CMS Critic is now powered by ProcessWire
Today, I am excited to announce that CMS Critic is now powered by last year's winner of the Best Free CMS award in our Critics Choice CMS Awards, ProcessWire! For the last several years, we've run our popular website on WordPress but found as things progressed, we continually ended up having to rely on third-party plugins to get the functionality we needed. With ProcessWire, we no longer have this issue as the bulk of the capabilities we require are built in.
Our WordPress platform, up until today, required approximately 30 plugins and had a database size of over 30 mb at the time of transfer to ProcessWire. Now, we are just over 5 mb in database size and our system is far, far faster than it was before. Not only that but we've had the site developed on the amazing Foundation Framework, which I personally had the pleasure of tweaking and adapting with a new style and layout. I have to admit, this is the most fun I've had in years of development work. I can truly say I fell completely in love with this framework. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and easily you can adapt your layout and come up with a unique look.
The transition to ProcessWire began after the first week of May when I first reached out to Ryan Cramer (lead developer and founder of PW) to find out if he thought his system would be a good fit for our needs. Our talks quickly led to us hiring Ryan to develop our site and I have to say the whole experience has been an incredibly awesome learning opportunity. It's been exciting and wonderful to learn to work with this CMS, from its simplicity to its logical programming. Ryan is a consumate professional and if working with a developer was always like this, I'd want to keep building things and never stop.
I'd like to think that this site now has an opportunity to expand past the borders and roadblocks we had encountered on WordPress into new realms of opportunity and I'm looking forward to exploring what we can do with this great CMS.
A big thank you to Ryan and I hope you like the new site. Have feedback to share? Please do so in the comments below.