Let's Highlight Processwire's Ability To Be An "enterprise Cms"

[marcus]

In the famous "30 minutes" thread MadeMyDay somehow made a point by putting ProcessWire into context with TYPO3.

Recently, I got an inquery for a multilingual website for a speaker agency. A customer looking for an Open Source solution. These speakers had meta data attached (topics, languages, speaking areas, gender) and this database would be the most essential part of the website. Also, a password protected area was needed where speakers could supply materials such as slides to an exclusive user group. Sounded like the perfect job for ProcessWire, unfortunately, after a while of internal consulting and decision-making, the customer chose TYPO3 instead. PW was totally new for them, they admitted to be fascinated by it, but went with the system they knew in the end.

That, and Marc's above mentioned comment made me think. ProcessWire does a good job catering developers but still has room for improvement, in my opinion. Throughout the 30 Minutes / WP Tavern article I often read, "once the developers are on board, the rest will follow". I'm not so sure. It would not hurt to emphasize PW's abilities to serve as a business/enterprise CMS right now.

Take the benefit teaser on typo3.org for example, a perfect intro. It states:

• Open Source Enterprise CMS
• Scalable Web Application Framework
• Large, active global community
• User friendly with unlimited extendability
• Integrated Development and Editing Workflows

I guess most of these advantages do fit to ProcessWire as well or, in the case of continuous integration, are on the doorstep (at least that's how I read "Integrated Development"). And PW's community may not be large yet, but is damn active.

Apart from that, the home page is full of, hm, let's say: trigger words that work on some business business owners: "enterprise", "professional", "web solutions" and "certificates".

I'm not proposing to copy all this. But I have an idea: Since both TYPO3 and ProcessWire are relatively big here in Germany (each on their own scale) one could emphasize the "also a perfect business CMS" aspect on http://de.processwire.com. I guess this won't hurt "the brand" at all, but, possibly, create some insights on if and how such a communication strategy could work.

/edit: These automated capitalized words in the thread title are really annoying :-/

[Nico Knoll]

I may would go with something like processwire.com/business/ or business.processwire.com or business.pw ((or enterprise.pw or vip.pw) redirecting to processwire.com/business/) which points out why ProcessWire is able to be used as enterprise/business CMS. Maybe also offer Premium Support and so on. 

Probably I would use a little different design of the page (at least colours). A little bit darker. So it feels more classy. And enterprise people think they are in there own section.

Good examples: 

http://vip.wordpress.com/

https://www.dropbox.com/business/

[Pete]

I think anything that sees PW being marketed as Enterprise needs ryan's input as there have been discussions around enterprise support etc in the past and the last thing any of us want is to market it as enterprise without the infrastructure to back that up (for example if I was an enterprise customer seeing PW marketed as such, I'd go straight to the PW website to see if there was any official support from the core team in case things went wrong with the dev doing the work - it's only sensible to be cautious with large sums of money).

I know marketing it as suitable for enterprise work and official support are two different things, and it's fine to discuss how to market it as such, I'm just saying that it's not as simple as putting up a page or mini-site.

[marcus]

I know marketing it as suitable for enterprise work and official support are two different things, and it's fine to discuss how to market it as such, I'm just saying that it's not as simple as putting up a page or mini-site.

No, of course not. The intention of this thread was to think about how one could emphasize PWs aptitude for business websites - as it is able to stand the test of being extandable, reliable and user friendly, to chose a few of the aspects TYPO3 advertises with. Emphasizing this alongside the other advantages already communicated, aimed at developers. No microsite, and no business model. Way too big.

[cstevensjr]

I do agree with what everyone is saying, however I do think at sometime, in the near future, we should have a business model properly explained.  We do need to promote and sell the business capabilities/potential of ProcessWire.  I would hope that is what everyone is already doing now.  

I believe we can put our collective heads together and define what the actual business capabilities are and why they are.  I believe a lot of the information is already on the website, we just haven't made a solid business case for using ProcessWire over other solutions.  Sometimes it's simply using the basic keywords that business managers are looking out for.  We have to remember that when we do use those keywords they have to be matched with solid and verifiable technology solutions (that work as advertised).

Being considered an Enterprise solution is something totally different and as @Pete rightly says will take major input from Ryan and others.

[yellowled]

Funny thing, I usually associate “Enterprise CMS” with something expensive and closed-source that consists of a weird combination of Java, Perl, XSLT and other outdated technologies which should not be used to build modern web sites or apps any longer. 

