Upcoming Updates - index.php and GitHub

[TinyCoding]

Hi all,

I am completely new here, and yet I find this CMS extremely well made and easy to customize. That said, and with all the love possible to its developers, what is the plan for future updates to its core (index.php)?

I might have gotten this wrong, but from what I read on GitHub - this project is no longer maintained? If I got it wrong, that's awesome. If I did not get it wrong, what are the plans for those using it if and when core upgrades are needed?

Thanks for making this, it's more or less perfect

[OneManLaptop]

This is a very good question. I don't quite know what's happening with Wonder CMS these days. I still use it but our fearless leader, Wiz (Robert Isoski) hasn't be very present on the forums these past months and I don't see much of a roadmap for WCMS.

I think the web still needs Wonder CMS and it's still going to be perfect for many people looking to maintain simple websites but the web moves fast and I do worry that WCMS is at risk of being left too far behind. Summernote is a particularly bulky outdated thing at this point.

I don't know, things change and people move on. I know I intended to be more involved but then life threw me a curveball and I've had a near complete career change, so life comes at you fast.... I get it!

Still, some sort of official comment from Wiz about the state of WCMS would be appreciated. Is it on hiatus, is ongoing support widning down or stopped or is he beavering away on version 4.0 and wants to surprise us all with a big reveal! In which case, use the secret code word Wiz, haha.

Hope he's well wherever he is.

[wiz]

Hello world.

Happy to see new and old users that see value in WonderCMS.

Some of the people that have been with this community for longer, know that WonderCMS is generally a slow paced development project (some year a lot of updates, some years less, some maybe none), depending on how much time our jobs/families take up. That, and also the fact there is only 2 people developing the core (Slaven and I).

WonderCMS has been actively maintained for 16 years, (celebrating 20 years in 2028). We don’t plan on abandoning it, however we are slowly reaching the initial “perfect index.php” core we imagined almost two decades ago. The core which would be not needing a lot of maintenance.

The first priority is always security, then the core themes and plugins.
Most of the roadmap usually comes from the issues opened on GitHub and most upvoted comments.

The plan is to release an update by the end of the year, however no promises, as they can come and bite you back later.

This original post is a reminder for me to update GitHub to reflect that the project is still here to stay.

In other news, we will also probably be closing the swag.wondercms.com, since it’s been losing money due to no active support and costing us.

If there’s any general questions like these, I’m always pleased to answer

Edit: Regarding Summernotr, I agree it is a bit outdated, however expectations are that plugins/themes are actively created from the community, since we currently have a bunch and it would be pretty hard to maintain them along with new requests). I’d be personally really open to a new editor.

[NorfolkGreg]

Hi Wiz,

So good to see you posting here again, although I know you have been monitoring what goes on as you have deleted some of the spam posts I have reported.

Just wondering if you feel able to add my theme to the official list yet. See:
GregCustom Theme
viewtopic.php?p=8228#p8228

Would also love to read your response to my Wish List post:
viewtopic.php?t=4450
Regarding that and the fact OneManLaptop responded positively to the idea would you have any objection to either of us creating a fork to implement the ideas. Unfortunately, I don't have the PHP skills to do that, but don't mind hosting a fork on GitHub if it's something you support and something that OneManLaptop or others reckon they could undertake should you not have the time to work on implementing it yourself.

In other words I don't want to start something that has no prospect of being adopted into your WonderCMS product. I'm not interested in supporting something that becomes a rival product.

[turboblack]

hi2all

NorfolkGreg and how can you even know that something will become something or not if you don't start it?
Personally, I would like a version without bootstrap and other frameworks, with clean code that can be worked with on any technology, modern editors are a huge limitation, bootstrap too, you depend on its updates, and if you have a complex layout, then you are afraid to update so as not to break it.

I prefer HTML 4.01 and I think that it is more than enough for modern solutions.

Regarding visual editors - what exactly is wrong with the previous one, and why is it old? There it is enough to fix the scaling of images, and the insertion of video (they run away to the side and break the layout on phones).

Users began to have too many requests regarding technologies, and have too many complaints, although there is a solution for phones - use 2 fingers instead of one.

for me, backward compatibility is more important than support for new phones, because in fact - people don't look at websites from phones, people look at social networks on their phones, and based on the statistics that I have for my pages - a user with a phone is a random passerby.

different approaches are needed, since there are different requests, but it seems to me that CMS was a niche product, and will remain so, people do not leave, despite the fact that I developed my CMS a long time ago - I still use this one, my son also uses it, because different projects and websites need different CMS, there was and will not be a universal product.

let's increase the activity of the project a little - it is needed.

[NorfolkGreg]

NorfolkGreg and how can you even know that something will become something or not if you don't start it?

My PHP coding skills are effectively zero, limited to copying short snippets of other people's code, so I'm not best placed to fork WonderCMS as I'll be relying on other to actually contribute code.

