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Please note: I changed my initial forum name zx80 to my Github name cwsoft. Never thought I will release two PW modules within a month after my initial registration to the ProcessWire community forum ?. Hope this makes it more transparent for possible future contributions to the PW eco system.

I posted a (rather lengthy) comment about some of the ways I work with my clients. I'll be posting some of that here where reading it in context can help the message as a whole. I've been a web designer/developer for ~15 years in many capacities like freelancing, in-house employee, and now at my own one-person company (I'll get into why that's different than freelancing). I've been the new guy on the bottom rung of the ladder, and a director at an ad agency. I don't think that I'm special or that I have it all figured out! I feel this comes from a culmination of experience, long hours, mistakes, and trying my best. I'll group some topics together and give some briefs on each: on being a web professional, building value/client relations, and yeah things don't always go well. Building skills in these areas may help boost performance in things like getting clients on board with ProcessWire, differentiating yourself from other web services, being confident in what you charge, and building both a great reputation and long-term relationships. Get on the bus, we're leaving our comfort zones. Here comes the disclaimer. How and where you work matters. The market you operate in matters, competition, local economy, etc. That's why I'm not going to say "here's how to come up with what you should charge" or "this one neat trick will change the game". These are my experiences, I think some of what I share will be things you can implement yourself, some may inspire you to think of something different, and other stuff might just be rubbish. I also think that knowledge unshared is knowledge lost- so please share your critiques, experiences, and suggestions below. Your opinion and experience matters! Onward! Note- my language will tend to lean towards freelancers and individual operators but if you're a formal employee this all 100% applies to you as well. Take a moment to envision the company you work for as your client. It becomes relevant very quickly. On being a web professional Being a web dev isn't easy. Taking anything you love (going to make an assumption there) and doing it professionally means doing what you like and slapping on a bunch of stuff you don't to make it work. It also means you need to up your game in places that involve things that "orbit" web development. It is always a good idea to break focus and bring in new skills that complement and increase your expertise. This is necessary so you can be more than a really good developer- you can become an expert. An expert professional proactively learns as much as possible, they can speak with authority in many areas related to their work through verifiable fact and with consideration for others and their needs. A professional works to be good at what they do but also has skills in multiple areas that allow them to do that. It means the difference between building a website and building an effective website. A professional values: Being a clear communicator. Always #1. Being an educator Being a solution Being a student Some of those seem obvious, so let's unpack 'em. Being a clear communicator means more than speaking well. It means conveying your ideas in a way that others can understand and appreciate. It also means working to understand others because that will affect what you say next. Communication requires translating your technical knowledge into layman's terms and rather than stop at stating a fact or good idea, following up with why. This helps others value things as much as you do and shows respect for others in that you believe that they deserve to know. You are a translator you modify your attitude and approach based on how other people are engaging you by being aware and paying attention. Being an educator means bringing others in on your knowledge. Education helps avoid arguments and shows that other people deserve to know more about what you do. I told a client the other day that there are a lot of people who do technical work that don't take the time to educate those around them, that means what you're doing is just a black box of mystery to them. How can they value what you do if they don't understand it? People have become comfortable with "well I'm not smart enough to do that" or "that's too complex for me", I start with the idea that everyone is capable and it is up to them to find their limits. We aren't teaching them how to program, but we should let other people in on things they might care about. This has to be done in a way that the person you are talking to feels like they are being elevated and not become embarrassed or have feelings that they are ignorant for not knowing something. Example: A client in a meeting started reviewing the mockup and picking it apart. "I don't like the color of that button, and why is it located there? Maybe we should move X above Y. I want the form over here not at the bottom." I addressed each of their concerns. I explained that the button is located there because we know from studying user behavior that it is more likely that people will engage. The color of the button is also a UI strategy, if you look across the entire site you'll see that buttons that do something we want them to do are the same color. The "Menu" button is the same color as the "Sign Up" button, we'll have encouraged interaction by normalizing the experience and by mentally associating that color with action. The background of the call to action form at the bottom of the page is the same color as the button- because it indicates an action that you should take. Being a solution means either providing the solution, or if it isn't possible, brainstorming an alternate option. My least favorite situation is the "yes or no" decision. I try to provide a "yes or yes", where we have two options that can address a concern- even if one isn't as good as the other, or isn't