Thoughts on CMS packages

[ryan]

There's been very little written about ProcessWire formally on other sites, so always glad to see someone write something about it and I'll try to post links here when they appear. Marc Carson (@circular on twitter) posted an article on his site titled "Thoughts on CMS packages, July 2011". In it he briefly covered Textpattern, ProcessWire and a couple others. I thought it was very complimentary to ProcessWire and Textpattern (one I've not tried before). Here's the link: friendlyskies.net/site/webdev/thoughts-on-cms-packages-july-2011 http://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/thoughts-on-cms-packages-july-2011

I think we'll get a lot more written about it once get get 2.1 finalized and we start promoting it intentionally, like on opensourcecms, etc.

[SiNNuT]

Pretty nice write-up, and Processwire deserves it, that's for sure. Ryan, back in December i  asked you if you could set up a forum. You replied:

if there's ever enough using it i'll setup a forum. right now, i think there are just 3 of us using it

Now there are 2274 Posts in 330 Topics by 105 Members. Granted, a lot of them are from a few hardcore users, but i see a nice growth in numbers. Most seem to be pretty impressed with PW. With a little promoting i think it can become quite popular. Personally i am impressed that one developer made such a nice and clever CMS.

[LeslieC]

I have to agree with SINNUT  ;D

I am playing with PW only since yesterday, but I am already really impressed with PW CMS. The possibility what PW can be used for are endless! This is probably the most versatile CMS I've seen. And I tried them all 

[ryan]

Thanks, you guys are too kind. Sinnut I had forgotten that you were the one that originally asked me to setup a forum–that was an excellent suggestion on your part! Thank you for that.

I'm advising people to use 2.1 now unless they need to upgrade an existing 2.0 site. But once 2.1 is totally wrapped up next month, we'll start trying to get more exposure for PW on other sites like opensourcecms and others.

[selfthinker]

As the first part of the discussion that followed (which was moved to the Pub subforum) is still relevant to this thread, I post it again:

The original link now leads to a 404 error page. It has been moved here: http://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/thoughts-on-cms-packages-july-2011

[apeisa]

Thanks. I updated the link in first post.

[MarcC]

Sorry, very experimental site there. :-P

[Soma]

I just checked on opensourcecms.com and PW is now on first place of worst-to-best list! With 1442 votings.... Bastards.  :-\

---

Every few minutes a couple ratings more...

Well how comes this doesn't surprise me much.

[ryan]

We were at 200 votes yesterday, which took us a few months to obtain. I have asked them to remove ProcessWire from their site until they can come up with an honest ratings system. People take those ratings seriously and they are so easily manipulated. Maintaining a positive rating at opensourcecms.com apparently requires playing a dishonest game, and I'd rather not be listed than play that game.

[MarcC]

Ah, that would explain why I couldn't find it there. That sucks though. I wonder what a $100/1 month sponsorship fee would do for recognition, though? I mean, provided they got honest at some point I guess.

[ryan]

Ah, that would explain why I couldn't find it there. That sucks though. I wonder what a $100/1 month sponsorship fee would do for recognition, though? I mean, provided they got honest at some point I guess.

I think we're best focusing our efforts elsewhere. It's not a level playing field over there. I don't think the people running it are dishonest by any means, but they've got a real problem they have to deal with before I'd want PW to be listed there again.

The site's rating system is being controlled by hackers to boost the ratings of CMSs that can't compete on their own. The back door to the ratings system is obvious to anyone that experiments with it for 5 minutes … one uses a hidden iframe to start a session, and an <img> tag to complete the vote, and every visitor to your site unknowingly votes your will at opensourcecms.com. It would be easy for us to play the game and boost ourselves to first and slap Joomla to 1 star, but why play that game? That's stooping pretty low. It's taking advantage of innocent users and opensourcecms.com. Though I do think that that opensourcecms.com is at fault too–leaving a backdoor open like that is asking for trouble. 

While I feel bad for the folks running opensourcecms and those that have to cheat in order to compete, I think we should be genuinely honored to be considered such a threat. We got nearly 2,000 1-star votes yesterday by someone that was apparently very scared by ProcessWire. Surely that must be a record at opensourcecms. It definitely gives me a lot of energy and enthusiasm for our project.

