Help getting started in ProcessWire

[Oceanus.R337]

I'm just getting started with ProcessWire, but have past experience on other platforms (mainly WordPress). 

I'm interested to know: If I wanted to contruct a site that looks like Robert Reich's what are the top three things I need to learn/ know/ understand/ consider? 

Thanks in advance -- looking forward to the learning --

[pwired]

Start digging the forum categories in community support for an hour,

I am sure your questions will be different by then.

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/4173-grouped-forum-posts-links-articles-tutorials-code-snippets/

Glad you could make it to processwire the cms/cmf/cme

that just works how it should be.

If I wanted to contruct a site that looks like Robert Reich's

You need a css framework to place all the different parts of that website

in the positions as you see them there. I recommend pocketgrid, a huge

timesaver.   http://arnaudleray.github.io/pocketgrid/docs/

[marcus]

I'm just getting started with ProcessWire, but have past experience on other platforms (mainly WordPress). 

I'm interested to know: If I wanted to contruct a site that looks like Robert Reich's what are the top three things I need to learn/ know/ understand/ consider? 

Thanks in advance -- looking forward to the learning --

Generally speaking and in addition to pwireds post, three more "philosphical" points to start:

• Look at the HTML you want to achieve (its semantics, its structure) without having any particular CMS in mind. Keep in mind that you possibly replace everything with field output (as in: for the template file, you could as many fields as you want to make all the desired parts of the site/page "moving parts", editable parts).
• Check for repetitive things (in your example for example blog posts, books, tv appearances, videos)
• Seek potential data relationships (in your example not that important) and have to keep in mind, that ProcessWire way of organizing content is basically one big tree, with all advantages of this approach (for example pools of blogposts, of books, of videos...)

[diogo]

Think of that home page as an aggregate of several pages on a "normal" website: In that case you would have something like this on the processwire tree:

Home
    My work
        Aftershock
        Beyond Outrage
        ....
    Television appearances
        Colbert report, nov 2013
        Daily Show, sep 2013
        ...
    Posts
        Raising Most People’s Wages
        Why Ordinary People...
        ...
    etc

Then, with the API, you can easily target those parent pages and display their children in your HTML structure.

what are the top three things I need to learn/ know/ understand/ consider?

You need to know how to structure templates, fields and pages and learn the API

You need to understand that in PW everything are pages, and pages are not necessarily representations of "viewable website pages"

Consider going through the tutorials here http://processwire.com/docs/

You need a css framework to place all the different parts of that website

Ahem! You don't need a framework to do something as simple as three columns. You can of course, but you don't have to.

And welcome to the forums

[pwired]

He said "I'm just getting started with ProcessWire"

usually starters don´t know css plus responsive,

that´s why I came up with a css grid (pocketgrid)

Besides I don´t think in that website everything is

simply stacked on top of each other vertically.

[jordanlev]

The Robert Reich site you linked to is a straight-up blog, which is the kind of site perfectly suited to wordpress. You can absolutely build a site like that in ProcessWire too though (as well as sites that are less blog-y ... which is where a system like ProcessWire will really shine because it won't lock you into a blog-like page structure).

I would say the big difference between wordpress and processwire is that wordpress has some assumptions baked into it... it assumes that most pages on your site are blog posts, it assumes you have 1 primary area for content per page and then some miscellaneous "widgets" that appear on every page (in the sidebar, for example), and it assumes that your templates have a header, footer, and a few different types of "interiors" (post, page, etc).

The thing about processwire is that it imposes very few of these kinds of assumptions on you. Really the only assumptions it makes is that you have pages of various different "types" (different types could be different visual layouts and/or different pieces of content). So you don't just have "posts" and "pages"... you can have whatever you want. Another big difference is wordpress's assumption that there is 1 primary piece of content per page... in processwire there is absolutely NO assumption about what content lives on each page (except for 1: every page must have a "title").

If you have ever used the wordpress plugin "Advanced Custom Fields", then you can kinda-sorta think of processwire as an entire CMS based around the ACF mindset.

SO... to recreate that Robert Reich site, you would have a "blog_post" template, a "home" template, and an "archive" template. The "home" template is only used on 1 page (the home page), and the "archive" template is only used on 1 page (the archives page). The "blog_post" template is used by all other pages. In terms of the page structure (like the sitemap tree), you'd probably have the home page at the top, and "posts" page underneath (which could serve as the "archive" page and also a parent page for all blog posts). The home page template would have the following fields:

• bio (textarea w/ CKEditor)
• books (Repeater field)
• TV Appearances (Repeater field)
• Movie (video)
• Slideshow (some kind of slideshow field, or an image field with your own front-end slideshow javascript code)
• videos (repeater)

The home page template would output all these fields in the appropriate places, and then in the middle of the layout it would use ProcessWire's "query" to display the 10 most-recent posts.

For the "archives" page, you also use PW's query API to retrieve ALL posts, and in your php code you can segment them by month/year.

For the blog post pages themselves, you have a "body" field for the primary content (a textarea with CKEditor).

Note that the stuff on the left and right sidebars of the home page actually appear across all pages... so these are more like "global content" areas or "snippets" or "widgets"... I'm relatively new to ProcessWire myself so I'm unsure what the best way to achieve re-usability of these is (hopefully someone else can chime in about that... perhaps creating a dummy page in the sitemap that holds these and then the template retrieves the fields of that dummy page and outputs them?).

There's also an RSS feed page and a 404 page template you'll want... you can copy these from the default site profiles that PW gives you upon installation.

So that's a high-level overview (from someone who is relatively new to ProcessWire, which is probably both good and bad in terms of explaining things

Let us know how it goes!

[diogo]

(except for 1: every page must have a "title")

And this can be easily removed. Any field can be or not required, title just comes as default.

[kongondo]

Yes...the correct position is every page must have a "name"

[Oceanus.R337]

Thank you all very much -- ProcessWire looks like it will be fun to learn. I have become too overly-reliant on WordPress as easy-to-implement, but leading to limitations on my ability to personalize a site such that it looks like something other than a typical WordPress site. Same experience on Blogger. Also tried Drupal & Joomla, both of which required too much overhead for what I have to communicate. 

I appreciate everyone's helpfulness. I hope to be very active on this forum. I'm a military veteran, and want to build a professional but personable web site that will serve as a platform for me to provide peer support to other veterans who need help. Goes without saying that I don't want to compete with the VA on a compendium of everything veteran-related, but straightforward content organization is (I think) going to be very important. I also don't want to spend more time on web site administration than I do on actual assistance to others.