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Notes → December 12, 2011

This project was a great deal of fun and hugely satisfying for a variety of reasons. There were a few firsts too, some of which I’ll share with you now.

Keynote

This was the first time I’d attempted to use Keynote to wireframe/design a site. (Below is an image straight from Keynote.) WTH? I hear you say, Keynote is like, well, PowerPoint isn’t it. Yes, it’s a presentation tool but it has some very handy drawing and layout tools. But it’s the multiple master pages that make it extremely useful for preparing layouts of varying components. Not only that but getting a PDF out of Keynote to send to a client is a cinch.

Previously I would have used Illustrator with a multipage plugin. Fun as that is to use on rare occasions, it can be a real pig to get a completed mockup out of. And let’s face it, Illustrator is great for technical illustrations and diagrams not page layouts.

Out with the old

This site previously ran an old and very outdated Core version of ExpressionEngine (which was discontinued by EllisLab). It was in fact the first site I build with EE. I’ll admit to cringing quite a bit as I looked through my old work. Putting it through an upgrade and redoing it all just looked like too much work. Well, not that much but I felt it was better to start fresh.

ExpressionEngine 2 as a product now is essentially the same as EE 1. A multi-channel/blog setup, custom fields, an entries list and a means to categorise everything. It just didn’t fit into the idea for what I had in mind for this new site. And looking at the proposed site map put me off using EE completely. I could have used Structure to fake a page heirarchy bit I find it flakey to use. Don’t get me wrong I’m not bagging EE, it just was not a good fit for this site.

ProcessWire

Technically this isn’t the first ProcessWire site I’ve sent live but it is by far the largest in terms of pages. I chose ProcessWire for a few reasons.

A super fast and clean installation.
Upgrading the system to the latest version is a copy-one-directory affair. The site templates and the core system files are completely separate. If you do decide to use an additional module that modules files go right in with the site template. There’s no anxiety that when you upgrade the core system that you’re deleting something you shouldn’t.
Developing a site with PW means knowing a bit of PHP. I’m not a PHP person by any stretch but the PW API is something I (mostly) get. The PW community is one of the most friendly and helpful I’ve ever encountered and I got some invaluable help there.
Easy on the client. What I didn’t want was for them to feel intimidated by an admin screen full of entries that are completely out of context. I wanted them to have confidence in knowing that they were placing their content in the right spot. The also client ‘got’ the ProcessWire admin as soon as they saw the page tree. Each section in the tree represents the order of pages on the site. There’s no ambiguity at all.
Little things like being able to custom order pages, specify child/parent template relationships (ie what templates can have what sub-templates) and being able to link to (and create relationships to) other pages within the site also proved important.

The development site was built under a subdomain. When it came time to make the site live it was simply a case of moving all the system and site files to the root directory. So that took about 2 minutes after I’d backed up and moved the old EE 1.6 site out of the way. ProcessWire doesn’t care what directory it lives in so long as the system, templates and database are all within reach.

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