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On the dev branch this week are a few issue fixes, but also some new features. The "Parent" field in the page editor (Settings tab) now is contextual to the page's template family settings. Now it will just show you the allowed parents, if you've configured them in the template. Previously it would show you a page tree to select from anywhere in the site. This saves you time, as well as the hassle of getting an error message after save, should you select a parent that isn't allowed by the page's template family settings. Next, the page tree "Move" actions (that you see when hovering a page in the tree) are now a little smarter. Previously, these Move actions would appear for any page that was either sortable or moveable. But now it also checks how many other allowed parents there are, per template family settings. If there aren't yet any other potential parent pages existing in the site, the page is no longer considered moveable, and thus won't show a Move action. This useful addition was added per Bernhard's request, as was the addition to a couple new classes used in the page tree to better differentiate between public vs non-public pages... something that I understand Bernhard's admin style may soon demonstrate. This week a question came up through email about how to make multi-language "required" fields require a value in all languages the page is active in. Currently multi-language required fields only require a value to be present in the default language. If you want to make them require all active languages, you can do so with a hook in /site/ready.php. I thought it was pretty useful so thought I'd share it here. Though maybe we'll have to add it as a feature. if($page->process == 'ProcessPageEdit') { $wire->addHookAfter('Inputfield(required=1,useLanguages=1)::processInput', function($event) { $inputfield = $event->object; $page = $inputfield->hasPage; if(!$page) return; foreach($event->wire()->languages as $language) { if($language->isDefault()) continue; if(!$page->get("status$language")) continue; // skip languages not active on page $value = $inputfield->get("value$language"); if(empty($value)) { $inputfield->error("Value required for language " . $language->get('title|name')); } } }); }

Customized templates and fields Each and every content type only has the fields it really needs. Books, companies, recipes - it doesn't matter what kind of data my clients or I have to deal with. The templates and fields will reflect that. Therefore clients don't even have to learn anything in regards to creating or editing data. Super easy. It's typesafe (by my definition) We can discuss the meaning of 'typesafe' here but... I think ProcessWire is somewhat typesafe because I define each field, template, relationship, and almost everything else. I know where to expect what kind of data and know what data is allowed in which field. No guessing, no errors. (Sure this depends on your setup and your will to invest some time.) Works perfectly fine for non-developers I won't call myself a coder or programmer - I just tinker around with code and have fun. When I started using ProcessWire, getting around was super easy, and learning the fundamentals took only a day or two. From there on, it was easy-going. It's impressive what you can achieve with only some if/foreach/echo in PHP/ProcessWire. I said it a few years back and still stand behind it: ProcessWire seems to be the easiest way to learn and work with PHP. Low maintenance There are ProcessWire projects of mine that haven't been updated in the last 5+ years and still work without any PHP or security issues. The moment a project is finished and works without flaws it will do so for a very long time. There is no real need to update a project. Small footprint, high performance A ProcessWire website doesn't need that much of a big hosting package. The moment you start using Core cache functionalities or even ProCache most websites are fine and ready for an average amount of traffic. Maybe not ready for a slashdot/reddit/ProductHunt-peak but that's a totally different story. I can get so much out of ProcessWire compared to WordPress (and others I used/tested in the past). ZIP downloads and no real need for a package manager What I really love and enjoy is that you can get everything as a ZIP file, unpack those, move them around and do whatever you want or need with them. Not needing NPM or composer to get started - like in the good old days - is just perfect. In the last 1-2 years I did a lot with NPM due to 11ty and Astro, yet an old-school ZIP file has its very own charme. For comparison: Installing CraftCMS feels good and really nice, yet I absolute don't know what's happening, what is needed, and so on. It's like a blackbox. It works but I don't know why. I hate that.

Looks like the next level of Business Email Compromise just became unlocked (if it wasn't already.) Lutra Security have a nice write-up on the attack they are calling "Kobold Letters". Basically, email clients change the DOM of the email when they forward it, allowing different CSS to apply between the first recipient viewing an email, and subsequent recipients. Allows an innocent-looking "request to forward to the CFO" phishing email to the CEO to become a "request to send funds/data" when received by the CFO from the CEO. Explict verification of the request contents needed now, not just a "Did you send me a message?" question which only verifies that the message was forwarded. Something to be aware of if you work in a team or are responsible for any kind of staff training on phishing etc.

Just to add to this: the Move action is only removed if there is a "Children are sorted by" setting on the parent template or the parent page. Because even if there are no other allowed parents, the Move action is present to allow sorting within the existing parent so long as no fixed sorting is set.

I haven't really digged into the admin customizations of PW-like CMSs I've used like Statmic/CraftCMS but the way you can modify view/behaviour of Inputfield and it's derived classes in ProcessWire is really nice imho.

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.

@MarkE, I reported the issue here: https://github.com/processwire/processwire-issues/issues/1904

Thanks @MarkE, have applied the fix in v0.3.6.

