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Last week I asked you what you'd like to see in ProcessWire in the next year (and years ahead), and we got a lot of feedback. Thank you for all the feedback, we've had a lot of great and productive discussion, and of course feel free to keep suggesting things too. Below is a summary of things based on what I thought was feasible from the feedback so far. I'm not suggesting we'll be able to do all of this in 2021, but do think it makes a good preliminary roadmap of things to look closer at and start working on some very quickly. I'll keep working to narrow this into a real roadmap, but wanted to share where we're at so far (consider it preliminary/unofficial): Flexible content or page building One of the most common themes has been that people want more content building options as an alternative to using a rich text editor at one end, and page builder at another. This is a direction that some other CMSs have been going in (like WordPress), and one that many would like to see ProcessWire provide an option for as well. But the needs seem to come from two different angles, and it points to us pursuing 2 directions simultaneously: First would be a flexible content block style editor in the core as an alternative to rich text editor that supports pluggable block types while maintaining best content management practices. If possible, we'd use an existing tool/library like editor.js or another as a base to build from, or potentially build a new one if necessary. To be clear, it would not be a replacement for CKEditor but an alternative approach supported by the core. Second would involve improvements to Repeater/RepeaterMatrix that enhance its abilities in supporting those using it for building more complex content page builders. Since many are already using it for this purpose, the goal would be primarily to better and further support this use case, rather than make Repeater/RepeaterMatrix a dedicated builder. Jonathan Lahijani and others have pointed out some specific things that would help achieve this and I plan to implement them. Admin theme improvements We would like to add additional flexibility to the AdminThemeUikit theme so that people can further customize it how they would like it. What directions this will take aren't nailed down quite yet, other than to say that it's going to be getting some focus (and this has already started). At the very least, we know people want more sidebar options and the ability to tweak specific CSS, perhaps in a preset fashion. Improvements to existing Fieldtypes and Inputfields Things like support for a decimal column type, more date searching options and additional input level settings on other types. Though these are specific feature requests and our focus is more broad, so we'll be going through many of the core modules and adding improvements like these and more, where it makes sense. Pull requests and feature requests People would like to see us expand our code contributor base by merging more pull requests in cases where we safely do it. We will also be narrowing in on the specific feature requests repo to see which would be possible to implement this year. External API There are requests for an external/front-end API that would also be accessible from JS. I support the idea, but have security concerns so am not yet sure if or in what direction we might take here, other than that I would like us to continue looking at it and talking about it. File/media manager and more file sharing options There is interest in an option for a central media/file manager so that assets can be shared from a central manager rather than just shared page to page. There is also interest in the ability for file/image fields to reference files on other file/image fields. External file storage Some would like to be able to have PW store its /site/assets/ and/or /site/assets/files/ on alternate file systems like S3. That's something we'd like to use for this site too. To an extent, work already started on this last year with some updates that were made, but there's still a long way to go. But it will be great for sure. Live preview and auto-save There are requests for live preview and auto-save features to be in the core. Currently they are just in ProDrafts, but there are now more options and libraries that would facilitate their implementation in the core, so I'd like to see what we can do with this. More multi-site features There is interest in ProcessWire natively supporting more multi-site features, potentially with the option of working with our multi-language support.

@ryan Now we have custom page classes that I'm really like and I use it on all of my current projects, but maybe the same approach can be applied to custom page types? And one more request is the ability to deactivate the default language for page, I know that it could be implemented by custom field and some logic in hooks, but maybe such functionality could be added to InputfieldPageName. Thanks.

