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Here's a copy of my blog with some reflections on building my first site with ProcessWire as someone coming from Drupal: peopleandplanet.org ProcessWire is an open source CMS Content Management System or Framework (CMS / CMF respectively) using PHP and MariaDB/MySQL. It's been around a while, humbly gathering users and sites. I spent a good while reviewing lots of open source CMSes recently as I have previously relied on Drupal 7 (excellent) and didn't like Drupal 8+ nor BackDrop (a fork of Drupal 7). WordPress? not with Gutenberg/React and all those plugin ads, thanks. Turns out I'm quite picky about CMSes! This is because my role is developer, trainer, implementer, themer, discusser of problems and solutions and dreams. I have personal relationships with my clients and am here to help. So I need a system that makes it simple for them to do as much as possible without me, while also being flexible enough for me to rapidly develop new features. So I was shopping for me and my clients, not just one of those parties. ProcessWire seemed a good balance, and once I started developing with it I was hooked. I've now launched my first site with it: peopleandplanet.org and my clients are pretty pleased with it, and I have another job in the pipeline. Templates and pages In ProcessWire, everything (even users!) is a Page, and every Page has a Template. So in Drupal-speak, it's kinda like Page = Content/Entity and Template = Content/Entity Type. A Template is configured with lots of options and describes what fields apply. Templates don't all need to be renderable, but typically are, so generally have an accompanying Template File. Key implementation decisions I made There are many ways to generate and theme page HTML in ProcessWire and I went through them all! Here's what I settled on: Use Page classes: these are PHP classes which add/bend functionality for a particular page/template. Doing pre-processing of data this way seemed the cleanest way to organise things, using inheritance to share code between similar templates. I used the excellent Latte templating engine instead of plain PHP or other options like Blade/Smarty/... Latte is context-aware which makes templates cleaner and clearer to look at and safer because it knows to escape content in one way as HTML text and another as an attribute, for example. The final clincher is that it uses the same syntax as PHP itself, so as a developer hopping between PHP and Latte, there's much less brain strain. Use PageTableNext. This is similar to Drupal's Paragraphs or Gutenberg's Blocks (ish). It allows a page to be built from slices/sections of various different templates, e.g. I have things like "text" and "text-over-image" and "animated stats" etc. These let authors make interesting pages, applying different preset styles to things, giving a good mix of creative control and theme adherence. What I liked Beyond the above features, I liked these things: Fairly unopinionated: the core is quite small and everything is a module, so when you write your own module, you have similar level of access. e.g. I was able to make a core module behave differently by using hooks rather than having to maintain a patch of a core code file. The selector API is a domain-specific query language for fetching page data that makes a lot of common things you need to do very easy and clear to read. I like readable code a lot. A lot of basic CMS features are implemented really nicely; thought has gone into them. e.g. Drupal has a redirect module that can add redirects from old URLs when you update the 'path alias' for a page - great - but ProcessWire's implementation (a) prevents you making circular redirects which is a quick way to kill a Drupal site by accident that's happened more than once, and (b) has some useful rules like let's only do this if the page has been in existence for a little while - because typically while first composing a page you may change the title quite a few times before you publish. e.g. when you save a page that has links to other pages in it, it stores the page IDs of those other pages too, and when the page is fetched it will check that the URLs exist and still match the ID, fixing them if needed. Images - have 'focus' built in as well as resizing etc. so if a crop is needed you can ensure the important content of the image is still present. Booting is flexible; it enabled me to boot ProcessWire from within Drupal7 and thereby write a migration script for a lot of content. There's a good community on the forum. A forum feels a bit old fashioned, but it's good because you can have long form discussions; it sort of doubles as a blog, and a lot of new features are announced in forum posts by Ryan and others. The Tracy debugger is mind-blowingly good, just wow. Modules - third party or core - are typically very focussed and often tiny. This is a testament to what can be achieved throught the flexible and well-designed APIs. Weekly updates on core development from both the lead developer on the blog and the community, both with RSS feeds so it's easy to keep updated. What I don't like Logging is weird and non-standard. I prefer one chronological log of well categorised events, but instead we have lots of separate files. This is a bit weird. One thing it is opinionated on is that there should be a strict hierarchy between pages and URLs. I like that level of order, but in real life, it's not what I needed. e.g. People & Planet has three main campaigns and it wanted those at /campaign-name not /campaigns/campaign-name. And we wanted news at /news/2024-03-25/title-of-news-article, but we don't want a page at /news/2024-03-25/ and we want the news index to be under an Info page in the menu. This meant I had to write a custom menu implementation to implement a different hierarchy to display what we wanted it to look (3 campaigns under a Campaigns menu, the news index under an Info menu). There was a page hook for having news articles describe their URLs with the publish date, but this took quite a bit of figuring out. Ryan Cramer leads/owns the project and other contributors are sparse. He seems like a lovely person, and I'm super grateful for his work, but there's only one of him, so this is a bit of a risk. Also, the code has no phpunit tests. Gulp. There have been various initiatives, but this sort of thing needs to come from a core team, and it's not a priority for Ryan. I love tests, they help avoid regressions, help document designed behaviour, etc. Likewise, there's a styleguide, but it's not adhered to, so... Right decision? I'm very happy with it, and it seems a great fit for my clients' needs, and they're very happy. All software has risks and I got burned twice with Drupal 8/9 - once backing out after months of development; another project that went to completion I regret and dislike administering/maintaining now. But so far, so good, and I intend to use ProcessWire for other projects (including replacing this website) very soon. Contributions I have two ProcessWire modules that are there for anyone who needs them. TagHerder provides a page at Setup » Tag Herder that lists every tag and every page tagged with that tag, and provides three options: Rename the tag; Trash the tag; Replace the tag with another. Useful for cleaning up tags that have gotten out of control! EditablePublishedDate lets you edit the published date of a page. Useful for entering historical page information or such.

