ProcessWire is my goto CMS for any web project. Its extreme flexibility allows me to attack both simple and complex projects confident that it will handle anything that I might throw in.
This CMS is primarily aimed at developers, but the learning curve is surprisingly low and even a designer with basic knowledge of front end technologies can quickly grasp the basic concepts.
The backoffice is friendly for editors and can be streamed down to the bare minimum functionalities needed for each project.
@sandeepperiwal I think what makes ProcessWire special is the balance between power and learning curve.
You will quickly understand how to build an easy website, but as you ask for more and more from the system, you realize that it can provide everything that you need at any point. There are amazingly complex websites out there built on top of ProcessWire. ProcessWire is actually a PHP framework with a CMS built on top of it, and all the tools used to built the CMS are also available for you to build your websites. A factor that contributes for this, is that ProcessWire doesn't use a template engine, instead, you write all your code using pure PHP and the API that is inspired by jQuery ( $page->title or $pages->find("template=skyscraper, year<1950, floors>=10, sort=-year, sort=-floors") ). As you can imagine, like this the only limit for what you can do is your own knowledge of PHP.
Another impressive feature is how customisable the backend is. The defaults are very sensible and editing a website will be very friendly for any person that is not used to CMSs, as long as you have a well structured website. But when you start exploring all the aspects that you can customize, you realise how incredibly well thought this system is (kudos to Ryan). You can give the editors the exact experience that you want them to have, and you can achieve this by limiting the templates that they can edit, by limiting the pages that they can see, by adapting each field on a template or user basis, by making the visibility of fields depend on the content of others, by creating completely custom admin pages using the amazingly simple plugin system... I could go on and on. Also of course, all fields are custom, which helps a lot when streamlining things.
One important factor is security. This is something that ProcessWire takes obsessively. Everything is thought to make any ProcessWire core install absolutely secure. And because of it's flexibility the system relies less in third party modules, which makes it even safer. It's also important to note that all the modules submitted to the directory are subject to a quality check by the ProcessWire team.
Sorry for the long rambling, but your question was not that specific. I'm sure I even forgot to mention many other things ;)
@lynnfredricks Hi Lynn - it is completely different. I was attracted to Processwire having used Joomla with a CCK (Seblod). I was fed up that when I created fields for content, they were output with tons of useless html markup that I simply did not want.
Processwire, on the other hand, pulls the data from the database clean. For instance, if you create a field called "my name" then you recall the field into your template files as $page->my_name. All you get is the data.
More importantly, when it comes to creating the look & feel of your site, you do not have to work with some twisted templating system, but just write HTML, JS and CSS in exactly the same way as you would write a static site.
This makes it unbelievably powerful. You do not need to hunt for PW plugins for slideshows or whatever, because you can just grab any JQuery or whatever plugin out there and use that, or write your own. You can use any CSS framework, or none - up to you.
You do need to know basic PHP (really basic), but that is about all.
On consequence, the final site is much lighter weight, much more secure, much faster and completely within your control.
So, it is not article management system like Joomla or Wordpress, it is a proper CMS.
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