First of all I want to say, that I am really enjoying the discussion about the flexible content builder or the WHATEVER-builder (as I accidentally named it earlier) we are having here. And now I am purposely not calling it more specifically Site / Content / Page / Layout / Theme Builder. I think that @kongondo made a really wise question asking to define the distinction between those. And to determine, what exactly do we want to build. Are we really talking about the different things? It seems to me that now we are contrasting the YOOtheme Builder from @Jonathan Lahijani‘s epic video labeling it as a layout editor or a site builder, to bard / editor.js calling them content block editor or something like that. And choosing between the two. But, as I understand, @Jonathan Lahijani never proposed a layout editor / site builder way in a sense that it should store the final html code and let the content editor to directly manipulate it. He intentionally made it clear, that he chose to show us YOOtheme builder because it “separates the builder-part from the actual content” doing it in a “ProcessWire way”. And he also stated, that he is not for tightly coupling to the CSS framework (Uikit in YOOtheme). But he would want the ability to define the layout IN SOME WAY, like being able to create a 2/3/4 column grid and place the components (I think that they are the same as content blocks from bard / editor.js) inside those columns. And to be able to move those components to desired slot in the layout. I would really want that part too) I think that the earlier mentioned “ProcessWire way” is actually the separation of content and presentation. When we use Repeater Matrix, we store the content and some meta information not directly in the html code, but in the Repeater Matrix Page’s fields. Actually, editor.js (do not know about the bard field, but probably that one too) is also storing the content separately from the presentation. Not in the separate database tables, but in one json object. So it is kind of doing it the “ProcessWire” way too))) One difference, is that in the case of editor.js we have to manually deal with json when generating actual markup, when Repeater Matrix provides us the comfortable PW API for that (making this way a little bit more ProcessWire). The other difference is that when using Repeater Matrix we have to manually create all the actual fields and assign them to content types, making this way more laborious. The coin has two sides. So, as I can tell, we all want the same kind of editor. The one that does not store the actual markup, but the one that stores data, that later we can render to actual html (or any other format really). What about the layout part? As I said earlier, I would really want to have the ability to define layout with the flexible content builder we are talking about. @Jonathan Lahijani showed 3 ways of doing it in current Repeater Matrix-based content builder, and all of them are kind of a pain. But I do not want our editor to actually store something like col-sm-6, but rather some generic layout information. Like having a grid block, that can only have col block as a child, which in it’s turn can store the actual components. In Repeater Matrix now we do not have a distinction between layout element and a component. We only have the ability to put one element inside the other (the ugly nested Repeater Matrix way or the repeater depth way which also has its flaws). But it is the developer who is responsible to make all the decisions generating markup. So the developer could choose to implement the layout part or not to do so, which is really a powerful stuff I enjoy and would like to keep. That’s why I was talking about the “WHATEVER-builder” or a “framework for constructing a content builder” before. To do so, our new flexible content builder should allow us to: define the allowed parents/children for the elements; allow to show the child elements side by side (to imitate layout); intelligently control the drag and drop, taking into account the allowed parents/children for the elements. As far as I know, editor.js does not allow the nesting of the elements. Creating custom elements from admin The other great thing about the Repeater Matrix-based content builders is that we can easily create new custom content types (elements, components…) right in the comfort of the admin. It is not really a quick thing, as we need to deal with creating the fields and assigning them, but it is rather familiar. And those custom components can use all the other ProcessWire data with Page Reference fields, Selector fields etc, which is cool. If we go with with editor.js, I am in real doubt we would be able to create the new elements in admin. The dev would probably need to develop a js plugin and install it in non-PW-standard way, making it unlikely to happen. The connection to other Processwire content from that custom element would be even harder to implement. Visual representation of the content Repeater Matrix-based flexible content builders in the mentioned video look nothing like the actual content. The left part of YOOtheme builder does neither, but it at least represent the layout in some way. Editor.js / bard do not do that too. From the other replies in this thread I see, that it is not that important and even not desirable. Repeater Matrix interface is kind of ugly, when representing content. But: at least is is familiar and in line with all the other backend; it could be improved to be more like YOOtheme builder: add icons for adding content types, remove or refactor the repeater elements “chrome”, allow showing repeater elements side by side for the layout thing; and it uses the standard admin form ui, which means it is easier for @ryan to deal with. As you see, I am for the native ProcessWire UI here) And one more thing. In the video we see the actual markup rendered to the right of the YOOtheme content editor. We can do that also, creatively reloading THE WHOLE PAGE on changes with Hotwire / Unpoly / Vue. Making the flexible content builder feel dynamic and not requiring those saves-and-reloads. And making the connections between the options in the builder part and the final markup obvious to the editor. The data storage Repeater Matrix-based flexible content builders store the data in pages and fields. This makes it laborious to create new content types (create a new field, or find an existing one to reuse it, assign it, override it…) This also makes it hard to duplicate, copy/paste content in the site or between the projects. But it also allows us to use the familiar API when generating markup. Editor.js’ data object is compact and probably easier to be reused. But it lacks connection to other PW data. And the UI is totally different. Could we combine the benefits of the two? What if we invent the json-based storage for the data gathered with regular ProcessWire inputfields? Something like Mystique field combined with JsonNativeField (so the content is even searchable). And what if we allow to create the Interface for the new flexible content builders components with “fake” fields, which have their inputfields only, and are not connected to the database? Kind of like fields for the Form Builder or the UI for the @adrian’s Admin Actions’ actions. Think about that. We could design elements with any fields we need not messing up the regular fields namespace. Those fields’ definitions would be stored in our flexible content builder’s options, as well as all the content types (elements) and the actual field data in json. The UI would be the same inputfields we already have. When working with this field from the API, the field could be accessible as a PageArray object where each Page is a corresponding element. Bringing it all together I think it is possible to build the flexible content builder (or the WHATEVER-builder) using a lot of the technology we already have in PW. It can be comparable if not better than all the other competition. It can be well integrated and totally configurable through the admin. It can be portable between templates and projects. And it can be visual and responsive. What do you think?