what someone had in mind- you have shown that you are here and ready to work on overcoming a challenge. That makes you and your client a team. A "yes or yes" situation means that you have "become the solution", because that's how people will think about what you bring to the table. This one is worth an example from an experience I just had the other day: The client puts together events and sells tickets online. It's a reasonably large event that means a lot of people buying tickets. A lot of people were buying at the last minute, tickets sell out, and people rushing to buy may need help under pressure, both mean unhappy customers. This means a big influx of customer service requests that are difficult to handle. So: "We are trying to think of a way of how to change the shopping cart system to fix this issue but not sure how." Yes/No - "We could work on that but it may be complex work and will be a challenge to solve the problem by the next ticket date. It's up to you whether that's worth it." Yes/Yes - "Yes it's certainly possible to work on the store, we could also consider having an email sign up form on the website and then send an email when tickets go on sale, then reminders so that it can make it easier on everyone to space out the purchases and prevent last minute pressure. I'm open to both, what do you think?" I worked on a Yes/Yes solution, and they felt a lot better, and they no longer have to worry about it. I also communicated and educated by pairing my suggestion with a clear "why it's a good idea", and then I invited their input after sharing. They're signing a retainer contract with me this week. Being a student seems obvious, but it means being an effective student. We learn how to code better and try new things but it's important to get out of your box. This allows you to be more of an authority on web overall and others will see that as something they can and should trust. It's easy to study what you like, but sometimes you gotta take the classes you don't like to graduate... Here are a few: Get to know how to design websites that work. Learn UI best practices, learn about what parts of web design actually drive conversions things like speed, the number of fields on a form, effective calls to action, the difference between a web developer and a web professional is knowing how to merge what you build with what it has to accomplish. I don't do SEO services, but I have taken a lot of time to study it and understand how my work can be the absolute best when it comes to future performance. It goes beyond semantic HTML. Be familiar with what Google ranks by, the things that matter, and understand what is more important than others. It will affect the structure of the site, it means you will be doing things like creating pages that you probably wouldn't think to. Be good at technicals! Sure you've got a good looking site, but have you truly taken time to study typography? Off the top of your head, do you know what the most effective width of paragraph text on a page leads to more reading by visitors? Do you know an effective length of copy? Learn human/web psychology. How do colors affect perception? What if animations aren't just for making things pretty and cool. etc. Read and study stuff from great people like Mike Monteiro's "Design is a Job" because it will open your eyes a lot to the work you should be doing to support the work you're already doing. Also go watch his video titled "F*ck you, pay me" (spoiler: bad words) Before every project I assume that web design changed and it's up to me to check in on the latest information. Google "web design best practices 2023" before designing, head over to Stitcher.io to check out the latest that PHP has to offer and great tips- using new features may save you time, make your code ready for the future, and keep from using something that will be deprecated (WHY IS MY SITE BROKEN? YOU JUST BUILT IT!). I'm serious. Every single project. I assume my knowledge is out of date in some way. Remember: being honest and saying "you know, I'm not sure but I'll research that and get back to you" or "I'm unfamiliar but that's not something I can't figure out" is a hallmark of a trustworthy professional. Do not be a snake oil salesman, do not lie to get the job, don't be a know-it-all. Learn to defer to others who have more experience than you, for me those are SEO specialists, SEM specialists, and sometimes graphic designers. This shows respect for the work others do and you may get some partners to work with in the future. I have SEO and SEM people I trust and can recommend at the drop of a hat. This also makes you a solution, because you have others ready to help you solve problems. If you get caught BSing your way through something, you won't get away with it. Eventually they'll find out and you won't work with them again. I know people who have dropped off the map because of their arrogance or inability to be humble, you know who gets the phone call for work? Me, not him- and some of the people I work with have known him longer. Building value/client relations If you've made it this far in this ridiculously long post, you'll guess why this section comes after being a web professional. Using communication, education, solutions, and a student are pretty much the only way you can build value. Building value validates your hourly rate, or the price for a project. Those skills create intangible value, "my web person is more expensive, but they're honest, open, and always works with me to get what we need done even when I'm not sure what to do." Be mindful that if you wish you could charge more, consider starting from the basics and build more value. Keep in mind that your clients have a job. They have a business to worry about, they probably need to go pick up their kids from school, payroll is due, and why are sales down this month?! Doing your best to make their experience working with you low stress and relieve them of extra work is invaluable. To build value and establish strong client relations you have to stop thinking like a developer and start thinking like a business- PLOT TWIST: not your business, your client's business. Your