Weekly update – 11 July 2024

[wbmnfktr]

As I look at Laravel, and quite often stumble across YouTube videos about it, these days I asked myself... is there something that Laravel does (way better) that ProcessWire should/could/has to do as well?

Things I find super interesting are those Breeze, Intertia, Volt, Livewire starters. Amazing! Or the Laravel Queues, those various database adapters to use SQLite or Postgres just by changing a line in the config. The Tailwind/Vite workflows, and things like that. Not to mention all those on-demand services. It's impressive! But sure, those are big and heavy things you can't just copy, but there is a reason people love Laravel.

I know some of us here are actively using tools like Laravel and CraftCMS.
Why? Both are super complicated right from the start aka installation.

(yeah, I love to move around files and use my ZIPs to extract them into other folders and go from there!).

[d'Hinnisdaël]

@wbmnfktr The ecosystem of available packages and services is definitely one of the major draws of Laravel. It almost parallels the Wordpress ecosystem, but ten times more professional. A lot of Laravel packages are very high quality, actively maintained, well tested, etc. That's probably a result of their somewhat "enterprisey" approach to structuring a project. Dependency injection, containers, service providers, those are all great approaches for professional projects, but they do require some commitment to learning these specific concepts.

ProcessWire's approach to extension via hooking is almost the complete opposite of Laravel's container resolution approach. They're both flexible and ergonomic, but ProcessWire's a lot more approachable and easier to grok for newcomers I think. Being able to replace an internal handler in three lines without copy-pasting the whole class is really magical.

[wbmnfktr]

I'd support the "enterprisey" feel of Laravel and the whole ecosphere around it.
Some of those big packages and starters aren't just a package with a README.md, they have full websites to explain what's happening - even those that are free (or not that expensive).

I totally get that feeling, the vibe, the experience... yet it's way over everything I want to handle (aka my comfort zone).
I did the 30-day-challenge to learn Laravel and I learned a lot. I learned to invest more time in ProcessWire as I am already familiar with it and could do way more with it, when investing more time to learn some new basics (modules, hooks, custom classes, and such).

I love the simplicity of ProcessWire. From fields and templates, to selectors, to templating.
You can learn all that in a weekend.
While hooks and modules, custom forms, and more... may take a bit longer (weeks at least, for starters and non-PHP-Developers).

Still... are there some things we could learn, should adopt, might take a look at from Laravel, or CraftCMS, or Symfony, or...

I asked it myself, but I'm absolutely not the right person to ask those questions, so... here we are. ?