My last five cents here:
- Pagekit is a great product. I consider myself a technical literate and have worked with quite a few CMS in the past, be it Websitebaker (really tiny) to Wordpress and Joomla. All of these systems had their drawback, from being too simple (Websitebaker) to non-intuitive (such as Joomla and to some extent also October). What I like about Pagekit is that you install it, log in and it is more or less clear who you get the content in and have a very simple site up and running in a couple of minutes.
- For the past 9 months, I have been quite active with Pagekit. What I missed is the wealth of Extensions and Themes in the Marketplace as other CMS have it. I initially started writing Extensions and now Themes. What I realized is that the respective documentation and examples on the Pakekit homepage are simply "not good enough" to get people attracted to writing Extensions. If you asked me for a wish list, I would like to have a proper documentation and sample Extensions that have to typical stuff in, such as (i) system and page attributes (incl. the php code to write them back to the database); (ii) examples how to access system-related variables, such as the root of Pagekit, its Storage folder, ...; (iii) a script that I can run with parameters, such as mercator/myplugin and it changes all the variables in the examples, so it becomes "my" plugin.
- Themes are actually not that difficult - but you need to code in PHP, even if you just want to arrange your building blocks in a certain way. I would have appreciated if Pagekit would make this easier. It would actually be quite straight-forward to implement a template you can adequately parameterize (I will probably do that over the next couple of weeks). People could then focus on the CSS-related definitions, for which we also would need something that is easily customizable. Probably, this could be done with an Extension that is good enough for many people, who just want to get a personal homepage with limited customization. While this is not good enough for professional sites, it might be good enough for many users.
- While writing Extensions and Theme is often about fun as opposed to making money, I would appreciate a "Payable Marketplace" as well as the option to have people buy a plugin from a self-hosted website, which then can pull updates from a self-hosted repository.
It is all about simplicity and making it easier for people to develop would attract more programmers and agencies. If I had the time and all relevant skills (such as Vue and UIKit), I would probably fork Pagekit and start it from there. As I said at the beginning, designing a new CMS is a real art (or science) and you need the right skillset, which is hard to find on the market.
First of all, thanks for your contribution and feedback. From my point of view, the pagekit community should have a joint approach and communication towards YOOtheme. There are still a lot of people who like this CMS very much or have setup nice projects. Sad to see, that we are only waiting for nothing.