As for “Business CMS”, that's a term that I (just my 2 cents) find rather confusing. A lot of us make a living building more or less complex web sites and apps using ProcessWire. Judging from the Showcase forum, a lot of those web sites are for businesses. Besides, what would be a “non-business” CMS? Something for hobbyists? (Did I just hear someone say “Joomla”?  )

In all seriousness, I don't think it's necessary to market PW for Enterprise/Business use. It (currently) is a CMS for developers. Devlopers who make/made an educated, informed decision to use this particular CMS. Developers who will (individually) market this wonderful CMS to their clients.

I really liked the way Marc put it in the original thread – focus on building a smart, yet simple CMS that developers like.

The rest will follow organically. No need to hurry it. 

[LostKobrakai]

Developers who will (individually) market this wonderful CMS to their clients.

I think there's the problem which we're talking about. Not every developer is in a position to choose a CMS, just by providing a prove / examples of it's advantages to the client.

Some companies want to make their own decision, no matter what the developer has to offer. So it can't hurt to offer information for such people, just so they see, that processwire can easily be as good as some of the big ones (typo3 and so on). If there is no information stating: "This can be used for big enterprise sites", they just move another cms, which tells them to be the right and big business-cms. This doesn't have to be a big marketing campain, but one simple microsite, or a part of the already existing page should be enough.

The already existing "What's unique?" and "Why ProcessWire?" seem to be very much catered to be read by developers or quite techsavvy people. A marketing member doesn't care about jquery-like api, but if it's easy to maintain for them, if it's extendable, maybe if it's "enterprice", because it has to work for "such a big" company. Honestly I think some even just want to read that everything is possible, because a friend once told them a bad story where something just couldn't be done by the developer. So they want to be in control.

With one page, catered to their need in information in a well-written form, they can evaluate ProcessWire against other CMSes, if a developer aims for ProcessWire. If they need to search the page for the tiny bits of information they need, between the developer talk, they do harder to compare or even stop trying. That's what I think is missing on the current website. Nothing more.

[Nico Knoll]

Just thinking: Maybe you could even go further and create more then just the business microsite but something like "ProcessWire (features) for Developers", "ProcessWire (features) for Users", "ProcessWire (features) for Business" from which each is a microsite just highlighting the advantages.

[Joss]

The word "Enterprise" gets used, abused and misused widely, and it is no help to anyone.

To many developers/coders out there, Enterprise means it can scale up happily.

But to the business community, Enterprise means it has a support structure in place that is able to relate to the large organisation, that it has a stable, long term support version and so on.

I think if you release a business/enterprise version of anything, you must be in a position to speak to non-technical, business decision makers and be able to answer their needs 

I know from a cousin who is a decision maker in a large public company, that when they go for the Enterprise version of anything, it is not that they expect more bells and whistles than the community version, but they expect to be treated very differently. 

PW is not currently in the position to do that, unless someone can work out how to clone Ryan for free.  

[marcus]

So possibly "Enterprise CMS" is the wrong choice of words, since this term obviously has the notion of closed source Java monster or platinum 24/7 support. But that possible communicational opening towards decision makers (sub-large-public-company!) as well as developers, as mentioned by LostKobrakai, that's exactly what I meant. "How can PW help empowering my business website" vs. "Look no further - this CMS is able to even clean your company cars, daily!"

[Ole]

My thoughts are not about the naming and the keywords, but about the presentation and expanding the awareness of Processwire for the professional usage.
I know the problem, to explain all the time, why I use this unknown System Processwire...

Have you heard about the CMS Garden? (http://www.cms-garden.org/)
Its a Collaborative Booth of different CMS. Started on the CeBit, 2013 and visited various IT/Web exhibitions till now.

Actually is it a german project, but the concept (volunteers present their open source system to Business owners, Consultants and other professionals) were adopted in more Countrys after the big success in 2013.

Especially because of the strong german community it should be possible to realise this and it should be a great opportunity to promote PW.

[totoff]

I think the reason why most of us want to see PW as business CMS is, that we want to do the cool projects with a tool that is more flexible, capable, reliable as for example Typo 3 is. Right?

So, why is Typo 3 regarded as "enterprise cms" (at least in Germany) and PW is not (yet)? Imho simply because it was the first tool on the market that gave agencies (the cool ones, with big clients) a tool to work on elaborated websites. It was simply one of the first movers - and I personally believe, this is still its strongest asset. Very much more important than platinum support and all this kind of stuff. Decision makers buy it, because they know it - please correct me if I'm wrong.

So, what is the learning from this for marketing PW? I think it could be helpful to:

• Highlight solutions over features. Enterprise level sites already exist (ok, more or less) and we should look for a way to promote this solutions more
• Improve awareness in major agencies. They are the key multipliers for "selling" PW for big projects.
• Stay patient. PW has gained much attention in just some one or two years. It is on a good route. Very soon more and more bigger agencies will discover, what it can to for them ...

