ProcessWire Weekly #588

Latest core updates

There haven't been any new updates to the core this week, but since in our previous issue we focused solely on the newly redesigned ProcessWire website, there are some earlier core updates — from 3rd to 8th of August, to be more specific — that we kind of forgot to mention. So here's a brief summary of what's new in the core as of the beginning of this month:

• A fix for an issue in FieldtypeMulti, the base class for multi-value fieldtypes, which caused $page->field_name("limit=0") to return a pagination rather than all results.
• Some minor fixes and improvements to the new Konkat admin theme style.
• Support for configurable HTML5 autocomplete attribute for InputfieldText when used in the admin page editor. Options made available for this attribute include empty (default), "on", "off", "email", "tel", "given-name", "family-name", "name", "street-address", "username", and "one-time-code".
• Email inputfield also has support for the autocomplete attribute, but only for the values that make sense in that context: empty, "on", "off", and "email".

That's all for our core updates section for this week. For more details, feel free to check out the dev branch commit log at GitHub. Thanks!

A few notes on the ProcessWire website redesign

The newly redesigned ProcessWire website, which we introduced in our previous weekly issue (and which Ryan also covered in more detail in his last week's blog post) has now been live for just about a week. During this time we've already seen various updates, including fixes for bugs reported by the community — big thanks for reporting those!

In this issue we wanted to group together a few points from Ryan and the designers of the site, Diogo and Jan, to perhaps explain a bit the thought process behind some of the decisions made during this project. Of course if you have any suggestions — or questions for that matter — you can still submit them e.g. via the support forum.

The home page

The home page has received a few comments, which is not much of a surprise, really. It is a pretty big change from what we used to have, as well as one of the boldest parts of the newly launched website.

In order to provide a better idea of what we intended to do with this page, here's what Ryan had to say about the primary target audience of our home page:

It's for people that are not yet familiar with ProcessWire or just learning about it. Some will be developers, some won't.

[...]

ProcessWire has always communicated well to developers and they typically aren't the ones that need to be convinced. We always connect with the developers. But the decision makers are more often the clients, designers, marketers, etc. They are the ones that we hope to increase visibility to.

— Ryan

And regarding the use of strong visuals and animation:

The animations are there to communicate ProcessWire concepts in a memorable way, for people that don't already know these things about ProcessWire. [...] So if you don't like animations, don't worry because we aren't adding them elsewhere in the site, but they are an important part of what the homepage is there to communicate.

[...]

I see so many sites, and I like to look through the lens of how memorable it is. Like whether there's anything strongly unique or surprising that makes me want to click further inside, and hooks into my memory so that I can recall it later.

— Ryan

In other words: our home page is intentionally big, bold, animated, and — hopefully! —memorable. Being a bit much is not a bug — it's a feature. The rest of the site, such as docs section, have a different target group and different voice; this is also intentional!

The terminology: CMS vs. CMF

This has been discussed as well, and I felt it was worth addressing, because it's quite closely related to the previous point about the target group of the website: why do we have a page labeled "The CMS", even though many (or even most) of us would say that ProcessWire is so much more than just that?

I prefer to stick with the term CMS and guide folks into the CMF side of things, since the term isn't so widely known/used. Though I'll continue to use it, just not front and center.

— Ryan

Continuing very much on the same line of thought, a quote from one of the designers behind the project, Diogo Oliveira:

One aspect that we discussed, and that I don't think Ryan mentioned, is that Jan and I had several clients express concern about the tool after visiting the previous website. PW has some recognition among developers, but zero recognition among non technical potential clients, who we need to accept PW as our CMS suggestion. That's also one of the reasons of having "CMS" and not "CMS/CMF" front and center.

[...]

Also notice that I carefully worded that sentence to convey that this is only one of the aspects that we discussed. It doesn't mean that it was the most important one and it doesn't mean we discarded other targets. We still think the site will convince developers to go deeper and discover PW.

— Diogo

So, the intention is not to hide that ProcessWire is a content management system as well as a content management framework, but rather communicate plainly what it is primarily about. And that is content management.

Personally I tend to think that those familiar with the proper, nuanced terminology will easily grasp that ProcessWire is both a CMS and a CMF, while those who don't are quite likely to struggle with fancy terminology.

Communication is best when kept simple.

Design is about decisions

Design always involves decisions, and not everyone will understand or agree with every decision that was made. That being said, another designer involved in the project, Jan Ploch, made some very good points regarding this topic in particular:

However, it is important to me to say that there are reasons for our design decisions and that they were not made arbitrarily.

[...]

The overarching theme of the design is “friendly flexibility.” All design decisions were made to emphasize this theme and find a consistent visual language. With the new design, we want to appear less technical and also include user groups other than developers, such as designers, marketers, and editors/content creators. At the same time, we want to differentiate ourselves from other comparable CMS products and highlight PW's uniqueness.

— Jan

These were just some of the topics covered at the support forum, so pay a bisit to the topic in which the new site was announced if you'd like to check them out in detail or take part in the dialogue. As always in our community, all opinions are welcome and appreciated!

Site of the week: Lifestyle Group

Our latest site of the week belongs to Lifestyle Group, one of the leading manufacturers of jewelry, watches, accessories, and components in Europe. Based in Munich, the company was founded back in 1988, and they produce products for both international customers, as well as for their own brands, which include Monomania and LS Watches.

The Lifestyle Group website was created by typneun Desigagentur. It is a very nicely designed multilingual site with a straightforward yet playful layout combined with well-thought-out typography and a strong visual identity. Content wise this site is focused on introducing the company and their products, while more details about the production are split into a sister site, Lifestyle Factory.

As for behind the scenes details, one thing that sets this project apart is exactly that dual nature; it is actually a set of two sites, Lifestyle Group and Lifestyle Factory, that share the same backend — in other words it's a multisite. Meanwhile, the front-end of this site is based on what appears to be custom, in-house front-end framework of sorts, and there are no familiar third party ProcessWire modules visible on this site.

Our congratulations to the client, Lifestyle Group, as well as the team behind this project at typneun Designagentur for a job well done!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 588th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 23rd of August. As always, ProcessWire newsletter subscribers will get our updates a few days later.

Thanks for staying with us, once again. Hope you've had a great and productive week, and don't forget to check out the ProcessWire forums for more interesting topics. Until next week, happy hacking with ProcessWire!