[Soma]

I couldn't have said it better Ryan. I was thinking the very same. It just makes me wonder, and wish to know to what reason is they're doing it. Is it may personal or just scared off of a newcomer sensing that many switch from Textpattern, Typo3, Wordpress, Joomla, MODX ...  ;D

[Nico Knoll]

Maybe we should write some guides, which tell the reader what are the differences between his old CMS and ProcessWire and which ProcessWire function replace his old CMS' one , like "Switching from WordPress to ProcessWire", "Switching from TextPattern to ProcessWire", ... so the newcomer could become better really fast.

[Marty Walker]

Maybe we should write some guides, which tell the reader what are the differences between his old CMS and ProcessWire and which ProcessWire function replace his old CMS' one , like "Switching from WordPress to ProcessWire", "Switching from TextPattern to ProcessWire", ... so the newcomer could become better really fast.

That's a really great idea. I've been thinking about all the sites I've done over the past couple of years and there'd only be 2 or 3 that PW wouldn't have been a good fit for. But having built some in Textpattern and others in ExpressionEngine, I'm amazed at how much PW covers without resorting to a plugin or module.

[ryan]

I think it's a great idea too. Are there any other CMSs that others here have expertise in that they'd like to write something?  Perhaps we could build an archive of these on the site in the 'about' section so that people can get a good idea of what the differences are between ProcessWire and another CMS they are using.

[alchime.net]

I could give some inputs  about Modx but mainly for Evo (I used it before it what called like that, from 2006 to huu ok now..)

But it would be similar to the http://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/thoughts-on-cms-packages-july-2011 opinions in short.

Great package, really enjoyed using Evo, but I haven’t spent as much time with it since Revo came out. Quite a bit of interesting pseudocode in there. Still, it’s all PHP so it’s not like it’s a pain to work with. I just don’t see my clients enjoying the admin UI compared to other clients using other software.

Honestly i REALLY liked Modx and as i have already said somewhere, before, on the forum it was my best friend but now that  i found about processwire ;-) ...

And i tried like 100's CMS before PW. (I love to be an "early adopter.." but i stop creating web site for like 2 years..)

Regards

ps : Zenphoto is great too, Oxwall is pretty fine.

And i'm not a php programming efficient person yet.(?)

[statestreet]

I wonder how many yet-unseen effects that tweet from Smashing Magazine a couple of weeks ago will have. All it takes is a few people to see the the proposition ("A CMS that works like jQuery for content? Interesting..."), make the connection ("This looks like I could use it!"), and then it becomes the foundation for a project that might launch a couple of months later. Those people end up happy with how it worked out, they recommend ProcessWire to others, and then you have viral marketing.

That was me a few weeks ago; I was trying to figure out what to use for my new music project site (designer-developer-musician here), I saw the SmashingMag tweet, and now I'm on track to launch the PW-powered site with my new album next week.

[Pete]

Awesome to hear - be sure to post a link when it's up!

[ryan]

I wish that more people could have seen that tweet from SmashingMag. They sent that tweet to 500,000+ people at the same time, and only about 6,000 got through (and I bet it was so slow for those 6k that most gave up). I think we would have had to be on a large scale CDN to accommodate even a quarter of that traffic at once. So while the tweet went out to half a million people, I'm guessing the majority of people that clicked on it got nothing. I appreciate them tweeting about ProcessWire, but just wish we had the resources to accept their nice gesture. Hopefully we can get a more traditional link from them at some point, something that would spread the traffic out beyond the minute-by-minute nature of twitter. I would guess this is a regular problem with any tweet that gets sent by them... 500k+ followers is pretty amazing and they deserve the great reputation. But no traditional web hosting can accommodate that kind of traffic at once (as far as I know).

[apeisa]

But no traditional web hosting can accommodate that kind of traffic at once (as far as I know).

Probably not.

There are pretty interesting new php cloud hosting solutions popping, like www.phpfog.com and http://pagodabox.com/. Not sure how well those could perform when you get smashed?

