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From TextPattern to ProcessWire...


douglas81
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Hi,

I just completed my first site design in ProcessWire...

http://miraopalinska.com

post-2558-0-14331800-1410947540_thumb.jp

I'm more of a designer than a coder (and had never coded a single line of PHP) so the learning curve was a little bit steep at first, but the patterns started emerging and the consistent way in which Ryan has set up ProcessWire made things a lot easier.

I've been using TextPattern extensively, but was starting to find it a little bit clunky for my needs. ProcessWire, without wanting to slam TextPattern, is on a different level. One of the best things? This forum. It seems that absolutely ANYTHING I had a problem with, a search in Google brought me to this forum and an answer. That's a big difference from TextPattern (well, any other CMS to be honest). This forum is a condensed mine of information. So... thank-you everyone here!

This was also my first multi-language site, and ProcessWire has that sorted too in a very intuitive, very integrated way.

I'm still having a few problems here and there (CKEditor is acting a bit weird, for example), but I'm sure I'll be able to iron them out.

Mira's finding it really easy to update and add content. I was able to make the client side really clean and fuss-free. Something that was hard to do in TextPattern (and is a total utter nightmare in WordPress).

Installation was pretty basic, using the default admin theme.

I used the following modules...

CKEditor

ImgMinSize

Image cropping tool

Video embed for YouTube/Vimeo

Multi-language

Repeater

Everything else accomplished with a mix of Javascript and PHP.

Thanks again, particularly Ryan. I'm pretty confident I'll be using ProcessWire for all CMS needs from now on.

Douglas.

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Thanks guys! You see, just what I said... amazing forum and great community! Always active and always encouraging and I'm looking forward to being part of it.

@netcarver | yeah, I can't imagine using textpattern again. But I will always have a soft spot for it.

@pwired | ooh, sounds interesting. It was quite easy to get the language switcher working though, thanks to a pretty useful forum post. The tricky bit was getting the date/time to change language too.

@kongondo | Thanks! I'm really happy with the look. Fuji X doing the business with the photos also :)

I guess I should clarify, this new PW site brought the content across from TextPattern, but the design is completely new, so it's not really a conversion as such.

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I have read somewhere about a migrator. Not sure can not find it right now

but sure somebody here can. If not will post back. I have seen that header.inc

and footer.inc have been disappeared so maybe something will have changed

when upgrading from older version. Anyway 2.5 is the best ever.

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I have read somewhere about a migrator. Not sure can not find it right now

but sure somebody here can. If not will post back. I have seen that header.inc

and footer.inc have been disappeared so maybe something will have changed

when upgrading from older version. Anyway 2.5 is the best ever.

Upgrading now, so we'll see how it goes...

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As for the moment I'm posting this the URL miraopalinska.com only shows the directory index of the host. There ain't no index.php thus the site doesn't get rendered. You should immediately look after it, as this is a major security issue.

EDIT: Generally you should avoid directory listing. Here is how to: http://www.ducea.com/2006/06/26/apache-tips-tricks-disable-directory-indexes/

If you are in a shared hosting environment you may want to contact your hosting company to switch off directory listing.

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As for the moment I'm posting this the URL miraopalinska.com only shows the directory index of the host. There ain't no index.php thus the site doesn't get rendered. You should immediately look after it, as this is a major vulnerability.

I was just upgrading to PW 2.5, I guess the index.php was deleted for a while there. Upgraded to 2.5 now and everything back to normal.

As an aside... what was the vulnerability of seeing those folders?

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As an aside... what was the vulnerability of seeing those folders?

Anyone can have access to the code in .inc files, and while not possible to read the php files, anyone could just look for them and chose which ones to execute.

Edit: I sent you a PM before telling you this, but I guess you didn't see it :)

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Back to topic  :) : A lovely site! Me myself I'm a former Textpattern user and will always be thankful to it, because Textpattern introduced me to the freedom writing you own markup gives you. If you stay with PW you'll meet other fellow Texpattern users here.

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What would you advise as the best thing to do while upgrading to a new PW version? Maybe put in a holding index file while the new files are being uploaded?

I'm not an expert either, but would think that you are safe with directory listing switched off. 

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Beautiful site, by the way. I just don't understand why you have the menu hidden in the inner pages. I understand why in the homepage, but not the inner.

@totoff | Thanks for that link. What would you advise as the best thing to do while upgrading to a new PW version? Maybe put in a holding index file while the new files are being uploaded?

One way is to upload the new index file with a different name, and once it is uploaded, change the names. Another way is to open the index file and paste the contents of the new index there.

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One last thing: I first tried to click on the tagline Mira Opalinska / Pianist to enter the side. Why not linking it to /about/? The same is true vice versa: there is no other way to return to /home/ than to open the menu as her name in the upper left corner is not linked.

You should definitely feature your work in the showcase section of the forum.

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Beautiful site, by the way. I just don't understand why you have the menu hidden in the inner pages. I understand why in the homepage, but not the inner.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I guess I just like the cleanliness of having a page with as little on it as possible apart from the content. I sort of go back-and-forward in my mind. Somehow I started finding a menu at the top of every page obnoxious... sort of like if you had a TOC at the top of every page of a book. But I know what you're saying. It would be a trivial enough matter to have it be open by default, but leave the option there to close it.

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One last thing: I first tried to click on the tagline Mira Opalinska / Pianist to enter the side. Why not linking it to /about/? The same is true vice versa: there is no other way to return to /home/ than to open the menu as her name in the upper left corner is not linked.

You should definitely feature your work in the showcase section of the forum.

Yes, you're right. The returning home thing, actually clicking on "mira opalinska" on the menu or as it appears on the top left of a page... that should take you home. I think I've accidentally removed that link yesterday.

As for clicking on the tagline on the home-page. Yeah, I thought about it. But I guess I wanted to make sure user's saw and used the menu, to become familiar with it straight away, also see that you can choose a different language, and also be free to choose where they go first, rather than straight to the about page. That was my thinking anyway, but I totally see what you're saying.

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Don't get me wrong, I love the site. And in my site I also have the menu hidden in every page. I your case I wouldn't have the red menu open, that would be too heavy for the inner pages, but I would consider having it in black on white. I'm sure you tried some variations, and I'm just here giving my immediate opinion. It's great as it is any way.

Minor thing: when the menu slides down the letters fade in before the animation completes, you might consider making that fading later or slower.

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I'll have a think about the menu. hidden/sliding vs. non-hidden is something I'm always swaying back and forward between. I guess I was also considering that eventually there may be more links in there... concerts, media, projects... so if there is a permenant menu, I didn't want that to be cluttering up the head of the page.

Yeah, I'll experiment with the timing of the animations. I wasn't particularly viewing it as "text fades on top of the sliding menu", as two separate things. But I see that it could be nicer to have the red slide in first. To be honest, I was just happy to get the functionality to work, eventually, smoothly and across the myriad of devices. Ended up using Velocity.js which is really fantastic library. Very flexible.

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