Attention : Cet espace est un site d'apprentissage. Ne vous préoccupez pas des erreurs et dysfonctionnements temporaires sur ces pages. Nous sommes en train de faire des tests. :)
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The ProcessWire adventure (continued)

Let me explain ;)

When it comes to creating websites, whether it's a small project like a four-page personal site, or a large one like that of the French Ministry of Defense, there have always been people who code them and put them online so that they appear as you see them.

Simply put, we have the amateurs and the professionals.

If these days absolutely anyone can build and put online a "small" website without really worrying about how it works, there are people who have lined up the lines of code so that with one click you can add a photo or with another, without moving from your chair, you can visit the skyscrapers of New York and find out which is the tallest, its size, the year it was built and the name of its owner.

Yes, yes, it does exist. :)

Stay where you are and type https://demo.processwire.com/ on your smartphone, tablet or computer.

Well, this miracle was performed by a friend of ours, using the tools of the free ProcessWire platform - exactly the same tools I used to create the pages you're reading.

To put it simply, there are two kinds of enthusiasts on this platform.

People like me, more or less gifted but amateurs all the same, who come looking for a free but quality CMS, and "coders" (or developers) who earn their living with this job and are far more competent than the first category.


The miracle is that both sides get along, even if, for the record, the former feel a little scorned by the latter, but love them all the same, because they're often a great help when a formula escapes them or their site breaks down. Lol!

The coders are a little annoyed at the arrival of this horde of ignoramuses who waste their time with their sometimes stupid questions, while the others are happy to have free advisers who often help them out with their programs, or even offer them ready-made scripts free of charge.

We note in passing that the coding grunts have a heart, but what I'm getting at with this story is that the PROs (or initiates) will more readily help an actor who comes to learn than a profiteer who only comes to plunder.

There you have it. :)

It was with this in mind that I became interested in ProcessWire, because, while I was looking for a free, high-performance CMS like the others, I also and above all wanted a place and a community that would accept my incompetence and help me move forward in learning programming. I'll tell you why.

For as long as I've been building websites and putting them online, I've come across thousands of CMS.

The trouble is, no matter how good they are, they always lack the function we need, and we don't know enough PHP to add it ourselves. It's about time I started ;)

Barely a week ago, I knew nothing about this platform and today, on December 24, 2023, I'm giving you this site developed with PW (ProcessWire) tools.

It's my Christmas present to you. :)

To be continued...

If you'd like to know more about this adventure and be notified when the next chapter is published, just ask.
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Chapter 2

Before getting down to the nitty-gritty, I'd like to give a few useful details to all you apprentice coders out there, i.e. those of us who are used to working with the Content Management Systems (CMS) favored by budding webmasters who, while they [sometimes] have a few basics in HTML/PHP/JavaScript etc., aren't capable of displaying "Hello World!" in PHP on their home page without asking Google to find the magic formula for them. Lol!

They're like me [in the past] copy and paste enthusiasts, and it's going to have to stop. :)

Dear friends, even after my praise for PW (ProcessWire's pet name) and my assertion that even those who don't want to learn to code, or at least go further in their meagre respective knowledge (which we respect), can use the CMS part, you need to think hard to make it your own.

In fact, unlike other CMS created for the computer-illiterate and to make things easier for them, this one is designed for development on a whole new level, with data cross-referenced to build tools that will code applications.

For example, inserting an image into a page is very, very easy, and everyone knows how to do it, but moving 15,000 different themes of equivalent width, sorted by date, author and commercial value, to present a collection on a world tour exhibiting in the Americas, Guatemala and all the countries where Spanish is spoken, is already more complicated, and PW, as it's called, has provided the tools in your copy of the software to perform this miracle.

Provided you know how to use them. :)

That's where its creator is brilliant, because he's built the system so that it's easy to understand by those in the trade, but also accessible to the less skilled of my kind, provided I put in the work and start by reading the documentation, which I generally hate to do.

After that, I'll have to learn PHP and other programming languages, which I also hate, learn humility and perfect my English, because that's how the enthusiasts on our forums communicate.

I'm also going to have to learn patience, because when we hackers test programs, including CMS, we have to get it right the first time and understand it quickly, very quickly, otherwise we'll delete it and go and try another one.

Yes, that's how it works with webmasters, and for the beginner, ProcessWire demands exactly the opposite of what I wanted to do up until now.

So, my friend, now's the time to decide whether or not you want to try it out, because you're going to find a simple thing complicated, and if you're not familiar with it, you certainly don't want to dabble in the promises of programming, even a little, because it's your life you're committing, and I'm only exaggerating a little. It's really about passion. :)

To be realistic, if it's just a CMS you're looking for, the learning curve is lighter elsewhere (although...) but you'll never get the chance to build your own program and will have to work with other people's imperfect ones.