work needs to reflect that this is more than a website or web application, it's going to solve problems and be a net gain for their organization. You need to think as if you had an office down the hall, act as if their deadlines matter, through the way you work with clients they should feel like worrying about a website is off the table and they can get back to what their real job is. You know what matters to you? Their profits. What else matters? Their employees effectiveness, their customer satisfaction, etc. Your website/app may highly impact all of those things (and probably will). I had a manager tell me after a presentation for a new product page on a website "I was really impressed, you think like you own a business". Mission accomplished. My response? "I really appreciate the compliment, but it really is a culmination of the work you, me, and the rest of the team have done. I really appreciate you helping move the project forward." Most of the following about initial client meetings and writing a proposal is taken from my other comment so you can skip it if you've read it already. Building value starts from the first time you talk about a website. When we first meet I work to lead the conversation in a way that gets me as much information possible to do the best work I can, to let clients know that I'm here for the "big picture", and to get them to think about what their next website means for them and how much it's worth. In my initial meeting I type a lot of notes and I always discuss the following 7 topics: This may sound odd, but what does your business do? I've looked at your current website, but would like to hear that from you. (There's a chance they haven't updated their current website due to reasons we've talked about here, or that the content doesn't do a good enough job). What are your plans over the coming year? Do you plan on expanding to new locations? New products/services? (Not always, feel the client out to see if they're positioned for this- it also lets you think about whether you need to consider this for the site architecture/code) What do you want visitors to do when they get to your website? What does success look like? Filling a form? Calling? Getting them to your online shop? Visiting your location in-person? Stick around for ad revenue? Explain that websites are supposed to do things with purpose. Open up the conversation about how a website is not a brochure, it's a live business asset that establishes brand strength, is often first impression of a business, and because we just discussed what conversions look like in the previous question- a tool that works 24/7 on their behalf. What do you like about your current site? What don't you like about your current site? Is there something that you want your website to do now that it doesn't now? Get everyone in the room to think about how this isn't a replacement website, we're leveling-up here and it's time to get strategically creative. You'll see that all requires communication, education, solutions, and a being a student. After this, I talk about my values and what is important to me when working with clients. Think about the typical idea that "programmers are hard to work with" or "the IT guy is a jerk and is abrasive". We need to overcome that with new potential clients because it's safe to assume that they've had some not-great experiences. I talk with them about these things that matter most to me: Communication. Always #1. They already know that I've taking the time to communicate, now they know that it's my priority and it makes them realize how much we've been talking about them. This is another thing that I can almost guarantee has not been said to them. Ownership. Businesses/people should own their properties and assets. True ownership means being able to use and update it. If there are services along the way (like maybe Google Tag Manager) or a new hosting company then it should be an account their business owns and I'll guide them through any process to do so. If I were to be unavailable someday- you won't be stuck with a website that was dependent on me. Performance. Re-iterating the need to aim for conversions. Adhering to accessibility rules for legal and user friendliness reasons. Making the site 100% (like Google Lighthouse 100%) SEO ready when it comes time for a specialist to optimize. These questions almost never fail to get potential clients to go wide-open with you. Every single thing we have talked about has now built value and price follows value. This is where we end the first meeting and I tell them that I want to review my notes and put a proposal (I never call it a "quote") together for them and that we can meet/call next. This first meeting usually ends up taking 1-1.5 hours, an initial meeting I had last week took 2. My proposals run 2+ pages. The opening paragraph is the introduction to the project and the approach- if they said they want to expand then the website "will be built with your goals for expansion in mind". The next are bullet points that now re-iterate much of what we talked about in our initial meeting (the 7 questions). Next I talk about timing, to head off "how long will it take"- that this project is a collaboration where we depend on each other to get content, approve designs, consider the features that the website is going to have, etc. We're all in this together, and I am invested in this with them. You're now thinking about their concerns before their questions and you've worked to control that conversation. If I'm asked for more detail, I say that we will set timelines for each stage when we get started- so when design starts the timeline is X, when that is approved we set the next timeline, etc. Then comes the price but I close with the terms of payment. It's usually 40% to get started, 40% on design approval when we go to code, and 20% on launch. Now the client is looking at the price in terms of affordability over the coming X amount of time. Here's what this process has done: my language says "I'm an agency" not "a person who does websites". The client has probably talked to me more than they ever have to other web people. They've shared the