Test Drive & A Few Little Questions

[wiz]

Just WOW, absolutely loving what you have managed to create!

1. The login page/overlay - 10/10. While we've always tried to be as much as white label as possible, it's interesting to see users taking a completely opposite turn. What is your opinion on white labeling vs branding it?

When people click on login, the white notice bar slides down and just explains about the update system. What has been causing me to sweat a bit, is that I am of course unfamiliar with how WCMS behaves when it does detect an actual update! I've had to force hide the save id overlay, but I've left the cache one alone, I hope that means users will receive the relevant notifications!

2. WonderCMS doesn't download anything automatically.
2a. If any updates are detected, the user should see a "notification" after successfully logging in. (This can be easily tested if you add your own custom theme through the settings panel, and bumping the version on GitHub.
2b. In the next iteration of WonderCMS, there's a CSS native hiding/showing, so I'm thinking of releasing a beta prior to a public release, so users like you can check everything still works as expected with their modifications.

3. LOL the Wunderbar, it makes so much sense ). It's even drag and droppable! I'm interested to see how it works out on mobile? Piece of art!

One of the first things I noticed about the CMS which I wasn't a fan of, was that the notifications would re-appear whenever you flipped between pages. When editing multiple pages, constantly closing these became a bit of a chore, so whilst I didn't want to hide them, I thought I would put them a little more out of the way and so the Wonder Bar was born.

4. Maybe we should think of implementing local cache, for whenever the user closes them down, so they stay hidden. When they login/logout, we can clear the cache so they would re-appear. What do you think?

Wonder Bar contains the notifications, editing instructions and the admin buttons. You'll also notice I built in a realtime 10 minute countdown, which resets every time the CMS detects a save. If ten minutes pass with no recorded save, this pops up:

5. Seems like an amazing user experience. Is this something we could improve by adding a floating "Save" button and get rid of the click in/click out saving experience?

This left me needing to use the static Summernote editor, which is far more stable... but static.

6. Is this something you would be willing to share with the community? Seems super useful and an awesome/better alternative to the Airmode. I'm in awe .

This is a nice little bonus, but I needed an easy way for the client to add / remove news items, so I built an easy to use little news editor. Clicking the green button will generate a template article with today's date automatically added, the red cross deletes articles.

7. I love it. Another question here is, could you possibly use the blog plugin as news? It seems we also might have to consider using the blog also as a news plugin and let the users decide what they want do to with it? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

8. Have you made any modifications to your index.php? If not, you should be pretty future safe in terms of anything not overwriting your awesome project.

To wrap up I just want to say again, what a pleasure this software was to work with and I commend yourself, StephanStanisic and all the other contributors who have got the software to where it is and for your vision and stewardship of it. WCMS has been the missing piece in my workflow for years now, so I look forward to working with you all in helping to make it the best it can be and putting it under the nose of as many devs as possible.
Thanks for answering my support questions along the way. The previous backup bug seemed to be unique to my MAMP setup, so that's good. Speak later bud.

Thank you for taking the time and giving WonderCMS a chance. You seem to have completely figured it out. I'm inclined to ask for your opinion on how you think we can improve it and make it easier for amazing devs like you, to have even more fun.

I would urge you to post your project in the "Showoff" section. I'm tempted to bring a "featured" website on the wondercms.com homepage, so more people can see your awesome work. What do you think?

Proud of what you've done and achieved, thank you for sharing it with the community.

P.S. Upgraded your account to Developer on here, you absolutely deserve it.

[OneManLaptop]

Just WOW, absolutely loving what you have managed to create!

Oh what a great first response to read, thank you so much.

1. The login page/overlay - 10/10. While we've always tried to be as much as white label as possible, it's interesting to see users taking a completely opposite turn. What is your opinion on white labeling vs branding it?

Honestly, for a brief second I did consider slapping my own business logo on there and calling it Monster CMS or something, but honestly, that would feel like a bit of a slap in the face to yourself and the team who have invested so much time to make Wonder CMS what it is. Plus you've had some great endorsements and it's the only CMS to have gone to the Moon after all. I'm proud of the association with the name and I hope to encourage more people to get on board, but for those who want it to be white label, I think it's great that they have that option.