Personally, I would like a version without bootstrap and other frameworks, with clean code

But WonderCMS does not use any such packages. Older default themes, and some contributed by external contributors did, but they are not part of the current default package.

I prefer HTML 4.01 and I think that it is more than enough for modern solutions
....
people don't look at websites from phones, people look at social networks on their phones, and based on the statistics that I have for my pages - a user with a phone is a random passerby.

I think that may say more about the visitors your sites attract than the majority of those using the web these days.

Regarding visual editors - what exactly is wrong with the previous one, and why is it old? There it is enough to fix the scaling of images, and the insertion of video (they run away to the side and break the layout on phones).

I'm relatively new to WonderCMS and not sure what you mean by "the previous one". Certainly the first time I tried Summernote, it encoded all images as base64 text (or whatever the technical jargon is). I think I read that may have been fixed more recently, as I found it just wrecked any readability of code with even the smallest edit. On the site I built for someone else to operate, I encouraged them to use the default editor and wrap text in heading and paragraph tags as required.
As for images overflowing on phones, that's just a matter of a theme with suitable CSS code. Take a look at https://gregchapman.uk on a desktop and play with the window width as you encounter images. Then try it on a phone and you'll find there's no overflow.

it seems to me that CMS was a niche product, and will remain so, people do not leave, despite the fact that I developed my CMS a long time ago - I still use this one, my son also uses it, because different projects and websites need different CMS, there was and will not be a universal product.

There I agree with you. Generally, a site built on a CMS platform will be developed by a coder for a client who just wants to update content and not worry about anything technical. WonderCMS is ideal for one (wo)man businesses that want something more than a Facebook page.

[TinyCoding]

I'm starting to review the older themes, and the newer ones. Bootstrap is for me a personal "never go there" choice, and therefore I am looking into the theme structure as well as the core structure to better understand the "globals" used for getting navigation, content, etc.

That said, I am also looking into replacing the editor with a pure PHP Markdown parser using JS to allow live editing and to use, for example, the W3schools CSS framework.

In other words, I am playing around. I look at WonderCMS and think, "WordPress without the bloat and db", which is also why I love it.

[NorfolkGreg]

That said, I am also looking into replacing the editor with a pure PHP Markdown parser using JS to allow live editing and to use, for example, the W3schools CSS framework.

If you look at my GregCustom theme you'll see I used the menu from W3Schools at
https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_j ... opdown.asp
but I had to hack it quite a bit to use it with wCMS, hence my "Wish List" request.

I'm less sure about any need for a new "programmers" editor. It will all depend on the end user. If my assumption is right typical end users need something like Summernote, a WYSIWYG editor. Without that then learning MarkDown is little different to learning a handful of HTML tags which are all that's needed with the existing default editor. You'll see I started to create a list of suitable text editors at:
https://gregchapman.uk/wondercms/editor

[TinyCoding]

If you look at my GregCustom theme you'll see I used the menu from W3Schools at
https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_j ... opdown.asp
but I had to hack it quite a bit to use it with wCMS, hence my "Wish List" request.

Yes, I have tested (I think) all themes by now, and yours seem good. I also looked at your website and your "editor" post. That said, I too want a custom menu as well mobile menu which reminds me: I'll most likely move the "Settings" and "Logout" part to the footer or something as well as transforming them into plain text links as they are in the way most of the time depending on the screen-size.

My initial idea regarding MD as the writing format is not something I would propose wCMS admins implement into core, it is more for myself in my upcoming custom theme where I'll most likely use the https://simplecss.org/ layout alongside some custom options for extra fields by adding custom code to the theme itself using https://github.com/WonderCMS/wondercms/ ... ble-blocks.

For me personally, MD is easier and faster to write compared to raw HTML code. The editors available through the "Settings" modal seem, in my opinion, to bloated. I understand that JS and/ or jQuery and some additional CSS is needed, but taking - as an example - the "Summernote" editor plugin: it loads four JS files and two CSS files from external sources.

This is my personal reason for implementing my MD > HTML live editor instead (written using PHP with minimal inline JS and CSS), and for the reason that I do not want to load any external sources whatsoever. But, I'll have to wait and see. Most likely I'll just fork the "Summernote" plugin, modify it to fit my needs, and go from there.

Same with the contact form. I'll most likely implement a PHP function that generates a random captcha code, extend the form fields, validate, sanitize, etc.

[NorfolkGreg]

I've been thinking about it overnight and I begin to prefer your idea of a MarkDown editor, certainly as a stopgap until a "perfect" WYSIWYG editor is available in Wcms.

My preference for getting the naive new webmaster to learn a few HTML tags is based on me hand coding web sites since the early 1990s. Markdown is, perhaps, a little easier for someone new trying to construct tables, lists and links in HTML.

Also thanks to introducing me to https://simplecss.org/ while the CSS documented in my GregCustom theme is very similar, with the one added feature of code to allow for different presentation on narrow/wide screens, it does remind me that I really ought to use more of the new tags available in HTML5. That ought to be the next update to the theme.