good and bad, we have a relationship, and now you have absolutely everything you need to do your best work and they know that. They probably also haven't encountered someone who wants the website to achieve conversions. They now know me as an expert. When you establish relationships with clients consider these items: Don't talk about other clients too much unless you're building rapport and talking about wins before they sign a contract. After that it's like a husband talking to his wife about his girlfriend. You can break this rule if you're talking about a success they've had that you want this client to have and correlate- because you're making it about the client you're talking to. Don't let a client feel like you're too busy or rushed. If an existing or past client needs help with something and it's small- consider what's worth more to you: the money you can bill, or the value of a client relationship. Only consider this if it's small and you can afford it- there is never anything wrong with billing a client. Be selective of who you do this with, don't do it often. Don't create a pattern and expectations. If you do this, be explicitly clear in an email (document it) with something like "I took care of that issue. This on is on the house so we'll skip the bill on this one. Let me know if you need anything else!" Make sure these are small, it makes a client feel like you aren't nickle and diming them. Do not overdo this. Don't do this to win over a bad client. Keep it for your best customers. Yeah, things don't always go well If you're still reading this ridiculously long post... Sh!t happens. You miss a deadline, you got a flat tire, your dog ate your homework. You misconfigured someones DNS and took their site down. Whatever. I would argue that if something goes wrong it's almost always the best opportunity to show how good you are. The only thing that people remember more than a problem is how you handled it. Be honest about it, admit fault, own it. If it was due to an error on someone else's part, I generally try to stay tame on blame and explain what went wrong rather than who did it- unless it was a) something egregious, or b) the person that did web work for them previously. You're not trying to dunk on them (be diplomatic) but you are there to solve problems and making sure they understand why you're now working with them and the other person isn't can be positive. Did a potential client reject your proposal (surely you aren't calling them quotes, right?) Try to negotiate if you're in a position to do it. If you've built value and it really does come down to cost, then look to have the value you've built help in negotiating. Etc. Random stuff I don't send invoices, my billing platform does. Built in document emailing, automated reminders for late clients, time tracking, reporting, expense tracking, customer portals, online payments through Stripe (and others), customizable branding, etc. If you don't have one, check out InvoiceNinja. It's open-source, built on Laravel, has an API, and you know how to put stuff on a web server, right? ? Create a subdomain like billing.yourdomain.com and it's pretty much ready to go. An update email describing less progress on a project than a client may want to hear is better than saying the same thing after they had to ask because they haven't heard from you. Keep communication open and going, let them know that you are thinking about them. Consider offering web hosting to clients when you feel like it's a good fit. Easy and inexpensive, I use StatusCake to monitor all the sites I host so I know if anything goes wrong. So my hosting is "private, exclusively for my clients, and monitored 24/7" Spin up a VPS at a reputable place. For managed hosting I use Dreamhost, for unmanaged Digital Ocean. I have a Dreamhost VPS and a separate managed MySQL DB VPS It's not really an "income source", you don't have to charge much, but it pays for all of my hosting and domain fees (including for my billing platform). They're happy, I'm happy. Very convenient to work on client sites when you don't have to juggle passwords for GoDaddy or some service they've set up. Should you be a company or a freelancer? Up to you. Historically I was a freelancer, then this year I formed an LLC. You don't have to do it but there are benefits Professional image, taxes, a more formal business interaction, legal protections Shows my clients that I'm as serious about what I do for my clients as they are. Consider creating a "marketing deck" Agencies create these to display their services and offerings. They're usually tailored to a specific client, but having a general one to provide people I'm interested in working with is a great professional document. Make it look nice, you don't have to print it, just create a PDF to have and mail. What else can you do? Can you offer more services beyond websites? I provide "web services", so design/build new websites, update/maintain/optimize existing websites Offer building integrations between platforms, provide CRM work where needed if possible Analyze business practices to help optimize workflows Research and provide recommendations for software that solves problems Help manage existing platforms, and train others to use them Think about how a developer gives you the tools for analysis, problem solving, and fast learning. You may learn software faster than other people- I've offered to learn software and then teach it to people who already use it. Think about what you can do that solves a problem while at the same time lowering the bandwidth for employees at a company. This went on waaaaay longer than I thought it would but I just shared whatever came to mind. If you are interested in seeing the deck I put together for my services (and have a reputable account with a history here in the forums) PM me. I don't want to share it in the open since it contains PII. If you found any of this useful, shout out to @kongondo for encouraging me to share. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts, critiques, and suggestions! As always, I am 100% open to being wrong about things that someone else could help me be right about.

