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In addition to site development work and ProcessWire core development, this week I upgraded my OS X version (from Mojave to Monterey), my PhpStorm version (from 2018 to 2022), and my Apache/PHP/MySQL environment versions. I tend to wait a bit too long between upgrades on my computer and so I ended up with a lot of things to resolve, and a still few remaining. While waiting for upgrades to install, I randomly came across one of the first sites I ever designed/developed out of college, working for Grafik in the year 2000: https://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/ ... I can't believe it's still there. It looks really dated now (it's 22 years old), but reminded me of how much things have changed in web design/development. While I'd been developing sites for a few years before this, it was just a hobby, and it wasn't until this time that it was my job. Back in 2000 there weren't a lot of people that knew how to create websites and it always felt like you were breaking new ground. Internet Explorer was king (and nobody liked it then either), Google was just a small startup, but AltaVista, InfoSeek and Yahoo were big. Sites were developed in a way that would make you cringe now. I don't think we used CSS hardly at all, but we did use tables for everything layout related. There was no such thing as "mobile" (the iPhone didn't come till 7 years later). There was no such thing as "responsive" layout and accessibility was pretty much an unknown. Most of the time we used images for a lot more than was appropriate (headlines and much more) because HTML and HTML fonts were so limited. It all seems so primitive now but what's the same is that it was fun then and it's fun now, actually it's more fun now. I don't have any point here, just that it's funny to look back at how much as changed. Last week I mentioned that we're likely to upgrade CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5 sometime in the next year. There were several comments about that and so just wanted to talk a little more about it. First off, I really like CKEditor 4, it's been a great fit for ProcessWire. If the company behind it was going to continue building and supporting version 4 after 2023 then we'd likely stick with it. But the CKEditor 4 end-of-life is sometime in 2023 and I don't think it's an option to stick with it (in the core) after the developer of it is no longer updating or supporting it... at least not long term. While CKEditor 5 is a different animal than CKEditor 4, it's also still the closest upgrade path from CKEditor 4, and I'm hopeful it will be able to serve as a near drop-in replacement from the perspective of users (only). My hope is that by the time we've completed the upgrade to CKE 5, our clients won't necessarily know the difference or have to re-learn anything, unless they want to take advantage of something new exclusive to CKE 5. From my perspective as a developer integrating CKEditor 5 into ProcessWire, the development side is not a drop in replacement for CKE 4 (not even close), as all supporting code will have to be redeveloped. By supporting code, I mean things like the code in the InputfieldCKEditor.module file, the code for our custom CKE plugins (pwimage and pwlink), as well as anything else development related that is referring to CKEditor. There's no doubt it'll be a lot of work. But the rich text editor is one of the most important input types in the ProcessWire admin, so it's fine, it's worth putting a lot of time into. As for CKEditor 5 being bloated relative to CKEditor 4, I very much doubt that's the case. It was a complete rewrite, the folks at CKEditor know what they are doing, and it's safe to assume it's even more optimized and streamlined than CKE 4. In terms of size, the download for CKE 4 and CKE 5 are both 1.7 megabytes. As I understand it, they started with a new codebase for CKEditor 5 in part to start fresh and avoid legacy bloat. So I see this upgrade as being the opposite of bloat. So what happens with CKEditor 4 in ProcessWire when it likely is replaced with CKEditor 5? So long as CKE 5 can be a near drop in replacement for our users, and for the markup it generates, then the CKE 4 module will move out of the core and into an optional module you can install from the modules directory, when/if someone wants it. On the other hand, if the transition is not completely clean between versions then we may end up supporting both in the core for a short period of time. Though I'm hopeful this won't be necessary. There are some other interesting looking editors out there that have been mentioned, and it'd be nice to have more input options available. I see something like Imperavi's Article as a good option for some but not a replacement for our current rich text editor. At least I know my clients would not be happy to have that big of a change occur from a PW version upgrade. Likewise, something like the Easy Markdown Editor is a great option for some, and I'd like to be able to install a module for that and use it in some cases. But folks used to using CKEditor 4 in their work would not be happy to have that big of a change either. CKEditor 4 works really well for what it does, and I think the goal has to be that clients using CKEditor 4 now should be able to continue doing what they are doing with as few changes to their workflow as possible. I'm hopeful we'll be able to get there with CKEditor 5, while also gaining some benefits in the process. Where other input options make a lot of sense is when building a new site where there aren't already users depending on one input method or another. And it may be that at some point (sooner or later) it will make sense for ProcessWire to have another textarea input option that's different enough from CKE to make it worthwhile. But in my opinion, that would be a potential additional option, not a replacement, as CKE is pretty well established and expected in PW.