Hi @Robin S, I just had the following error message: I'm not sure exactly what caused it, but changing line 144 to if(!$item->fields || !$item->fields->get($other_fname)) continue; seemed to do the trick

Thanks, ? I was positive I had that selected, but I can't seem te reproduce ?, don't tell anyone.

I've added a new sub-project to my PWGeeks site that turns the ephemeral activities shown in the PW forum's Online Users & All Activity pages into a live-updating, unified, timeline of events - both what users are replying to - and what they are viewing. Whilst it is not built with Processwire, it is related and was an interesting little project to build. I thought I'd post about it here in case it's of use to anyone else. You can find it here: https://activity.pwgeeks.com/ Clicking on a username drills down into their activity, but more on that later. Unlike the usual All Activity view on the forum, this integrates consumption activities (viewing stuff) with production activities (posting/replying.) Unfortunately, due to a limitation on what the forum lets non-logged in readers see, reactions to posts cannot be tracked at this time. I initially thought this might be useful just to make the ephemeral viewing activity more obvious, but I'm now hoping that it can be turned into a tool to more easily help forum moderators deal with spammers (new joiners who quickly start posting). But that's yet to be proven. If you don't wish your read/write activities to be traceable, you can login to the forum in anonymous mode. Architecture The architecture is split into a long-running ReactPHP Watcher Service, and the Index Generator code which creates the page you just viewed with the help of Caddy, PHP8.2 and PHP-FPM. It all runs on a cheap Contabo VPS. Both Caddy and the watcher process are defined as systemd services that are automatically restarted if they fail, or the box is rebooted. Pusher is used to provide a Pub-Sub channel for immediate communication of changes found by the watcher service to anyone who is viewing the index pages - allowing the index to be updated as forum activity is detected by the watcher. Pusher takes care of any fan-out needed between the Watcher Service publishing the events, and any browsers subscribed, via Pusher-JS. I used Pusher's free tier and created an "application" to get my channel and the needed credentials, which went in a .env file. I also turned on subscription counting on the channel within Pusher's dashboard to allow simple console logging of the number of clients connected to the channel at any one time. All detected activity is also stored in a local SQLite DB which allows the Index Generator to build the initial table of activity shown in your browser. Once the page is loaded, JS events take over and continue populating the table in (almost) real time as they come in from Pusher. The Watcher Service ReactPHP is used to create a long running server process, in PHP, that has run for more than 2 months at a time with rock-solid (no, that's not a bernhard module) memory use at 10MB once all the user data is loaded from the DB. I am sure this process would have run indefinitely, but I recently restarted the service to add detection of write-activities on the forum. The major Composer packages used are pusher/pusher-php-server (to publish to my app's event channel) vlucas/phpdotenv (to read the pusher credentials from an .env file) react/event-loop (to run the PHP app indefinitely) fabprot/goutte (for scraping the 2 forum pages) symfony/console (for CLI output formatting and logging) I would probably choose a different scraping library if I were to do this again, but goutte works just fine for now. The watcher only uses two public forum pages; the Online Users page, with the logged in filter applied, and the All Activity page. It is worth noting that the service has no log-in details, so sees these pages as a logged-out visitor to the forums would - which means significantly less information is available to it than to you if you view those pages when you are logged in to the forum. All Activities Page Differences When logged in, the All Activities page shows user reactions to posts (2 below). These are not available to guests, so cannot be tracked by the Watcher Service. If you have purchased Pro modules and have access to some of the VIP forums, then new posts or replies to posts in those forums are also shown (1) Guests have no access to either of these - so VIP forum activities are not tracked. The Watcher Service does not have any login credentials, so this is the view it sees... All activities listed on this page have a UTC timestamp in their HTML attributes that can be used to record the actual time of Joins, New topics and replies being posted. I don't bother recording any "user started following..." activities. Online Users (logged in) You might not be aware of this page on the forum, but it's how the Watcher Service can tell who's viewing forums & posts, creating new topics, or using the personal messaging service. If you have never visited this page on the forum, you want (1) browse, 2(Online Users) and then use the Filter-By dropdown to view logged-in users. The activities listed (3) do not have a timestamp in the HTML - so the watcher limits itself to anything that happened "Just Now" that has not yet been recorded for that user and uses the server's time() to record the event as having occurred. When users view a VIP forum or post, or visit the All Activity page, the user list page does not show what the user is viewing - it just shows their activity as a blank string (See netcarver's activity in the above screenshot.) Other Limitations The main loop of the service runs several times a minute and scrapes and de-duplicates