Google is not only polishing the interface on their mobile OS platform, but streamlining most of their wonderful and indispensable web applications with a unified look and style. Material Design is the latest design/visual language developed by Google and announced at the Google I/O conference in June 2014. As with latest UI design philosophy, Google went with flat look and focused on the details. While the direction is open for personal’s opinions, in overall I think Google has done a remarkable job.

If you love Material Design, there is no reason why you should not try to use it as the DNA of your next project. Luckily a bunch of talented people took very little time to make things easier for their fellow designers and developers to be able to take make use the framework to their site’s design.

Materialize

This one goes on the top of my list because it feels like most polished and actively developed. The framework homepage shows a clear example how you can create nice look on your websites using their components.

Bootstrap Material

If you are already in love with Bootstrap and do not want to fool around with another framework, there is a solution for that too through this project by applying Material Design as a Bootstrap theme. Note that as the time of writing, this theme is not ready for production.

Material UI

Last but not least, if you use React for your JavaScript library, this framework is definitely for you.

There you go. Hopefully the list is useful for you. If you know other front-end frameworks that are based on Material Design, please share them by replying to this post. I would love to check and possibly add them here.

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When it comes to using it as CMS though, I always struggle to justify it as the way to go. Despite its evolution in complying the demand, it is still far from perfect. In more than one occasion, client would come to me with very specific request to use WordPress to manage their website. If the website needs to come with a blog, then yes it is a good option, but sometimes it is only a company, personal or product profile which content needs to be manageable from CMS.

For years, I had been trying to find the right platform/framework with just enough features and functions to allow me to build a website without having to take more time on integrating it with the CMS. Then I found ProcessWire. Learning about for ProcessWire works was not the easiest, but all the time used has been very well paid off after a couple of projects built using it.

What makes ProcessWire a better CMS than WordPress? For starter, you can define your own fields to be used throughout the system. No plugins or custom functions required, which have always been a real turn off for me. I can list all the goods and bads between these platforms, but in short with ProcessWire you can set it up to go with your site’s structure, while with WordPress I feel it is more about adjusting your site to fit as a template.

So, why should you use it?

1. You prefer to build your own CMS but also knows the pain in making one
2. You hate the idea of installing half a dozen plugins to create that simple customization
3. You are not that good in making custom functions in WordPress
4. You prefer not to have all the long navigation items on the left side of the admin panel
5. You want to it to be super easy to change the template of the admin
6. You need to manipulate lots of images and they have to be easy to manage
7. You want to make sure the user will enter the right input into the fields
8. You do not need to change the front-end template (theme) that often or ever; update: I was referring to WordPress’ manage theme functions which is very rarely used
9. You like to explore new platforms
10. You have worked on a PHP framework and love it

No platform is perfect by all means, and I am pretty sure ProcessWire is not the only one that was built on the idea to make as flexible CMS as possible. But for me it is the first one that really clicked, and it is free! So, kudos to Ryan Cramer and thank you for building and constantly improving this great platform.

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