2. WonderCMS doesn't download anything automatically.
2a. If any updates are detected, the user should see a "notification" after successfully logging in. (This can be easily tested if you add your own custom theme through the settings panel, and bumping the version on GitHub.
2b. In the next iteration of WonderCMS, there's a CSS native hiding/showing, so I'm thinking of releasing a beta prior to a public release, so users like you can check everything still works as expected with their modifications.

That would be very much appreciated. I appreciate that if you modify to this extent you have to be prepared to adapt to updates a bit, but I'm really trying to make it so any of my modifications will just sit on top of the work you've done and I won't have to run around rewriting everything on update. A beta would really help.

3. LOL the Wunderbar, it makes so much sense ). It's even drag and droppable! I'm interested to see how it works out on mobile? Piece of art!

Yeah for mobile it sits (or rather it will, haha) at the foot of the window and can be expanded or closed at will.

4. Maybe we should think of implementing local cache, for whenever the user closes them down, so they stay hidden. When they login/logout, we can clear the cache so they would re-appear. What do you think?

That seems like a clean solution. As long as they see them once, that should be enough.

5. Seems like an amazing user experience. Is this something we could improve by adding a floating "Save" button and get rid of the click in/click out saving experience?

Honestly, I do think it's quite neat how it is now. I just double checked and if people edit one page and then just automatically click to go to another, their work is still saved, so that's a nice safety net which I really appreciate having. It was only really that overlay which was the problem and I feel the Wonder Bar resolved the necessity for that. Could always make it a toggle setting in the Setting area?

6. Is this something you would be willing to share with the community? Seems super useful and an awesome/better alternative to the Airmode. I'm in awe .

Oh of course. I did send a copy of the files to your email address for you to have a look through. The Summernote fix was quite simple though;

Code: Select all

.note-editable {
	overflow-x: hidden!important;
}
	
.note-toolbar {
	position: sticky!important;
	top: 10px;
	background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, #f4f3f3, #ececec, #e5e4e5, #dddddd, #d6d6d6);
	width: calc(100% - 20px);
	margin: 10px 0 0 10px !important;
	border-radius: 20px;
	box-shadow: 0 1px 5px black;
}
		
.note-toolbar button {
	border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.37) !important;
	margin: 0 2px;
}

7. I love it. Another question here is, could you possibly use the blog plugin as news? It seems we also might have to consider using the blog also as a news plugin and let the users decide what they want do to with it? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I'm actually doing it like that for another project, but as there was no need for separate blog entries here, it seemed like an unnecessary complication. The less moving parts, the less can go wrong. The other project is coming along but it's substantially bigger than Mary's, so it's progressing a bit slower. Hoping to have an early version of it live for the summer though, so I'm sure I'll have more insight by then.

8. Have you made any modifications to your index.php? If not, you should be pretty future safe in terms of anything not overwriting your awesome project.

No, I've left the index.php file well alone. The only core file I've had to edit, is the admin of the Summernote editor. I've added this:

Code: Select all

onPaste: function (e) {
	var bufferText = ((e.originalEvent || e).clipboardData || window.clipboardData).getData('Text');
	e.preventDefault();
	document.execCommand('insertText', false, bufferText);
}

The client updates the menu by copying and pasting from word files and originally, Summernote was copying all the style it detected in the word document along with it, which was creating an horrendous mess on the website. It's the thing I'm still wrestling with to be honest, as the client likes to copy and paste updates rather than edit what's there and of course that creates far more layout breaking problems than just editing. Right now I'm trying to develop a system where they can edit the menu in a similar style to the news editor, as there's just less scope for problems.

Thank you for taking the time and giving WonderCMS a chance. You seem to have completely figured it out. I'm inclined to ask for your opinion on how you think we can improve it and make it easier for amazing devs like you, to have even more fun.

I would urge you to post your project in the "Showoff" section. I'm tempted to bring a "featured" website on the wondercms.com homepage, so more people can see your awesome work. What do you think?

Proud of what you've done and achieved, thank you for sharing it with the community.

P.S. Upgraded your account to Developer on here, you absolutely deserve it.

Well I am sincerely humbled by my upgrade, thank you, that really does mean a lot.