Thanks for the pointer @adrian ! Here is what I ended up with : <?php class ImageCreateVariations extends WireData implements Module { public static function getModuleInfo() { return array( "title" => "ImageCreateVariations", "version" => 100, "summary" => "", "href" => "", "singular" => true, "autoload" => true ); } public function init() { if ($this->wire('page')->process == "ProcessPageEdit") { $this->addHookAfter("InputfieldFile::fileAdded", $this, "sizeImage"); } else { $this->addHookAfter("Pagefile::install", $this, "sizeImage"); } } public function sizeImage($event) { $inputfield = $event->object; if ($event->method == "install") { $inputfield = $inputfield->pagefiles->getField(); } if ($inputfield->name != "gallery" && $inputfield->name != "image") return; if ($event->method == "install") { $image = $event->object; } else { $image = $event->arguments(0); } $sizes = [300, 600, 1200, 1800]; foreach ($sizes as $size) { $retina = $size * 2; if ($retina >= $image->width) { $image->width(floor($image->width / 2)); break; } $image->width($size); $image->width($retina); } } } I simplified your condition in line 94, but maybe it's the wrong thing to do ? Anyway it now works as expected so thanks again !

For images added via the API, you need Pagefile::install This block from my CustomUploadNames module might be helpful in seeing how I handle admin vs API uploaded images. https://github.com/adrianbj/CustomUploadNames/blob/9c896717459d1674c8ca37731c8a6f79730436a7/ProcessCustomUploadNames.module.php#L92-L103 and you'll also see differences in the customRenameUploads() method below.

The other great thing about it is that it's a very realistic thing we can do. Though Jonathan's video pointed out a lot of drawbacks. Maybe we can solve some of them with upgrades to RepeaterMatrix like Jonathan proposed, and maybe others are acceptable drawbacks given our context is very different from tools like WordPress. Plus, it seems like Jonathan is already using this approach successfully with clients. I took a closer look at https://editorjs.io/ and I like it for a lot of the same reasons I liked what The Bard example was showing. The plugin-based approach for blocks it uses looks great and this seems like something we could probably integrate pretty easily/quickly since it's based off an existing tool that handles the difficult-to-code parts. Being able to solve this need with an existing tool like this is the ideal route IMO. While cool no doubt, this is where I get into more of a grey area as to whether ProcessWire should be involved in this sort of thing at all. It just seems it steps maybe too much outside the scope of content management. Yes, this makes sense. This is what I liked about that editor.js option, as it seems like (combined with its plugins) it's already a clean system for doing this. Interested to hear of others think this approach would be a good path to take. I'm already a fan of Unpoly after spending a lot of time looking at it, particularly with how lightweight it is relative to what it does. There isn't anything hard coded in it. The top area is a CKE and images field, and images use tags to place in groups. The next part is list of features/highlights, each with headline, icon, description, and link; these are a FieldtypeTable field. Another FieldtypeTable field manages quotes (quote, cite, source, active), which are pulled randomly in different parts of the page, as well as on other pages in the site (which pull from the same field). Everything else on the page is pulled in dynamically from other parts of the site. For instance, the blog part always shows the newest blog posts, the showcase part always shows the newest site additions, the Pro modules part pulls from the /store/, etc. So there isn't really much code on the actual homepage template, since it's actually the other parts of the site rendering each of those. I agree, I will add this. Yes, that has been my experience as well and so this was one of the things ProcessWire has always tried to solve from the beginning. Keep the client focused on semantic content and not on style, layout or presentation. It's also why I've never been a fan of front-end editing. As soon as the person editing content takes their focus off of meaning and shifts to presentation, that's where things go south and content is no longer portable. I see a fundamental job of a CMS being to manage portable content. With all that said, it does seem like there is an exception to the above (per what Jonathan mentioned earlier). That is, the perhaps temporary 1-page marketing things, where questions of portability don't really matter and the short term marketing needs do. This is already built into FieldtypeFloat, so another good reason for it to add DECIMAL column support. Well in this case, we would add the support to the core, so one wouldn't need to use Combo for that purpose. A number spinner is built into the HTML5 number type, which is already an option for the float field. What's lacking is the ability to modify the step value from the default. I can add that, no problem. @Robin S I've been experimenting with your Uikit admin CSS additions and a few of them (some of the "fix" ones) seem like they should be added to the core. Some of the other more subjective ones, you've got me thinking we should have a "customization presets" dropdown in the Uikit admin that lets you select predefined customization sets like yours. I think having separate configuration settings for all the different things you've changed is probably too much configuration, but presets seems like a good way to answer common preferences people might have?