Module allow you to load events from event files. Visit Github page or module directory for usage

There weren't very many CMS/CMF platforms either. I started out with SSIs to start reducing redundancy and duplication, then ended up starting my own CMS around 2000, but I picked a loser in terms of development language, and I realised trying to maintain a CMS for a modest number of clients on my own wasn't really efficient use of time. Someone introduced me to ProcessWire in 2015, and since then nearly all my websites have been converted to it. Web development and database development have progressed together for me, so ProcessWire's separation of content and presentation, and strong access control are critical for me. I evaluated my other CMS platforms before I settled on ProcessWire and I simply didn't like them as they either had a steep learning curve or were too output focused or both. I wouldn't use Word to try to build a relational database, nor would I use WordPress. I think if there is one major thing still on my wish list, it would be the ability to have a UI using ProcessWire inputfields to create data entry forms for arbitrary SQL tables. A common scenario for me is converting offline databases (often Microsoft Access) to cloud based alternatives. Usually it's possible to restructure everything within ProcessWire's pages model, but sometimes I just want to be able to dump the data across and build a UI quickly with no need for data to exist within a page model. I've been playing around a bit looking at building module(s). I'd love the goodness of Lister/(Pro), but instead of picking a template, pick an arbitrary SQL table and specify fields from it, set access control etc in the same way Lister Pro woks, and then have I guess what I'd call an SQLTemplate where you'd pick an arbitrary SQL table, select fields from it, and for each one specify an inputfield, within the contraints of the SQL field type. Of course none of this data would be accessible within ProcessWire's page structure out of the box, however there's already $database->query() to execute an arbitrary SQL query and return a result set, so using arbitrary SQL data within templates is already easy, so the only bit missing is a UI to manage arbitrary SQL tables as easily as ProcessWire pages in admin, but it's already halfway there with inputfields that don't care where their data comes from.

The idea was that RockMigrations could save at least module config settings to yaml files. I'm still not a fan of putting migrations in general into yaml files, because the execution order of migrations can matter and that's not possible to do in yaml while it is possible to do in PHP. But for module configuration I guess YAML would be an easy thing. So one could for example could install tracydebugger, do all the necessary config and hit save. Then all developers working on the project could have the same debugger settings. That might be a good thing (for module settings that need to be consistent across all environments), but it might be something you don't want. Again that's a problem that is not easy to solve and that's the reason why I think it makes the most sense to write migrations by hand.

This week on the dev branch are several updates to the comments system including support for custom fields on comments (which we're calling comment meta data). I'm currently working on a site that uses a reviews system powered by BazaarVoice. It's pretty nice but it's also very expensive (I think at least $500/month in this case). The system powers their reviews which include not just a rating and review text, but also a bunch of other criteria that the user can provide. See an example here — click the "Reviews" tab and what you see there now is currently coming from BazaarVoice. But in a couple of weeks you should see the same thing powered by ProcessWire. Think of this like a comments system with custom fields. That's not something that ProcessWire has supported before, but now this week it does. Though I know most don't need this, so have kept it pretty simple, focusing just on adding API methods to make it possible to get and set custom field values for any comment. These include: $comment->getMeta('name'); $comment->setMeta('name', $value); $comment->removeMeta('name'); The name and $value can be whatever you decide. There's also a bonus $comment->meta() method which combines the methods, letting you get or set, kind of like the meta() method on Page objects. If you want to use comment meta data like this, it's exclusively an API feature. So if you are looking to collect custom fields from users, you'll want to implement your own comment form rather than the default. In our case, we'll be using FormBuilder to implement the comment form that includes the review and custom fields. But you could just as easily use a homegrown form. When it comes to outputting that custom data, you'll want to handle it more like you would outputting a repeater, iterating through the $page->comments and then using $comment->getMeta('name'); for each of the custom properties you want to output. Worth noting is that output formatting doesn't come into play here, so if some text in the meta data needs to be entity encoded for output (for example) then that's your responsibility. How about later editing of the meta data? Should you need it, the ProcessCommentsManager module (Setup > Comments) has been upgraded to support editing of comment meta data. Next to each comment is now a "Meta" link, and if you click it, you'll get a modal window on top of the comment enabling you to edit the meta data as JSON. That might seem a little unconventional, but I'm trying to keep it simple and flexible. Most will probably use this to view meta data rather than edit it, but the ability is there when/if needed. I didn't think it would be worth spending the significant time building a full-blown page-editor like environment for editing comment meta data, but also felt like I needed something like this for occasional editing needs. The InputfieldCommentsAdmin module was also updated to have meta data links for each comment. But the reality is if you have ProcessCommentsManager installed, chances are you aren't editing comments in the page editor anyway. So a new option has been added in the comments field configuration (Input tab) enabling you to disable comments in the page editor and instead link to the editor in the comments manager. When enabled, your Comments field in the page editor would instead look like this: This is worthwhile because the comments manager is just a better place to view/edit comments in the admin since it is paginated, supports editing of all properties, and lets you sort/filter as you see fit. Whereas a big list of comments in the page editor just slows it down. This week the CKEditor version has been upgraded to 4.19.0 (see release notes). I'm also emailing with the people at CKEditor about getting us a license to use CKEditor 5 with ProcessWire. As you may or may not know, the CKEditor 5 license (LGPL) isn't compatible with ProcessWire's license (MPL2 and MIT), so we are working on a license agreement to make it possible. Since CKEditor 4 will reach EOL in 2023 it's a good time to start planning for CKEditor 5 and I'm excited to work with it. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