After some more tests and polishing, the first version of my new site module NoCoWoCo - No Cookie Without Consent was released on my Github profile. The cookie consent dialogue will need some more love (like fade in/out CSS animations, darken background, maybe make it modal). A future version may add configurations for the links to the imprint and privacy policy pages (if exists), but this can easily be set in the module template file for now, so I don't know if it´s worse but we will see. Feedback welcome but not required of course. Have fun.

Thank you for addressing this so quickly!

Hi @JayGee, of course yes! Thanks for all and don't worry: you did well to take a break after a hard work. I am very happy to have been useful: as soon as I can I check the error in the front end, but as you said I think it is possible to avoid it by assigning default values during module init. I'll get back to you shortly! Bye!

I had two projects in the last 2 weeks making problems due to using short php tags. DDEV has you covered! Just put this short_open_tag = 1 into .ddev/php/my-php.ini and do "ddev restart" ?

Hey @Cybermano ? ... remember me! ? Sorry had a crazy few weeks at work and then a holiday, but finally got around to reviewing your great contributions on this module. I tested it and everything looks great. I merged your changes and also combined our readme files and added a thanks note/credit for you too ? Thanks again - you've taken this module way beyond where I originally planned. Only comment is I noticed when you first install it, the module will error on the front end because no languages are selected. I guess this is obvious when you think about it, but wonder if we should make that a compulsory field or pre-populate with at least one language? Thanks J (Finally changed my name on here too lol)

I want to give a shoutout to the work that @bernhard is doing with his page builder- and all his modules really. He took the time to share the progress he's made on RockPageBuilder. It really does nullify so many issues that I shared above in my 9 WP examples above. Once again, the quality coming out of the PW community continues to take things that exist on other platforms and do them the right way, just like PW itself. Outstanding work! It's a module, so I'm going to count this as PHP related ?

I hope you already asked @adrian ?

Thanks @FireWire Coming back to PHP, Brent and Roman do an interesting monthly review of PHP things...

