how helpful and kind are the people in this forum. If you show you did an effort, you will never receive those passive-aggressive "RTFM" answers as in my previous CMS forum...

So if it's a project on which you want to invest time and efforts, you will get way better satisfaction than with a premade website builder (which apparently you already tried). PW is not dependent of a type of website (or doesn't have a big catalog of theme) and you can build whatever you want. Which is cool but could scary coding beginners as us. However, docs, forum and examples provided at download are quite enough to start your first structure and have a functional blog. I oversee however you may need help from community for some more advanced functions. Which is fine.

I clearly see amelioration from my 1st website to the current one, so if you focus on only one project, chances are it will become quite good!!

Good luck!

Mel

[Ade]

Thank you for the replies.

There is some positive and some negative feedback there.

I am surprised that an important — partly in the sense of its value, but also in the sense of security — function as member log-in is not provided by a core module, even an optional one. As I am no expert, I cannot know whether any third party code is secure and reliable and I would not be comfortable without knowing that.

On 7/4/2024 at 10:26 PM, cwsoft said:

I would recommend to set up a local PW installation with a basic template first

I do have local empty installations of this and Drupal, being tested and sort-of-developed concurrently to see which wins. My web host provides them as well, so I have two demo-content installations in folders on my hosting, which has been useful to see how they perform.

I have also read most of the ProcessWire documentation, but a lot of it was not very clear and thorough, so it left me with a lot of unanswered questions. Still, it is not as bad as the Drupal documentation…

****

The fact is that I am still undecided. Drupal's core features are compelling, but I am yet to tackle the theming. I think that the ProcessWire theming is likely to be easier, but only if I can manually replicate what I have learned to do with Drupal's Views, etc. So far, my attempts to create content and templates have failed at early hurdles and I can find no solution when I search the web.

 

 

Edited yesterday at 11:37 AM by Ade

[Jan Romero]

17 minutes ago, Ade said:

I am surprised that an important — partly in the sense of its value, but also in the sense of security — function as member log-in is not provided by a core module, even an optional one. As I am no expert, I cannot know whether any third party code is secure and reliable and I would not be comfortable without knowing that.

Admittedly I’ve been meaning to read this whole thread for days and the quoted passage is about all I got so far, but there is a first party option here:

https://processwire.com/store/login-register-pro/

 

[da²]

PW provides all the API to create users and login them. You just need to create the frontend form so the regular users will be able to login on the site. No module is required, but if you don't want to write code at all you can use a free module, in the past I've used this one.

Edited yesterday at 12:32 PM by da²

[szabesz]

2 hours ago, da² said:

in the past I've used this one.

Important to note that that module is no longer being maintained in favor of its commercial follow-up: https://processwire.com/store/login-register-pro/

Note that Ryan's modules are worth their price, and they are also secure. One can save a significant amount of time and receive quality support for the price.

3 hours ago, Ade said:

Drupal's core features are compelling, but I am yet to tackle the theming.

Compared to almost all other PHP CMS/CMF options out there, ProcessWire requires the least amount of time and effort when upgrading the system and its modules. You can keep a ProcessWire site online "forever" without the fear of it not being updated. The only driving force to update a ProcessWire site that is running fine is to keep up with PHP deprecations. Other than that, there are no maintenance tasks to perform if you are okay with a particular ProcessWire site.

By purchasing the most important modules from Ryan (modules most important to you), you also support the continuous development of the system. At least that's how I look at it 🙂 

[gebeer]

14 hours ago, Ade said:

So far, my attempts to create content and templates have failed at early hurdles and I can find no solution when I search the web.

Try following the steps here: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/first-steps-in-processwire-cms-vJ0lNwzDRY6eaXW.skftsw

This should get you started.