PHP is slow... well, maybe not that slow at all. Interesting read. https://dev.to/realflowcontrol/processing-one-billion-rows-in-php-3eg0

This is pretty amazing stuff. I recently worked on a few tasks for a client that involved parsing ticket sales data in CSV and Excel formats. I was only working with ~67,400 rows of data. I used my go-to library Simple Excel which gets the job done and has a great interface for looping, filtering, reading, writing, etc. data. Maybe I'll try playing around with that implementation at some point... I guess then I'd have to figure out how to write something efficiently- because deadlines can wait (haha). Good share!

Hi everyone! I built this module trying to solve the following issue. Most of the time I use Repeater Matrix types with a few fields wrapped in a fieldset that are for configuring the behaviour/rendering of a specific repeater type, and are not really content related so I had always wanted to have them kind of hidden, but with a small preview of that the options are set (which I've yet to do). https://github.com/elabx/FieldtypeFieldsetPanel

Have you tried giving the editor role page-sort permission on the parent template?

Hey, I just came across this thread because I ran into this issue. It turns out if you feed the configuration a single spaced empty string it will not wrap the WYSIWYG content in the paragraph tags. And for whatever reason, span was causing my system to become unresponsive. I didn't see this mentioned here or in the TinyMCE forum so figured I'd share here incase it helps save someone some time. Go to: Modules > Configure > InputfieldTinyMCE scroll down to Default setting overrides... Hack the Planet!

One way, if your parent pages have different templates and their children should also have distinct templates, is to use the template family settings. Otherwise I think you may need to hook Pages::moveReady - see https://processwire.com/api/ref/pages/move-ready/

Really great writeup @artfulrobot You might find that TracyDebugger helps with this to some degree - its "Processwire Logs" panel combines all logs into one ordered reverse chronologically. It also highlights when you have new errors / notices since you last viewed the site.

Hi @bernhard, Just revisiting this. I hadn't noticed, but @Klenkes is correct - the orphaned block deletion is broken again in newer versions of RockPageBuilder. It did work up to at least v5.0.3 but it looks like an extra check was later added in getUnusedBlockIds(): // never delete blocks younger than 10s 'created>' => time() + 10, Which I believe is saying "find unused blocks that also have a created time newer than 10 seconds in the future". Hence it's not going to find any. Changing to this: // never delete blocks younger than 10s 'created<' => time() - 10, Appears to resolve the problem, and I think is doing what the comment says? Thx, Ian.

I really like this. Thank you.