That's actually a very good point. And a very nice addition to the usual updates, content and discussions here as well.

Something like this is already supported by @adrian's Module Settings Import / Export module which I recommend.

There is an optional module in the core ProcessForgotPassword that you can install to enable people to reset their passwords if they forget. With regard to preventing even super-user role from changing any password other than their own, I think it could be done, but would require a hook in site/ready.php I'd imagine adding a hook before InputfieldPassword::processInput should be able to check the current user, and if they're not the same user as the password belongs to, then abandon any changes. I may not have the right hook method. A hook before Pages::save might be another option, as everything including users are 'pages' in Processwire, so the logic would be something like if($user->name != $page->name && $page->template == 'user'){ //Prevent page saving. } Someone else can probably help give a working example, or if I get time I can have a try and update my post once I've got something working.

Yeah I was just hoping you have some experience with it and have done the review before so I don't have to do it ?? Proper image handling is something on my list and it's definitely something that I'd want to have in RockFrontend. The goals is to have a module that makes all the tedious frontend tasks easier and more efficient. srcset would be a perfect example and image handling is on my list for quite some time now, but I don't even have experience with webp at the moment so I might not be the best person to implement such a feature ? Let's see what you guys think of RockFrontend once it is published and then maybe someone wants to contribute... Thx for the suggestions ?

Just a little rant: Please don't turn our textarea/RTF-fields into something like Gutenberg or similar. As a module, ok. But please... not as the default option. I'm not that deep into all the details about those RTF-Editor tools/scripts but what's so bad about staying with CKEditor 4.x for a while as it's stable and mature enough. Never had any issues with it.

I just wanted to mention that I hope that our new editor will still be a rich text editor and not a page builder (like the mentioned "article" editor) - imho we should not mix those two! I've done a lot of work and research in that regard over the last two years or so and I'm now very happy with my repeater based content builder. When I started I also looked at editor.js as the interface looked neat. But I couldn't even manage to build a single custom content element with it. It's an editor for JS artisans and not for PHP devs like me (us?). A repeater based content builder has the huge benefit that we can simply use all the existing fields that PW provides. If at some point someone created a new field that would most likely just work within a repeater. Having a new editor interface with a totally new storage concept would mean we'd need to build all those block's for the editor and we could not use them outside of it. What about Multi-Language? The example above shows a nice page builder, but I wonder how multi-language would work with such a field? In a repeater-based setup we can just install LanguageSupport and make those fields translatable. PS: Using a matrix based approach makes CKEditor fields usually super simple! Like this one where only bold text and links are allowed:

This is why I always prefer the inline mode for CKEditor: very little is done until needed, which speeds things up nicely, yet setting up a new RTE field (when it is needed) takes maybe a few hundred milliseconds (assuming scripts and/or styles need to be loaded, otherwise it's nearly instantaneous). No matter how you do it, adding elements to DOM tends to slow things down. The more you add, slower things get. That is why Ajax loading is great for things that are needed rarely, while things that are needed most of the time can and should be loaded right away ?

This is because non-superusers aren’t allowed to add children under /processwire/setup/languages. First, because /processwire/setup/languages is of template admin, you would need to open the template settings for admin and check the box “add children” in the access tab. Then you also need to give them permission to create pages of template language, so in the language template, enable access control and check “edit pages” and “create pages”. This isn’t a very nice solution, because you have to change access for all admin pages. I suppose it would be neat if a “lang-add” permission came with the language support module. Alternatively, you can probably write a hook to add a button somewhere that creates a language and bypasses those permission checks.