My thoughts are not about the naming and the keywords, but about the presentation and expanding the awareness of Processwire for the professional usage.

Finally, I can only second that. 

[pwired]

I agree also, Enterprise CMS is not the right description.

How about scalable from small to Enterprise business ?

[Martijn Geerts]

You could build with PW planboards, map applications, newsletter-tools, news-scapers, spiders, voting games, surveys etc etc. Calling PW an enterprise CMS is way to limited. 

[argos]

[Maybe a somewhat off-topic reply]

I would not call PW an Enterprise or Business CMS in this stage. I would not even call it an allround or general CMS at this stage. In my opinion it's purely a developers' CMS. I understand enough about the PW concept to understand why developers are psyched about it. It's a very promising concept indeed. I see it as a concept system, and not a real-world CMS yet. I know, I know, you can create real-world sites with it, but you have to be a developer. A real one, who can code, and can think very abstract. Someone who actually likes things to be abstract.

Fired by my initial enthousiasm some time ago, when I discovered PW, I spent quite time trying to get my head around this system. I failed. I read all relevant forum posts, and support info. But still I failed. I was able to create a simple semi-static site after a while. But I would not need PW for that. I can use Wordpress or WebsiteBaker or Joomla or whatever. I got very frustrated trying to build a basic blog-site, even with the help of the semi-ready blog module I got frustrated about the complexity of it all. I also got frustrated about everything being called a page. I know the reasoning behind it, yet I think it's a user unfriendly concept that is already enough to stop PW in its tracks when it comes to widespread use. There are many usability shortcomings in PW that make it unsuitable for general use, let alone Enterprise use. It's an infant system, when it comes to allround features, plugins, and usability.It will not appeal to many people except coders and devs. That's not enough to make more than a dent in the current CMS landscape. 

I am not a developer. I am an experienced website builder, and I think PW is way too abstract and too cumbersome for people like me. My clients would even fail to understand 90% of the low level PW stuff I know now. I simply could not offer this system to clients, even if I would understand it completely myself.

I keep an eye on PW, and I hope many of it's usability issues will be fixed in the coming years. Right now I use Joomla/K2 if I need a CMS with easy custom fields option. For a semi-static site I use WebsiteBaker, and for a typical straightforward blog either Joomla or (heaven forbid) Wordpress.

PW an Enterprise CMS? Only if all people who work with it are coders. And those chances are very low.

Sorry for the negativism, I'm still excited about PW, but it's not a suitable general or business CMS in the real world right now. I hope it will be someday.

[cstevensjr]

@argos, Everyone is entitled to their opinion.  Thanks for your comments.

[pwired]

I understand enough about the PW concept to understand why developers are psyched about it.

Love that line.

Argos, not being a developer, you are not the only one who got stuck in the way you described

when you started with PW. It happened to me and I have seen it happening with other starters

posting about it in the forum.

And you know why ?

If I look back now on when I first started with processwire, it is only for not having seen in the beginning

enough examples of how to rebuild, redesign, recode the template and css that comes with a standard

processwire installation => into another completely different new website.

You see, coming from wordpress, joomla, modx, etc. etc. etc, you are used to a certain way

of doing things, workflow, thinking, etc. With processwire you have to put most of that out of

your head and start looking at things differently with a new way of thinking. Not easy I admit.

That is because processwire gives you so much freedom to do things it becomes a blind spot

for a none developer where to start.

It is your very old way of cms thinking that makes you think everything in processwire is complex

and makes you frustrated.

It clearly shows how designers and none developers repeatedly try to draw processwire into

there old way of thinking with out of the box functionality, a template installer, plugins and more

of that happy 1 click add-on's. (Luckily without success so far)

Yes it is true that developers/coders have a great advantage here because they already have

a mindset to abstract and translate concepts easily into a template with code, css, js, etc.

Being experienced in php, css and js gives you a big head start when beginning with PW.

You can see it sometimes happen in this forum that talented coders not always communicate

well with none talented coders. Yes I am speaking for my self here But this forum stands out

with great freedom of speech and with people who go to great length to help and assist beginners.

But then again, you can't have it both ways: do it your way and do it the cms way.

With processwire there is not doing it the cms way but do it your way or any way.

What you wrote about pages is simply not true. Pages are easy for an administrator,

a designer, a coder AND an end user/client. It only depends on who is going to fill

pages with what data/setup/configs or content. The page concept is that flexible !

