impresspages / ImpressPages

ImpressPages is php framework with admin panel. Build functional website in one hour.
http://www.impresspages.org
Other
501 stars 178 forks source link

ImpressPages - Dead ? #891

Open CloudSentralDotNet opened 5 years ago

CloudSentralDotNet commented 5 years ago

Awwww mannnnnn ...

Dead ? Any updates ? Anybody knows the main players ?

eazuka commented 5 years ago

Not dead, just about coming out of hibernation :smile

computerfreak84 commented 4 years ago

Not dead, just about coming out of hibernation :smile

On what facts is this statement based? Anyone working on something?

Three of my clients websites have become almost unusable by now because of massive bugs in IP (mainly images not correctly resizing).

In what timeframe can we expect any development?

azanov commented 4 years ago

@computerfreak84 Did you report these issues in any way here on Github? I assume that in case of serious issues, even there hasn't been a major update in years, someone would fix it.

computerfreak84 commented 4 years ago

@azanov: the main bug is described here: https://github.com/impresspages/ImpressPages/issues/887

and my other issue with a page with thousands of images is described here, but has been closed, even though the issue is not really resolved for my client...: https://github.com/impresspages/ImpressPages/issues/800

Unfortunately I'm not good enough to contribute to the project, so currently have to decide if we can stay with IP and wait for max half a year for some substantial development or migrate our pages to another CMS system, even though I would hate to leave the incredible features that IP offers. It seems that especially with PHP 7 we have encountered multiple strange bugs...

maverikt commented 4 years ago

My advise is to find another CMS, IP was good in its time but i dont see how it can be saved, there is no decent developers to continue, i think we should be realistic.........

eazuka commented 4 years ago

@computerfreak84 Did you report these issues in any way here on Github? I assume that in case of serious issues, even there hasn't been a major update in years, someone would fix it.

good response.

eazuka commented 4 years ago

Not dead, just about coming out of hibernation :smile

On what facts is this statement based? Anyone working on something?

Three of my clients websites have become almost unusable by now because of massive bugs in IP (mainly images not correctly resizing).

In what timeframe can we expect any development?

based on the fact of me speaking with the core developer on the possibility of bring Ip out of hibernation and to get other developers involved in the development and maintenance. This discuss in still on-going i will say and as Ip is open source project, there is nothing stopping you from posting your issues here on Github for the community to look at. just as @azanov rightly said, someone other than the core developer may help fix the issue, same way there are lots of plugin in the Ip plugin market contributed free by developers that are not part of the core developer.

my friend @maverikt, you know better to be making such statement that no decent developers to continue development. and i'm sure you have tried looking for another CMS, can you please point us to another decent CMS that can compete well or take the place of IP? even in this it unmaintained state for few years now, i'm yet to see any better alternative

IP was well ahead of some other CMS (paid and free) and though it has some few short-comings due to prolonged unmaintained state, it still rocks! and i believe its the responsibility of those developers experienced with IP to get involved now and rescue this awesome CMS which is the reason why i'm discussing with the core team. I believe Impresspages can still be great again with the community support and creative suggestions and contribution, not bashing.

eazuka commented 4 years ago

Unfortunately I'm not good enough to contribute to the project, so currently have to decide if we can stay with IP and wait for max half a year for some substantial development or migrate our pages to another CMS system, even though I would hate to leave the incredible features that IP offers. It seems that especially with PHP 7 we have encountered multiple strange bugs...

@computerfreak84 can you post/create new issues here with the strange bugs you are having on PHP 7. if you don't post the issues, no way for it to be known and resolve.

computerfreak84 commented 4 years ago

@computerfreak84 can you post/create new issues here with the strange bugs you are having on PHP 7. if you don't post the issues, no way for it to be known and resolve.

thanks for your answers. I'll try to make bug reports if there is really plans to revive the project.

I think if bug https://github.com/impresspages/ImpressPages/issues/887 would be solved, a lot would be better, but on one project with thousands of large pictures, the whole image browser is not responding for multiple minutes and not even loading thumbnails or just very very slowly. So a redesign of how the image repository/browser works, would be very beneficial (see my suggestion https://github.com/impresspages/ImpressPages/issues/800). Because I have users who often upload original size pictures, the issue should probably be handled even before the image browser (or it has something todo with issue https://github.com/impresspages/ImpressPages/issues/887).

Other bugs seem to be design flaws of the whole system, for example when a page has lots of content, each revision seems to make everything worse and copy/pasting (duplicating) such pages takes forever (without any progress information). Also I've had pages not saving the positions of (title + text) widgets correctly and the only solution was to limit the amount of widget blocks and keep text together instead of in separate blocks. And then there are many bugs related to plugins, which I stopped using because of that (mainly plugins not correctly respecting the state of the "published" button on top of the page and plugins not working anymore when IP got updated).

Maybe I should add, that I've developed quite complex templates with lots and lots of ipBlock-sections (I started calling them dropzones for my client and marked them with a dotted outline when logged in, see screenshot), so some issues might be because the system wasn't tested for such a scenario.

ip_dropzones_computerfreak

One of the most irritating things for my clients is the "high sensitivity" of the drop-area with "the blue line showing up". In many cases (especially with complex plugins), it's almost impossible to drop a widget block to the desired place.