Not sure where I want to take this... At least it will be a successor of https://processwire.com/talk/topic/18166-processwire-kickstart/; Maybe more... Anybody here still using wire shell and wants to share experiences/learnings? How were you using it? What was missing? What did you like most? etc

Happy New Year! Today I’ve bumped the version on the dev branch to 3.0.170, and it’s quite a lot of updates. This post covers most of them. In this post, there’s also a question for you: what would you like to see in ProcessWire in 2021? https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.170/

It seems like we gonna have a fascinating year! I am enjoying being here since 2014, but feels like the most interesting part is just starting!

This depends whether you want to support ProcessProfile and potentially other "Page editors" in addition to ProcessPageEdit: if you check the process name specifically, this hook won't be attached in those cases. If it should be attached for other Process modules as well, you do indeed want to compare against the class_implements() array or alternatively check for "instanceof WirePageEditor". Admittedly I'm not particularly familiar with your code or Adrian's module, so may have missed something obvious ?

+1 ?

Currently version 4.7.0 of Font Awesom is used in ProcessWire for icons for templates and fields. Since its release, both version 5 have come – and version 6 is in the making. I would like to see a newer version in the future in ProcessWire, @ryan 4.7.0 (in ProcessWire) has around 675 icons as far as I can tell. The current Font Awesome version has around 1600 icons. When version 6 comes, theres around 2200 icons I have read.

Hi @MoritzLost - thanks for the detailed report. Should be all fixed in the latest version.

Another huge thumbs up from me to focus on flexible content blocks. I find that I need this more and more often not just for the typical landing pages, but for content-rich, art-directed articles, and repeater matrix only partly fits that need.

Yes, thumbs up from here also to focus on bard/editorjs level of "content blocks" instead of full layout editor.

A lot to agree with here ?? One thing I particularly liked about editor.js is how it keeps content separate from design: behind the scenes everything is abstracted so that a quote block is really just an object with a few text properties, etc. You could render that quote block in a hundred different ways for the front-end. Portable indeed ? In fact the more I think of it, the less sense it makes to think of block editors as something that would replace pages and fields. I'm all about having content split into separate fields where it makes sense. But as a replacement for RTEs, that's something I can definitely get behind: an RTE is a decent tool for creating text-only content, while for anything beyond that I find them rather awkward. For "body content" (which may these days typically be a varying mixture of text, images, tables, forms, highlights, and so on) flexible content fields are (imho) a much better choice.

I see there is a number of topics that are actively discussed in this thread. Maybe we could make a subforum with the selected 2021 roadmap features to be discussed with dedicated working groups? Not to loose the momentum we got here in this thread) And to nurture that community participation in the future of our beloved ProcessWire. I see these: A strategy/fieldtype for creating rich content. Making admin themes be extendable and/or adding features to them like a sidebar (might be it could be accomplished as an extension?) External API / using PW as a headless system out of the box. Central media/image manager for reusing images across pages Support for different file storages for image like Flysystem Growing popularity of PW (without sacrificing stability of course). Showing github contributions and such. Implementing admin forms in the frontend / making a limited admin for non superusers (pushing this as I am personally interested)) ...seven is a great number to deal with, but certainly there could be more)))

@Zeka Thanks, I still feel this is redundant in PW, but it's been mentioned enough times that I can't rule it out. So will keep eyes open here. Yes, if you mean things like S3 storage or similar, this is something I've been interested in too. This is definitely on my wishlist too.