Once your beginners processwire blind spot goes away, you will never want to go back

to joomla, wordpress and cms alikes. I can't give you right now the examples I was writing

about. Try to find as much as you can in the forum like I did and you will see what I mean.

[Peter Falkenberg Brown]

Dear All,

If one defines "Enterprise" as an environment of mission-critical websites that make money for a corporation, then I am already using ProcessWire in that fashion.

My day job is as a Web Director for a New York magazine publisher that owns around fifty+ magazines. We have over 25 Linux and Windows servers, which I manage. I also write custom web database applications for the company, and recently wrote a "Web Help Ticket System" using ProcessWire. The ticket system receives its initial input via email, which gets piped to a PHP script, parsed, and then input into the ProcessWire help database. The script then emails the responses to various individuals that are in the database.

I've created a front-end staff interface, with usernames and passwords, that displays the tickets and allows editing, searching etc.

It's been running for a number of months, with tickets sent in from Editors, etc. So far, it's proven to be very robust.

This is just one example of what I would call an Enterprise level web application, built using ProcessWire as the CMF. Of course, someone else may define it differently.

I want to note that I had initially looked at Drupal for this purpose. I'm not yet a "Drupal developer" -- I just haven't spent enough time with it. But after spending *some* time with Drupal, and after seeing that many magazine sites that use Drupal seem over-heavy and bloated, I have to say that ProcessWire is lean and mean and fast and a complete joy to work with. It does have a learning curve, but I think it's less than Drupal's learning curve. (That would be a good survey.)

I say that because once you wrap your head around PW's method of one data table per field and its "virtual data tables" (aka templates or field sets), then it becomes a piece of cake to use the API and PHP as the template language. The sky's the limit in terms of ProcessWire's power and flexibility.

PW might seem arcane at first, but I don't really think it is, except for the table structure, and that ends up making sense after one digests it.

I also built a complex, formula-based business app with PW, at http://thepivotstartup.com (in the members section). It allows entrepreneurs to plug in numbers about their business ideas and vet them, to see if they might work in the real world.

Finally, I use ProcessWire as my own CMS, at http://significatojournal.com. My wife, who is a writer, but non-technical, does most of the article posting, using PW's admin back end. She finds it very simple to use. I don't need ProCache yet, but when I do, it seems to me to be a brilliant caching mechanism, since it dynamically writes each generated page to flat HTML files, and then uses clever .htaccess rules to serve them up.

Because of all of the above, I would recommend ProcessWire for mega websites, and in fact, if it was "my do", I would build and/or convert many of the magazine sites that I manage in my day job to ProcessWire. I'm completely confident that PW would do as good a job as WordPress and Drupal, which the company currently uses.

I believe that the reason that PW hasn't been adopted in the enterprise isn't support, but rather the lack of market share, mind-share, and enough usage for Big-Iron websites to prove to companies that they'll be safe using PW.

I don't think Enterprise support is really the issue. We had one CMS, called "Nstein" and another called "Ekron" that both had expensive support packages. We left both behind with great sighs of relief. We use Drupal, WordPress and DotNetNuke, without any support contracts. All that matters is the confidence that:

a) we can find developers who use it, and

b) there are enough examples of high-powered, high-volume, Big-Iron sites that use it successfully.

I think "B" is the real kicker. I read a Fast Company article about Drupal serving up hundreds of thousands of pages, and then recommended it to our VP. But, I wish PW had been around back then.

That's the PW challenge, I think. Convince some VERY high-level, well know companies to make huge, heavily trafficked websites with PW, and then other folks will say, "Hey! Look at that! Let's use ProcessWire!"

And then it shall be done.

Peter

[krems04]

That's the PW challenge, I think. Convince some VERY high-level, well know companies to make huge, heavily trafficked websites with PW, and then other folks will say, "Hey! Look at that! Let's use ProcessWire!"

And then it shall be done.

Peter

One of the best ways of doing that is to corner a niche market/region!

Also, convincing the very high level companies ...how? some "very high level" companies tend to tune you out once you dont present a Microsoft based solution. 

[marcus]

One of the best ways of doing that is to corner a niche market/region!

Also, convincing the very high level companies ...how? some "very high level" companies tend to tune you out once you dont present a Microsoft based solution. 

I think, "companies" are in this case web agencies. And they tend to lean towards everything Mac and are the ones to convince. I'll try to namedrop and showcase ProcessWire from time to time when I'm working for my web agency customer

[Pete]

@argos - there are many, many people who have learned it and understood it here that did not consider themselves programmers to begin with, so I think it all depends on every person's ability to grasp new concepts or languages and as human beings we'll all have different experiences there.