I shall post the site in the show off section now and hopefully it will be the first of many. We are a small studio though (just me and the wife who does the graphics and illustration work) so we don't put out a huge number of websites each year, but I do like to make the ones we do special.

As to future improvements, there's really three main things.

1 - I feel the updates I've made resolve the issues I had with Summernote, notifications and saving. I've no expectation that they'll become a part of the standard software going forward, but if they do that would be easy for me of course, haha. But seriously, in case it wasn't clear, you are welcome to take and use everything I've done specifically related to WCMS. Obviously the design of the website itself is under exclusive license to my client, so I can't offer that up as a template in of itself (although I promise to build a specific, kickass WCMS template in the future) but everything specifically related to WCMS is free and open for anyone and everyone to use.

2 - Those update checks are still pretty long. I'm not a programmer (in spite of my nice shiny blue username haha) so I don't know the nuts and bolts of what's going in those update checks, but can it not be as simple as website tells Git what version number it's running through a simple string, Git checks if it's a greater or lesser number than the current version and acts accordingly? To me that simple check would take a few seconds not a few minutes. Doubtless you have your reasons that I'm oblivious to, but the bottom line is, people are used to login procedures taking seconds not minutes, so it is something it would be great to see brought more in line with user expectations.

3 - The last biggie is image handling. You've told me that you're in the process of overriding default Summernote behaviour and will get the CMS to use links to files rather than embedding in base64, which is great and will prevent that database file from bloating.

However another really crucial thing we need to look at, is image editing. I was with the owner of Mary's yesterday and she asked if she could just take a quick picture on her smartphone and upload the pic in the News section. Technically that should be no problem, but she was using a phone with a 108MP camera! The picture she took came in at just over 27mb in size. The chaos that would have caused if she'd gone ahead and uploaded it would have been both hilarious and terrifying. Can you imagine what the database file would have looked like after that, haha. It's an eye opener though, because this is the type of thing people just expect they can do, because they can do it with Facebook and Instagram and the like and it just works.

So we need some sort of image processor which sits between the customer uploading images and them appearing on their website. I don't think anybody is expecting filters or anything like that, just something which will make sure the pictures clients upload are suitable for a website setting. Ideally, it would feature webP support, srcset, thumbnail creation, things like that which would allow for the smallest file sizes and easiest creation of galleries.

I found this Summernote plugin, which looks to be actively maintained but I'm not sure if it actually modifies file sizes, but maybe it's the beginning of a solution:

https://github.com/DiemenDesign/summern ... attributes

Anyway, that's all for now. Still got some polishing and tweaking to do but all being well I'll have this project nipped in the bud by the end of the week and I can move on to the next one and continue to work with you in refining WCMS. I really do appreciate your warm response though, everything about the project has a positive vibe to it, which is... wonderful.

[OneManLaptop]

Hey all, how are we doing? I've been busy! I've retrofitted another website with WCMS:

https://foleys.be

Made a few small modifications. I added an undo / redo button to Wonder Bar and improved the mobile skin.







In truth, none of the clients I spoke to said they would edit on mobile, but you never know if they need to make an emergency edit when they're away from home!

I also built a special food menu editor:



The first client had some trouble as they preferred to copy and paste large swathes of text and of course that would break the style a lot of the time, so I opted to build a more... controlled experience. Firstly I rebuilt the menu to make it more robust, opting to wrap each individual text block in a div, as this helps to keep Summernote from freaking out if you start a new paragraph or delete one. It just generally seems to be more stable doing it like this. Then to dissuade clients from deleting and adding new menu items themselves with copy and paste, I've added the ability to clone / delete individual menu items and that's stopped them having to copy and paste and risk messing things up.

I also added a cleanup function! When clients hover over the logout button or nav links, a function runs which just cleans up any classes, style or tags which the editor or indeed the website has added, as I forgot to consider that WCMS will of course save any inline styles written by GSAP, which I use to add animated features to the site.

For the time being I've told clients to upload any images they want to use to one of their social media platforms first, let that do the resizing for them and then use that image for their website, haha.

I also had an email this morning about a new flat file CMS:

https://www.flatcms.nl

No on-site editing, so WCMS has a leg up there, but I thought you might find it interesting to take a look at the technology they're using.