But if you're tempted to give it a try, if only out of curiosity, download, install, read through the documentation even if you don't understand everything (you'd be more than a genius), and ask questions on the forums when you stall.

By then, you'll have read a good part of the conversations, found the points that interest you, started to understand what you didn't know, and in no time at all, you'll be writing your first article, as I'm doing now.

And in this first article, it was quite natural for me to talk about ProcessWire, Ryan, its creator, my friends already on the forums, my difficulties in understanding this CMS-CMF and I even talk about you. :)

Well, now, enough about us and let's...

A tour of the owner.


At first glance, ProcessWire looks just as it sounds in its presentation, which reflects the developers' love for things well done, and its extensive documentation shows that it's serious business. And once you've tried it, you'll be amazed at the work that's been done for over 10 years.

And that's not all ;)

Once you've had a look around and understood the system, downloaded it, tested it and seen what it's all about, spend some time on the blog and you'll understand a lot of things that I'll leave you to discover.

What you'll notice most of all is the way Ryan (the main creator/developer of the thing) talks, writes, communicates, convinces and you get the impression that he's already your friend. I spend hours on these pages.

You'll find him on the forums, where they talk like a family about programming, code, PHP, Pascal, JavaScript and other things I've never heard of before, and for the first time in my life (I'm 72), I not only don't get bored, I [often] understand what they're saying. Curious, isn't it?)

Politeness and respect are de rigueur even with incompetents, who sometimes make us tense in any case, and the first time I was there I felt very small. Lol!

To give you an idea of the atmosphere, one of them wrote to an embarrassed beginner that there would always be an answer, which is quite rare on forums of this kind. I know because I frequent them. Hi! Hi! Hi!

Otherwise, on the site, click on the links in the main menu and go to the download section to see the different CMS Profiles (we'll explain), the Templates, the Modules (called Plugins elsewhere), the showcase of sites and applications created and developed with ProcessWire, the store and the very dense documentation that will keep you busy over the coming months.

With all this, you'll quickly get lost, but don't worry, that's normal. The concept takes time to sink in.

The phrase we hear most often in the ProcessWire environment is...

The phrase we hear most often in the ProcessWire environment is...

You've got to start, and you'll learn as you go.On the job.

I could talk about this for hours, but we're going to get down to the nitty-gritty right away, and I'm going to tell you all about my first few days, and especially about how PW got me used to it, and not (at least for the moment) the other way around. :-D

I'm going to save you a lot of time by teaching you a couple of things you wouldn't have guessed until much later, and that's a shame because the key to understanding ProcessWire CMS-CMF lies in the fact that this tool isn't what you came for.

Unless you're a seasoned coder/developer who's heard about the thing from your peers and come to try out this much-talked-about CMF, you've arrived because you've read about an improved CMF that makes it easy to build your own programs, and it's only natural that it should have attracted you because you're enterprising, courageous, and learning something new suits you. :)


So, like me, you're going to jump on the CMS part, quickly go through it because there isn't really much to it, complain a bit because you can't find the plugins, the source code as you're used to, the usual reflexes common to most content management systems (CMS) and "think" as if you were trying something new.

This is where we make our first mistake.

We could say that the PW CMS is just a base, a skeleton, and that all the tools to build the elements assembled to do what you want (a tool made available to local people to calculate property tax, for example), you're the one who's going to create them.

Fortunately, there are others who have gone before you, and you'll have plenty of programs already coded at your disposal, not only to build the beginnings of a site, but also to use as examples, if only to understand or plagiarize them.

But if you're a beginner, don't worry, this won't happen just yet ;)

So, you're going to think that you're not (for the moment) building a website, but that you're working on understanding how the whole thing works and what you're going to do with it.

Like me, you won't be able to resist the temptation to follow the tutorials to understand what a "Profile", a "Page", a "Template" and so on is, until you're completely lost in realizing the power of the thing and you'll fall in love with it before you've even managed to install your first module.

Speaking of modules, or plugins as they're known in other countries, you'll be a little disappointed, because when you see the quality of the work you've already done, you (already) believe that the place is perfect, and it's not unusual for modules taken from the modulothèque (as I call it) to crash your environment, wiping out in a second the five days' work you've spent to get there.

It was the first module I installed that got me for the first time. Now, I don't install anything without testing it.

You'll have your story too, so before you try something new on your beautiful installation that took you so long, go and test it on another "sandbox" installation that you've planned for it.


Monday, January 8, 2024

My head is spinning.

I'm 100% invested (and even a bit more) in what I'm doing, and between my current sweet tooth and the replies from the guys on the forums who give me pointers on what I don't know how to do, I'm a bit like Windows when two pieces of software are working at the same time.I'm suffocating ;)

Between installing multi-language, creating a new article alert system when I add a chapter and other nice things I want to install, I've got work to do for a hundred years.

To be continued...