Great feedback. Regarding the second point of the things you don't like, ProcessWire provides core functions to manage the urls as you wish. Either with URL Hooks or with the templates' URL segments settings you can easily opt out the tree hierarchy structure of the pages. Thanks for your modules contributions.

I tried jan, it is interesting, because it allows you to use different LLM (also the OpenAI ones). I use Mistral Instruction 7B Q4 for this: (The code blocks have a copy to clipboard button on hover, so you get it fast to an editor of your choice... )

That looks very interesting, currently I use PhpSpreadsheet for such tasks, but I think the library is actually too big for what I use ?

That sucks, but I'm guessing they might make exceptions for some projects, so I'll have to ask them. Still, not nearly as much of an issue as what CKEditor did. But if it stays GPL and they don't make an exception for any projects, then most likely we couldn't include TinyMCE 7 with the core. In that case, we'd develop it was a non-core module, and folks would have to install it as a 3rd party module (in /site/modules/). ProcessWire's core is completely separate from what people develop or what they might add-on their site, so they don't have to share the same license. PW is built so that modules are independent of ProcessWire in the same way WP and PW are separate applications that can run on the same webserver, or a website is independent of the webserver that's delivering it, or a browser is independent of the HTML it renders or JS it executes. https://processwire.com/about/license/3rd-party-files/

Hello Ivan, Not yet. But unlike other interesting things that I haven't tried yet, I wanted to post the link anyway. I'll try it on another computer than my main one, on an old laptop or desktop, first with the "Mistral" model I think. A few GBs are needed if I remember correctly. During a few seconds I thought about the AIs taking control of our computers without asking permission in the future... They could also help to protect them. But let's not forget data poisoning. Have a nice week Ivan! Have a nice week also @szabesz!

This week there is a new version of the Site Profile Exporter module released (ProcessExportProfile). This is the module that was used to export last week's Invoices Application Site Profile. While this module has been around for a decade now, this latest version makes some nice improvements, which I'll cover below. @bernhard pointed out to me that he's using the module to make a new site profile, but he found it cumbersome to enter all the profile information every time he wanted to export the profile. So this new version now lets you update an existing profile with 1-click, making it much easier to re-export a profile. This version also adds a preview of what your profile will look like in the ProcessWire installer (the part where the user would select it for installation). Lastly, this version has several other small improvements and fixes as well. If you've ever thought of building a site profile, this module now makes it that much easier. This week I've also been starting to focus on the next long term client project, which is kind of a different and unique one that I look forward to. That's in part because I expect it will also involve a lot of improvements to the ProcessWire core and ProFields modules as part of it. Some of my favorite ProcessWire improvements have accompanied projects like this. There just isn't any substitute for real-life, large-scale projects when it comes to improving and optimizing the core and modules. Next week will be a shortened week here, so I'll likely post the usual weekly update Thursday rather than Friday. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

can confirm same behaviour. Disabling TracyDebugger helps. Fatal error: Exception: Unable to obtain lock for session (retry in 30s) (in xxx/wire/modules/Session/SessionHandlerDB/SessionHandlerDB.module line 96) #0 [internal function]: ProcessWire\SessionHandlerDB->read('836ab08de536179...') #1 xxx/wire/core/Session.php(327): session_start(Array) #2 xxx/wire/core/Wire.php(413): ProcessWire\Session->___init() #3 xxx/wire/core/WireHooks.php(952): ProcessWire\Wire->_callMethod('___init', Array) #4 xxx/wire/core/Wire.php(484): ProcessWire\WireHooks->runHooks(Object(ProcessWire\Session), 'init', Array) #5 xxx/wire/core/Session.php(205): ProcessWire\Wire->__call('init', Array) #6 xxx/wire/core/ProcessWire.php(581): ProcessWire\Session->__construct(Object(ProcessWire\ProcessWire)) #7 xxx/wire/core/ProcessWire.php(315): ProcessWire\ProcessWire->load(Object(ProcessWire\Config)) #8 xxx/index.php(52): ProcessWire\ProcessWire->__construct(Object(ProcessWire\Config)) #9 {main} in xxx/index.php on line 64

@rookie I wish you hadn't said that. I've been using Windows since 1987. Probably need a blood transfusion to get it out of my system.