Why I've stayed with ProcessWire

[psy]

I have never been loyal to tools for the sake of it. If something stops earning its keep, I move on. The reason I have stayed with ProcessWire for close to ten years is simple: it continues to make sense for how I work.

I still look after sites I built many years ago, and most of them just run. No rewrites, no upgrade stress, no feeling that past work is a liability. The API has stayed stable, and when it has changed, it has been deliberate and predictable. That matters when you are responsible for client sites long-term.

What really locked me in early on was the front-end freedom. PW never told me how a site should look or behave. It gave me solid building blocks and allowed me to choose. I can build very different sites without switching platforms or fighting opinionated defaults, and that freedom is something I value.

The forum is another reason I am still here. You, the people in this community, take the time to understand a problem before jumping to solutions. That is very rare. The discussions are thoughtful, practical, and grounded in real experience, and I have learned a lot simply by reading how others approach things.

And finally, trust. I trust ProcessWire not to chase trends simply for attention, and not to trade clarity or performance for fashion. Ten years on, it still feels like a system built by people who actually build websites. For me, that combination has been hard to beat.

[Peter Knight]

I think that sums it up 🙂

 

[BitPoet]

I second this wholeheartedly. The community is among the very best out there, and the lack of opinion, the clear structure and the ease of extending make PW a wonderful tool.

It's a sad fact that my days of working with ProcessWire are mostly over. My job responsibilities have changed over time, and the demand for wholly integrated cloud systems led my employer to migrate our intranet site with tens of thousands of pages and a lot of advanced functionality to another platform (let's not talk about the manpower needed to do that and the gaps left). There are of course advantages, but I can say that we had a tailored-to-fit solution on a level you don't find often, from ordering breakfast or lunch from local suppliers, over advanced forms connected to HR systems and Active Directory data, providing specialized integrated databases and automated workflows to our departments, to driving technical sales with dynamically generated interlinked views on bills of material, stocks and data sheets pulled directly from SAP. A piece of software more than 60% of 1300 worldwide employees used daily and that ran with 100.0% availability on a single IIS server with only a bit of memcache magic to keep things speedy. Over more than ten years, periodic updates went through with nary a hitch.

My heart bleeds a bit. Not working with PW every week also means that I'm not actively using the modules I built anymore. I'll have to go over my little babies one by one, retire those that have been surpassed by better approaches by now and find new pet owners for the others.