However saying all of those things in your posts because you personally didn't get into it seems a little unfair. It's not for people who want to plug it in and go - it's for people who want to learn at least some of the basics of web development.

As you say there are plenty of other systems out there for various needs, but just last night with a few choice fieldtypes and a bunch of templates I built the structure of a site that would have either been impossible in another CMS or taken me weeks of wrestling/coding. It took me 3 hours and not a single line of code was touched and the end result is a really nice page structure with intuitive templates for entering the data.

The code will come in the frontend templates, but the backend is all the client should ever have to worry about.

I would be very interested to know what could be done to improve the many documents and tutorials to better help people getting stuck, but I very much doubt the coding aspect can be made any simpler - it's already simpler than working with databases directly, so I can only imagine more tutorials might be the answer?

[totoff]

I know, I know, you can create real-world sites with it, but you have to be a developer.

Hey, this is a piece of wood, but you have to be a carpenter to build a table from it ...

So what?

I think argos' comment puts a spotlight on how the CMS market divides into two sections: one for - more or less - out-of-the-box solutions and one for more elaborated pieces of work, which require some skills. There is nothing wrong with the demand for out-of-the-box solutions, but PW definitely addresses another market segment. Why should this be wrong or change?

[pwired]

so I can only imagine more tutorials might be the answer?

After installing processwire, showing the steps how to turn the default template with nav, .inc, php tags and css

into a completeley different new website will certainly bridge beginners with the processwire concept.

I think argos' comment puts a spotlight on how the CMS market divides into two sections: one for - more or less - out-of-the-box solutions and one for more elaborated pieces of work, which require some skills.

It´s the ever going on division between designers/none coders and coders.

Not only here, you can see this phenomena in many other cms forums.

[enricob]

I also got frustrated about everything being called a page. I know the reasoning behind it, yet I think it's a user unfriendly concept that is already enough to stop PW in its tracks when it comes to widespread use.

@argos I know the fact that "everything is a page" can be weird at the beginning (it takes me a few hours of experimenting to get confortable with this concept ), but I can confirm for my experience that this is really a great solution, both from a developer and and from a customer point of view, better than any other cms I tried (and I tried many, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, ...)

I started to love the idea when I was starting to solve some problems in PW, and I always ended up (even after a lot of time thinking) saying "well I just have to use pages!".

Just to give some examples:

Problem: put some settings on a site level that can be manageable from the customer, ie a common footer text, a common image banner, and so on.

Solution: You just have to create a new Settings template, put some fields in it, create a page with this template, fill in the fields and you're done!

Problem: Create a categories system

Solution: You create a category template, with the field you need (title, image, ...), you create some pages that uses these template, then, to link a category to a page, you only have to define a Page type field for the template that this page uses, fill in the value, and you're done!

In both cases (in fact almost all other cases) from the template files (php) you can get the field values very easily using the api.

The fact is: once you understand the "page" concept, you can solve almost any problem you can think of, and even very quickly.

[mr-fan]

The former CMS from argos (and me) was a long time ago (around 20006-2012) full with out-of-the-box addons and snippets...many addondevelopers and so on.

I used a lot of them - and hanging today on various older installations with the more or less "messed" code (actual example is the funny old continue(0); that kills some addons on PHP 5.4)

I'm sick in using many many addons from many different sources.

I'm sick of changing the given HTML Output of the addons to fit my Frontend.

I'm sick of having 10xx template .htt's that serves me some Output (one from the Galleryaddon, one from the formaddon, one from the...)

i'm a PHP "beginner" since a couple of years because if to less time to take a real step forward.....and in my opinion i'm a beginner until i am a beginner until i learn new things....so i always wanna be a beginner

"Pages" is real the big issue to catch if you come from a other cms - and to setup the backend, too......but with the userroles and some other helpers it's a breeze!

the "abstraction" with processwire is the best of the best....because it's much more easier than taking the head in a database abstraction!!

every website setup could worked out exact for the needs of the user/client....and simple upgraded.

to have some "skills" required for a system is not the badest thing - to keep out users that only demand everything (in the os world) for free and asap - the new tutorial pages are great and if my english would be better i'd love to write some...

For the enterprise topic here - maybe it would be realy nice to show up some Apps that are build with PW like geowire.org!

I'd love the showcase!! (there are some real big projects in it) and read all the casestudies

https://processwire.com/talk/forum/16-case-studies/

something like this for some real "enterprise" projects - wouldn't this be the best advertice?

and the "wording" enterprise has no good title in the OpenSource world because you can simple switch a letter and get enterprice