EDIT: Just got email from phpfog: "We will definitely add ProcessWire to our todo list for jumpstarts, thank you for pointing us to it!"

[ryan]

There are pretty interesting new php cloud hosting solutions popping, like www.phpfog.com and http://pagodabox.com/. Not sure how well those could perform when you get smashed?

This looks very interesting, and I like the sound of anything that would let us be able to scale to handling high traffic out of the blue. But I'm completely lost once I get to either site–I'm going there looking for hosting, but they are just talking about developing applications and using Git. Even after reading and watching the videos, I'm not clear about what exactly these services are – I must be having a dumb moment today. I found something I could relate to on the pricing page but it's all pointing to really expensive shared hosting.

Has anyone used these are knows what they are? Do you get SSH and root access? I see lots of talk about scalability, but relatively limited resources called out on the pricing page. What advantages and disadvantages does this have over having your own dedicated server or VPS?

[Nico Knoll]

I wish that more people could have seen that tweet from SmashingMag. They sent that tweet to 500,000+ people at the same time, and only about 6,000 got through (and I bet it was so slow for those 6k that most gave up). I think we would have had to be on a large scale CDN to accommodate even a quarter of that traffic at once. So while the tweet went out to half a million people, I'm guessing the majority of people that clicked on it got nothing. I appreciate them tweeting about ProcessWire, but just wish we had the resources to accept their nice gesture. Hopefully we can get a more traditional link from them at some point, something that would spread the traffic out beyond the minute-by-minute nature of twitter. I would guess this is a regular problem with any tweet that gets sent by them... 500k+ followers is pretty amazing and they deserve the great reputation. But no traditional web hosting can accommodate that kind of traffic at once (as far as I know).

Well I'm one of the 500,000+

[Pete]

This looks very interesting, and I like the sound of anything that would let us be able to scale to handling high traffic out of the blue. But I'm completely lost once I get to either site–I'm going there looking for hosting, but they are just talking about developing applications and using Git. Even after reading and watching the videos, I'm not clear about what exactly these services are – I must be having a dumb moment today. I found something I could relate to on the pricing page but it's all pointing to really expensive shared hosting.

Has anyone used these are knows what they are? Do you get SSH and root access? I see lots of talk about scalability, but relatively limited resources called out on the pricing page. What advantages and disadvantages does this have over having your own dedicated server or VPS?

Looks to me like everything iss done through Git. They seem to purely host applications that they've tested so you can be sure the config is right, and you do cahnges on your PC and push them to the server through Git. No FTP or things like that, just a quicker workflow (potentially).

The BIG issue I have with it is the bandwidth. 100GB a month isn't all that much nowadays (one of my sites uses more than half that each month) but I suppose you would only be hitting it if you were hosting lots of videos or files for download on your own space, which I guess in the case of PW you wouldn't. Still very expensive though!

I use Storm on Demand from Liquidweb which scales based on usage. Obviously you'd have to set some upper limits otherwise a day's extremely high traffic could cost you an arm and a leg (unless you were prepared to take the hit to keep the content being served). It's cloud-based and I've been with them long enough to know it should scale well.

[ryan]

I'm not quite sure I'd want to delegate all my file management over to Git. That seems like a major sacrifice relative to having SSH, but maybe I'm just not used to the idea yet. I'll have to try it at some point before I judge it. But you are right that the provided resources just don't seem to be a good enough of a deal to motivate one to try something new. I need to check out the Storm on Demand that you mentioned, that sounds interesting. Their 2GB plan looks nice and sounds like a better deal than the VPS I've got now. Though I can't determine if it's fully managed (they list 3 tiers of management, but don't say what applies) and I can't tell of it comes with cPanel?

[Pete]

It comes with cPanel/WHM and has the best support team I've ever seen. Certainly the only host I've used that proactively monitors servers so if anything goes wrong it's automatically rebooted and you get an email about it - very handy for when you're asleep and something goes wrong so you don't wake up to a headache

Speeds seem the best of any US host I've used as well. I'll dig put my server specs and let you know what I'm on.