Version 1.1.6 Fix issue #6 TypeError Wire Oembed class Update Readme

Great read @FireWire, thx for sharing! It reminded me of a conversation with a fried that builds WordPress websites and is very happy with it. It was a terrible meeting to be honest, because I was struggling with my business at that time and I was thinking about what I could change or where I could focus with my skills and with the strengths that ProcessWire has to offer. But he is that kind of person that is better in talking than in listening ? So while I was telling him the reasons for my struggles (like for example that it takes a lot more time to build a website with ProcessWire than it takes to click something together with WordPress and some plugins) he was all the time responding with, "yeah, WordPress is great, we are using Elementor and my junior employee who was a parcel carrier one year ago builds a website for a client in 3 hours and we charge 1.500€ and everybody is happy. That really hurt in that situation, because I think it's the way the industry works (maybe a little exaggerated, which is always the case with him ? ). At least a big part of it. Also, I lost a client because their ProcessWire website was too inflexible. It was too static. So what you @FireWire describe as a benefit is IMHO a big limitation of ProcessWire. We have RepeaterMatrix, but it's still very hard to build a website with flexible building blocks (sections) that the client can rearrange as he/she needs. So the client moved from ProcessWire to WordPress. The main reason was exactly what you mentioned @FireWire: "We need a dev for every change". I think their new website is terrible but unfortunately I don't have any info on how happy they are with the current setup. But I understand that clients have that need. So I built RockPageBuilder. It's been in development for 2 or 3 years now and tries to find the sweet spot in between those PageBuilders that allow the client to to everything (adjusting fonts, colors, paddings, margins or even worse nesting elements so you need a degree in web development to use it) and ProcessWire, where the developer is the only one that controls the layout. It lets the developer easily and quickly define the building blocks of the website (like cards, text, headlines, gallery, single image, etc) and lets the client easily and quickly use those building blocks without having to think of paddings, margins, colours, font sizes or responsiveness because that is defined by the developer who knows how to make it work best for all situations. I'm sure there are niches or websites that don't need this flexibility and that can benefit from the tight skeleton that a developer provides, but in my experience this is not the case for most of the market and that's a problem in my opinion and that was basically the question that I was having in my head when asking for help from my friend and the main driver for building RockPageBuilder. But that's not the point of my post that is getting too long already (sorry for that ? ). Why did I mention all that? Because with all those problems in my head, the solution of my friend (WordPress + Elementor = 3h = 1.500€) sounded terrible for me and I guess you can now better understand why. I thought maybe I have to switch to WordPress as well. Maybe I should build modules for WordPress rather than for ProcessWire ... BUT - and that's now the point of this post and the insight that I took from the meeting with my friend which turned it into a good, helpful and at least somewhat motivating meeting. After telling me for over an hour how great WordPress is and how easy it is to manage for his clients ("every ape understands that in one hour") and after showing me how that really looks on a real life website I thought: "Well, I don't think it is really THAT easy." All the options, all the settings, all the things that could possibly go wrong... It just didn't look like something I'd like to work with (both as a dev and as a webmaster). Then I asked: "And your clients manage their websites on their own?" He: "No, they don't want to. It's so simple, but still, they don't want to do it and pay me good money to do it for them." That was strange. My clients typically manage their websites completely on their own. I don't hear from them very often or at all. It's a totally different experience. I thought a lot about that statement and the whole meeting. If it was really that easy, why would almost all of his clients pay him for doing it? That made no sense. Until I realised: Maybe it is not THAT easy. Maybe these great page builders are not that great for everybody. Maybe less (options) can be more (ease of use and fun). And that perfectly fits what you said @FireWire And (unfortunately) it perfectly fits to this as well: But I can't help. I want to have fun with what I'm doing and I don't want to charge my clients money for managing sites that I've built because they can't to it on their own. --------------- PS: Screenshot tools like greenshot for windows or shotter for mac can help a lot here. Or you could record a video easily (and for free) with a service like https://screenpal.com/ or https://calipio.com/ - maybe that helps ?

Big news! Version 1.3.0 is out - the big documentation update! The new version will activate a new view in the AppApi UI under Setup->AppApi. The button "See endpoints" will lead you to a new overview page which lists all registered api-endpoints. That includes the default /auth endpoints from AppApi, your custom endpoints from routes.php and all endpoints that were registered by a custom api-module like AppApiFile. I found it useful to see where the handler-functions for each endpoint are located, so I included that as well. And wait, there is more: The overview page has a button to auto-generate an OpenAPI 3.0.3 json, that can be imported in tools like Postman or Swagger. And you are now able to add documentation details in the routes definition, to make the generated json even more powerful. Read more about this in the new wiki-chapter. I have worked some time on this new feature and hope that it will bring much joy into your api-developer lifes ☺️ (Please consider buying me a coffee if you like my work)

Before the recent and major core updates to WireCache and Modules, we were on track to get a new main/master version out. I'd like to get back to that, as we are now 10 dev versions ahead of the main/master branch, and with some pretty good and major improvements. That's why I've been focused largely on minor issue fixes the last couple of weeks, getting into more of the fine tuning stuff, and likely will be the next couple of weeks as well. Thank you for opening issue reports as you come across stuff to report. Thanks also to @matjazp who's been helping out in the issues repo, maintaining existing reports and often helping to solve them too. I'm thinking we may have a new main/master version ready soon as July, next month. Most of next week I'll be in New Orleans attending the gymnastics nationals where my 10 year old daughter is competing. Since I'll be out of town, there likely won't be a lot of commits next week. Though there may be enough to bump to the next version, 3.0.221, I'm not sure yet. In any case, have a great weekend and week ahead!