Also when developing custom templates, almost every time I had to spend many hours to make sure I didn't break the "blue line showing up" for dropping widgets. There's something with z-index or float that I still haven't figured out that often breaks IP functionality if I get it wrong. Also multiple plugins incorporate Bootstrap and overwrite some of my custom css. Bear in mind, that I tried to develop templates that are completely fluid (no fixed widths). Before css-grid and flexbox it was a real struggle and still causes issues where for example image blocks or images keep the width of the css element as it was at the moment of editing the page (hard thing to solve, I know).

@maverikt: I might really have to look for alternatives, 'cause even if the project gets revived, the lack of certain functions and plugins was always an issue where we needed to find workarounds for quite common tasks that would have had a plugin available on more popular platforms. I recently started working with Python, so might leave the LAMP-stack entirely.

Anyway, I really love the user friendly-ness of IP and especially it's drag and drop WYSIWG approach and if the projects goes on, I'm happy to share my experiences and css-expertise.

maverikt commented 4 years ago

Everyone is talking from a technical point of view, no one is arguing that IP is way ahead of other CMS's but any business adopting this CMS now would be suicide. There is no support. No updates means security issues are not fixed, issues caused by new version of PHP, apache, MYSQL not being addressed. IP has lost confindence with businesses its just not worth the risk using it.

icampana commented 4 years ago

I also agree on the good things that IP brought, and I'm a developer, even though I don't have too much time available I do expect to work on solving at least the main bits to get it running properly with PHP 7, as soon as I can I'll send the PRs, so hopefully those can be tested and merged.

It would be really sad to see this project go away.

Update: PR Created and tested it using PHP 7.1 and 7.2 without issues, would be nice to test it with different environments to check if there's anything else going on, you can check it on #893

wannaco commented 4 years ago

well this looks pretty much dead to me

donnysim commented 4 years ago

If IP isn't dead, they would at least fix the market that's broken for over a year. So yeah, it's dead dead.

kreativmind commented 4 years ago

It is not being actively developed by the main devs anymore. I spoke to Mangirdas (co-creator CTO) and he stated he's been away from the project for a while. It's opensource and branch it out if want to continue to use it. Have to continue dev and fixes on our own.

NetLancer commented 4 years ago

Sad, i'm sure there is not many CMSs of this sort which are opensource yet very flexible (give room to create own pluggable service). For i remember my first site creating with no big knowledge of html/css things and weebly service gave me that necessary jumpstart to move on. Perhaps after i started real web learning back then.. So i consider drag-n-drop tools very useful in many cases. Thanks to those who invented it & maintain :)

jasteele12 commented 4 years ago

It is always sad to see an open source project get abandoned.

Take a look at concrete5, under very active development and works with PHP 7.3. There's a legacy version that will even work with PHP 5.3 (not recommended of course).

It was the first front-end editing CMS - my clients love it!

concrete5 Github

kreativmind commented 4 years ago

Concrete5 is one I've been using also for over 5 years. It works well. The drag and drop feature is what made ImpressPages pretty cool.

jasteele12 commented 4 years ago

I've been using it for over 10 years now. It has drag & drop blocks also (for those that might not know).

Click the Gears icon in the editing toolbar and you can drag any of the block there (many) right onto the page. The areas you can to drag into are easier to target than ImpressPages IMHO.

I love the modern codebase and total flexibility of what you can build with it (from a developer's perspective).

NetLancer commented 4 years ago

As an alternative i can also suggest zenar.io (used to use it for several month though coupla years ago, good impressions..)

marcoczen commented 4 years ago

Interesting ...nice ... Have you done anything with it ? https://zenar.io/about

As an alternative i can also suggest zenar.io (used to use it for several month though coupla years ago, good impressions..)

NetLancer commented 4 years ago

It was (zenario) version 7.x then i believe, last time i played with. Got good impressions even though i had barely ever dealt with cms things. I'd say it it sophisticated enough to grow with you and still beginner (well, as long as one has idea of web content management tools) friendly. Sorry folks, didn't mean to make it look advertising or something alike, Frankly I would more like ImpressPages tool to get good maintenance & live long, to me it's very idea is cheersworthy :)

computerfreak84 commented 4 years ago

As much as I would have liked to stay in the IP ecosphere, I have now moved on to Elementor Pro on Wordpress. The decision was not easy and I evaluated over 200 other tools to find a new drag&drop king. Elementor Pro gives me and my clients similar freedom and adds a lot of possibilities. Of course it‘s not exactly the same and in the same step I have also moved away from webdesign in code almost completely. Visual webdesign is very mighty now and I can live with the bloated code it generates due to the freedom it gives and because everything can be done in much less time. Funny thing is: there are still some things where ImpressPages was so ahead of the time, that they still can‘t be done with Elementor or only in a complicated way. Also, some of the essential features of IP that I was using since 2013 or so, just came to Elementor some weeks/months ago. I tried to avoid Wordpress and the mainstream, but by using Elementor Pro and a full „themeless“ approach, it isn‘t as bad as it was. And it adds more widgets and a bigger community which is one thing where IP started lacking pretty early. First I also experimented with using Oxygen builder as my dev tool and Elementor as the client drag&drop tool, but Elementor is just done much better. Maybe ImpressPages should have charged $200/year from the beginning too... If anyone with IP background is interested in moving to Elementor and has questions about how to achieve something from IP, you can write to info at computerfreak . ch

wannaco commented 4 years ago

I have not had the chance to test it but https://microweber.org/ seems very promising.

NetLancer commented 4 years ago

So, there's seemingly an idea arising for creating some curated list of opensource drag&drops, with say feature comparison info included :))

Humni commented 4 years ago

@eazuka is it still coming out of hibernation? 9 months on and no action?