Why ProcessWire
I wanted to rebuild the website of my personal, artistic work. The notion of just using HTML was very appealing, but I also wanted it to look like I'd made some effort. And I'd need some CSS to lay out the images anyway.
So I started in Neocities. And that was great to begin with. Some really simple designs. A tiny set of CSS.
Then I realised I kept changing the <head> as I learnt more. And that meant going back and updating ever page.
At this point I only had 2 poems on the site, and some navigation pages. But it was too much.
So I started looking at PHP. Reusable chunks of code. But there's no PHP in Neocities. So I started looking for a great tutorial to help me.
Everything seemed to have too many assumptions. I kept looking and stumbled upon ProcessWire.
A small, open source CMS, it looked to have a good story, and history. And it was available in Krystal hosting, my existing provider, as a Softaculous install.
Within a couple of sessions, and with Mistral's LeChat to guide me, I had my few pages looking exactly as they had in Neocities.
The CSS stylesheet was identical. The HTML was identical, only now it was powered by PHP.
The only problem was that I was editing the PHP on the live site. No backups, no staging, no revisions.
Next step was to get a git version control set up using Forgejo. Hosted on Pikapods, because I'm still quite allergic to the terminal and the command line.
But I'm learning.
So far, ProcessWire is "keeping out of the way" allowing me to build a very simple site. There's no navigation bar or footer. It's just context specific links on pages.
That might be a list of poems in a collection. It might be a single link from a poem page to a collection page.
The menu is a separate HTML page, inspired by Jim's Blog, about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s).
I hope that over time, my website will be somewhere people spend a bit of time wandering about, through a series of hyperlinks. Not jumping about willy nilly, but following clear paths.
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