I'll go ahead and invite myself to share some JS thoughts nobody asked for... The don't-reinvent-the-wheel message in the "Do not use React Server Components" video is good, but I think there's a lot more to it when it comes to full stack JS overall. Not only are JS devs largely solving problems that have already be solved, the JS ecosystem is constantly solving problems that it causes for itself. Obviously new features can cause issues to address- but it feels like JS really takes the cake on this one. Hydration and rendering issues were pretty much inevitable when you start overloading the front end and forcing the browser to do so much heavy lifting. Wait... sending a blank page that waits for JavaScript murdered your SEO?! Rendering pages on the server is relatively simple, rendering them in the browser- boy howdy... So then the JS devs cheered when it invented server side rendering... for JavaScript. Then there's the bundle sizes, which is noted in this article about React Server Components: So now they're solving for asset sizes, another layer of complexity to solve an issue that didn't exist (at the level it does now) until massive front end frameworks caused them. We used to worry (showing my age here) about jQuery library sizes... React is excited about saving 240k while the entire jQuery library is 85.4k (uncompressed), and all you have to do is redesign your app architecture with server side JS! BRILLIANT! Before someone interjects to correct me, I'm not saying that React and jQuery are the same, or comparable in functionality and purpose. I am saying that the JavaScript-first approach allowed a lot of people to accept compromises to create the Next Hot Thing™ and a lot of problems with it. JavaScript on the server pretty much just made this more complex by providing increasingly complex ways to make itself more complex- lol, recursion. "But", the full stack JS dev will say, "you can use the same language everywhere so there's consistency." My brother in Christ, you don't even import code between files the same way in Node and and client side ES6. So when I read this in that video: This is from a developer who goes to bed at night thinking about how their Next.js application codebase might be outdated by the time it launches. Then I go back to feeling like this: I used to kind of stress about not pursuing full stack JS, then I realized that I'm happy. Having a front end (whether SSR or a JS framework) and a back end (CMF or non-js app framework) keeps me sane. I know where things go, what they do, and why. There's consistency between projects. It's easier to maintain best practices. My NPM headaches are smaller. My PHP doesn't need nodemon or pm2 to restart the server application if there's a JS error. The amount of documentation I read that has a big red box in the middle saying "Note: this thing that you've built several apps with and know well is going away. We're destroying it because someone on Github said we need to move to stateless functions. Soon there will be pain, and you will cry." is very limited. I made that one up, but you get the idea. I'm not dragging front-end JS frameworks per se, but making the case for why they should not pave the way to the JS-ification of all that is holy and aren't automatically better. Maybe putting JS everywhere has made SPA solutions worse because they didn't leverage how well traditional server side languages worked already. Went off on a tangent here, but I've had a few moments of zen this year about being a PHP developer and wanted to share the energy. All that aside, to answer your question @wbmnfktr I've wanted to pair up a front end framework with PW but haven't had the time or right project to give it a try with. I do like the idea of using PW as a JSON delivery backend in general.

I'll share a bit of a sidenote on the language overall that I think may start to appeal to developers again who are giving PHP a try with or without a framework. PHP 8.0-8.2 has changed the way I write code significantly and features new and old like arrow functions, enums, union typed properties, nullsafe operators, named arguments, return type hinting, constructor property promotion, etc. are fantastic. Performance gains keep rolling in as well. I've enjoyed seeing the deprecations and cleanup in the language- even just committing to using typed properties and return type hinting make so much of a difference in how the language feels. I like the first video above where the person focuses on how enjoyable it can be and I'm always hesitant to give much weight to a JS developer who has some really outdated opinions. For example, these two sets of code do the exact same thing: I think that says a lot and the new features and style of the language are going to continue to boost frameworks as they adopt them as norms. Developers returning to PHP or trying for the first time are going to see something that feels really new. I've been building a Laravel/Vue application and InertiaJS feels like magic the way it marries the SPA front end with the back end. Really enjoyable.

Thanks for these @wbmnfktr. I haven't had a look but I wonder if it is about the JS build hell.

This is true, with a couple of small twists: SearchEngine supports "pinning" specific template(s) to the top of the list, or alternatively grouping results by template. These require making slight modifications (adding extra rules) to the query (DatabaseQuerySelect object) generated by ProcessWire. In the dev branch of the module there is a work in progress "sort by relevance" feature, which also modifies the query. This is based on MySQL natural language full-text search, so it's still up to the database to decide how relevant each result really is. Sorting results by number of matches, giving some fields more "weight" than others, etc. are not currently something that this module does, though I have occasionally considered if they should be. The main issue here is that it would require different storage and search mechanisms, so it's a lot of work, and additionally it would raise a few rather complicated issues (e.g. handling permissions, which is something that we currently get "for free" by relying on selectors.) Not sure how sensible that would be, all things considered. It might make more sense to use SE to feed data to a separate search tool, or ditch SE altogether for that sort of use case ?