Awesome! Thanks @Jonathan Lahijani that would be great.

@ryan I can collaborate with you on improving Repeater Matrix and giving you a really deep understanding of page builders, issues that would be faced and my thoughts on a direction ProcessWire can take. I've built a module internally that demonstrates a lot of these concepts.

Regarding @teppo's suggestion about a native external API - I know that we just lost one PW website to a JSON / GraphQL / Gatsby / React stack because the developer decided that was easier to do that than use GraphQL / Gatsby / React on top of PW. Personally I think his decision was misguided because now he is managing content in json files (he is the sole dev / content editor so he doesn't need an admin CMS), but I think he'd have done much better using PW for content management and generating JSON that can be pulled into the frontend. But maybe if PW had a native way of doing this, he might have stuck around and I am sure there are lots of other devs out there that ignore PW simple because they don't think it will let them use these modern frontend stacks. I do think an integrated javascript API would make lots of things much easier as it always feels a bit hacky to me getting PW data into JS - it would be great to have JS page object available on page load, but also to have a built in AJAX method to pull other PW data on demand. I do feel like we need to convince potential developers that PHP can work together with the rest of the tools they want to use - they don't need to use Node to integrate things. I am still baffled that companies are paying thousands of dollars a month for things like Contentful or ContentStack when PW can essentially do the same thing - I know there are other benefits to these services, but I find the downsides not worth the tradeoff. There are of course self-hosted headless CMSes out there, like https://strapi.io/ which has been around since the end of 2015 and has 32,000 Github stars and 600 contributors. I know you have constantly maintained that you don't care about popularity, but clients often do, and with good reason - they need to know that there are other developers out there to take over if needed. The other big thing for me is finding ways to make certain data queries more performant, perhaps with something like @bernhard's Rockfinder functionality built into the core so that we can pull large amounts of field data in a more performant way - we don't always need all the info contained in the PW objects that are returned by regular API queries. Honestly I haven't yet used Rockfinder in production - I've actually gone with custom SQL queries of PW field data to build up objects/arrays exactly as I need them, but some inbuilt methods for automating this (like Rockfinder does so well) would be nice. One thing I would like to see is a way to easily implement certain admin forms in the frontend - yes we can do this with the API, but having all the admin tools available in the frontend would have saved me a lot of time over the years essentially rebuilding functionality. Sometimes I can get away with the AdminBar module, but it's not always appropriate. If you want an idea for another profield, a properly working version of a recurring dates field would be awesome. Unfortunately the Recurme module just isn't a viable option - I do have it running in production, but it's not efficient and I have several hacky fixes in place. It's actually a difficult problem doing recurring dates well, but it is a common need for lots of sites and so a good implementation would be very popular. However, my biggest concern and bugbear has always been what some might consider little things, but these "little things" can sometimes cause lots of frustration - things like: https://github.com/processwire/processwire-issues/issues/550 - there are lots of other examples of these sorts of things that require hacky workarounds. It is much more important to me to find proper solutions for these than adding fancy new features. I'd also like to see the admin user interface tightened up - there are lots of areas for improvement and so this is just one silly example, but having the double-click to open/close all repeater items on the on/off toggle button is confusing and I think needs fixing. I have converted a local web dev agency to be exclusively PW (from Drupal), but whenever we chat, their main complaint is always the look of the admin - they feel it doesn't look modern and clean enough and makes PW look a bit cartoonish. Please don't take that as a personal insult - getting this right is difficult and in my mind take a very talented design person to get the details right - I can see the things that are jarring, but I am not good at figuring out how to make them right. I think this is really important in ensuring that PW continues to be something that we can convince clients is a modern platform. I do also think that the interface to RepeaterMatrix could be modernized. I am not a huge fan of fancy website builders, but I do think we need to find a middle ground between what RepeaterMatrix currently provides and the best of the new building tools out there, because eventually clients will complain that they don't have access to the shiny new tools - it hasn't happened to me yet, but I think that's partly because of the type of clients I typically have.

Following Gadgetto's train of thought I also found out now that using a commercial solutions really saves money in the long run. I really didn't want to risk security for example, so Snipcart could be great. Otherwise there are many breakdowns of what's good and what's not and I think unless you have an extremely simple shop you will most likely need a fully-fledged system.

Keep up the great work @Gadgetto. I love integrations like this.

Let me throw https://laradock.io/ into the mix. I've been using it for the last 3 years or so. Absolutely great.