Website Upgrade

A few months ago I decided to upgrade my website a bit. I wanted to move away from clunky static page generators, gain platform independence, and overall just simplify the process of updating my web presence. Of course, as an avid fan of static web pages, I was initially reluctant to do so. However, common sense prevailed, and the search for the right solution began.

As of writing of this note I've been working as freelance webmaster for more than 10 years, and full time for about 5. I've had pleasure and, well, displeasure to work with many different content management systems: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, MODX, etc. They're all amazing in their own sense, but... they're all just too big for my needs. For my personal web space I needed something simple, yet customizable. Something lightweight. You'd probably tell me that I'm crazy, that I should choose simple, customizable or lightweight, but you know what they say: "Seek and you shall find". And I did.

ProcessWire is exactly what I've been looking for. Once I got my hands on it, I instantly realised that I'll most likely never use any other CMS ever. When you perform a clean installation, it's a completely empty system. You decide what page templates you want, what fields they should have and how this entire thing behaves. PW strikes a golden balance between writing code/markup and digging through the admin panel, defining templates and fields.

After a few weeks of short burst developement sessions I was able to make a website that has the exact functionality I want:

• A blog that is separated from the usual pages and all the other content;
• Static pages that have just the fields I need;
• A music page where I can add my works in just a few clicks;
• A home page that resembles a "link tree".

And I plan to continue expanding my website in the future as I have many projects in the cooker.

I simply love ProcessWire. At this point I'm pretty sure that all of my future web projects will be running PW due to how powerful yet simple it is.