Anyway, future plans are to load all the WCMS elements through JS, so it's more of a JS module than an extension of the website design. Working on a hotel website now, so lots to do. Hope you're well over there.

[wiz]

Thank you so much for the explanations and awesome presentation <3

Honestly, for a brief second I did consider slapping my own business logo on there and calling it Monster CMS or something, but honestly, that would feel like a bit of a slap in the face to yourself and the team who have invested so much time to make Wonder CMS what it is. Plus you've had some great endorsements and it's the only CMS to have gone to the Moon after all. I'm proud of the association with the name and I hope to encourage more people to get on board, but for those who want it to be white label, I think it's great that they have that option.

There is nothing wrong with slapping your WonderCMS on such a creation, seriously just do it. None of the team members would consider this a slap in the face, and you should be absolutely proud of what you've managed to create. WonderCMS is meant to be white-label, so customize it as you please without regrets!

That would be very much appreciated. I appreciate that if you modify to this extent you have to be prepared to adapt to updates a bit, but I'm really trying to make it so any of my modifications will just sit on top of the work you've done and I won't have to run around rewriting everything on update. A beta would really help.

Prior to this release, we're taking your recommendation as a solid one, and we'll prepare a beta version on the WonderCMS homepage, we found a few more nasty bugs with the submenus, which we're resolving.

Those update checks are still pretty long. I'm not a programmer (in spite of my nice shiny blue username haha) so I don't know the nuts and bolts of what's going in those update checks, but can it not be as simple as website tells Git what version number it's running through a simple string, Git checks if it's a greater or lesser number than the current version and acts accordingly? To me that simple check would take a few seconds not a few minutes. Doubtless you have your reasons that I'm oblivious to, but the bottom line is, people are used to login procedures taking seconds not minutes, so it is something it would be great to see brought more in line with user expectations.

> but can it not be as simple as website tells Git what version number it's running through a simple string, Git checks if it's a greater or lesser number than the current version and acts accordingly?
This is exactly how we check it (it simply iterates only through versions of each github repo, but also checks what is installed on the client side. Slaven has a good idea of how to improve this even further, some additional caching will surely help this out. Additionally, we made the checks only once per week in the next version, so this should be less of a hassle.

3 - The last biggie is image handling. You've told me that you're in the process of overriding default Summernote behaviour and will get the CMS to use links to files rather than embedding in base64, which is great and will prevent that database file from bloating.

I've created a Github issue for this, and seems like something we could really use, thanks for the suggestion!
https://github.com/robiso/wondercms/issues/238

https://foleys.be/

You seem to be on an amazing roll for creating sweet sweet, sweet websites. Another astounding job well done!

I love what you're doing and sharing. I apologize for the late responses, work is taking it's toll lately and been trying to find more balance between career building and having a chill-out time to recuperate.
Thank you also for charing the flatfile, I'm trying to give it a go, but it seems it's not free + the demo credentials don't work for me.
Did you manage to give it a go?

Also, make sure to shoot your latest creation in the showcase, it deserves a prize!

[wiz]

Minor bug, when opening the "Gallery" on my Firefox, I see an alert box popping up "called".

[OneManLaptop]

Minor bug, when opening the "Gallery" on my Firefox, I see an alert box popping up "called".

Damn Wiz, good catch thanks!

I love what you're doing and sharing. I apologize for the late responses, work is taking it's toll lately and been trying to find more balance between career building and having a chill-out time to recuperate.

Life first dude, always. Everything is stable so no worries, there will always be a to-do list haha.

Thank you also for charing the flatfile, I'm trying to give it a go, but it seems it's not free + the demo credentials don't work for me.
Did you manage to give it a go?

Ah yeah, that's right it's $29. The demo worked for me, so I don't know what's going on there. It's worth having a look I think, as you're both trying to solve the same problem. As I say, I prefer WCMS's inline solution but would be curious to see if they've solved things like image file size shrinking.

[turboblack]

Hi. These sites look awesome! Can I ask you to lay out step by step instructions How did you do your top menu?

[OneManLaptop]

Ah sorry, only just noticed your kind comments. Do you mean the big blocks on the side of the Mary's site?

[turboblack]

yes, i actualy mean a logo too

[mjxl]

Very cool stuff you got going here!