activities from the forum. Any activity that happens on the forum between these samples are undetectable. So, if you visit a forum and then quickly click into a topic, and then back out, your activity will not be traceable. The Event Loop Using ReactPHP is conceptually quite simple, but there are a few things to keep note of. Here's the basics of the Watcher Service... <?php declare(strict_types=1); namespace Netcarver\ForumActivityMonitor; require_once 'vendor/autoload.php'; use React\EventLoop\Factory; ... use Pusher\Pusher; use Dotenv\Dotenv; require_once __DIR__ . '/.format.php'; // output formatting helpers require_once __DIR__ . '/.storage.php'; // storage class $dotenv = Dotenv::createImmutable(__DIR__); $dotenv->load(); // Create pusher publication connection $pusher = new Pusher( $_ENV['PUSHER_KEY'], ... ); $sample_period_seconds = 20; $started_ts = time(); $output = new ConsoleOutput(); $output->write("\n>>> ProcessWire Forum Activity Monitor (sampling every $sample_period_seconds seconds) <<<\n\n"); // Open the local SQLite DB for storage layer... $db = new \PDO('sqlite:path/to/database.sqlite'); $storage = new Storage($db); $loop = Factory::create(); $loop->addPeriodicTimer(1, function () use (&$storage, $started_ts, $sample_period_seconds, &$pusher, &$output) { $now = time(); $can_access_pw_forum = ($now % $sample_period_seconds === 0); $elapsed_time_seconds = $now - $started_ts; showStatusLine($output, $can_access_pw_forum, $storage->userCount(), $elapsed_time_seconds); if ($can_access_pw_forum) { $client = new Client(); try { // Scrape, dedupe & store events ... // publish events via pusher... if (!empty($event_timeline)) { ksort($event_timeline); $table = new Table($output); $table->setHeaders(['#', 'Time', 'UID', 'Username', 'Activity']); $mem_use = memory_get_usage(true); $runtime_str = formatElapsedTime($elapsed_time_seconds); $pusher_events = []; foreach ($event_timeline as $events_at_time) { foreach ($events_at_time as $event) { $uid = $event['uid']; $user_activity_count = $storage->getUserActivityCount($uid); $table->addRow([$user_activity_count, $event['time'], $uid, $event['user'], $event['activity']]); $pusher_events[$event['time']][] = [ 'uid' => $uid, 'url' => $event['url'], 'user' => $event['user'], 'act' => $event['activity'], 'mem' => $mem_use, 'uptime' => $runtime_str, 'type' => $event['type'], ]; } } $pusher->trigger('activities', 'update', $pusher_events); $table->render(); $output->write("\n"); } } catch (\Throwable $e) { $output->write("\nCaught Throwable: ".$e->getMessage()."\n\n"); } } }); $loop->run(); Note that Pusher, the storage instance, and the console are all passed into the loop closure by reference so state can be maintained between each scheduled call to the loop function. The loop closure uses a try {} catch (\Throwable) {} block to ensure it keeps running without systemd having to restart it in case of a PHP error. The catch block does occasionally run - so far if DNS resolution fails when scraping the forum. I've omitted the scraper and de-dupe code from the above as they are still a work in progress, but they populate an $event_timeline array if anything new is detected. The unified array of events (if any) is published via Pusher and each entry includes information about the Service uptime and memory usage. The Index page simply console logs this meta-data from the first event in the array of activities it receives, so you can use your browser's console to track these (along with the number of subscribers to the channel)... I made the event loop run every second, even if it's not time to sample the forum, so the CLI output can be updated regularly. This was especially useful when initially running the Watcher from the command line and I could probably drop the status updates now things are run via Systemd. Running from the CLI on the server, or tailing the log file, gives a nicely formatted table of events as they occur thanks to Symfony's console library and table helper. Systemd Integration To allow automatic restart of the watcher when the VPS is restarted, I added this service definition file to /etc/systemd/system/forumwatch.service that runs the watcher as an unprivilaged user... [Unit] Description=ReactPHP Processwire Forum Watcher [Service] ExecStart=/usr/bin/php8.2 /home/pwfw/activity.pwgeeks.com/watcher/react.php WorkingDirectory=/home/pwfw/activity.pwgeeks.com/watcher/ StandardOutput=file:/var/log/pwforumwatch.log StandardError=file:/var/log/pwforumwatch.log Restart=always User=pwfw Group=pwfw [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target A quick sudo sytemctl enable forumwatch.service && sudo systemctl start forumwatch.service is then all that's needed to get things running. As the output is logged to /var/log/pwforumwatch.log, I also gave it a logrotate.conf file to keep things under control. The Index Generator This is a single index.php file that takes care of reading the most recent user activities from the SQLite DB and generating the table of events from it for that point in time. JS is included (pusher-js) that subscribes to the application's activity channel. Pusher's free tier allows up to 100 simultaneous connections to the event activity channel, and you can see how many users are connected via your browser's console. NB: The following feature is now behind a basic auth login. If you click on a user's name, you'll reload the page with a filter that lists only that user's activities. Here are Bernhard's as he has posted recently as I write this up. Click on the User's name or avatar (1) to be taken to their page on the forum, or click on the "Everyone" or PW logo (2) to be taken back to the all-inclusive index. Trying It Out I recommend opening the activity tracker in one browser on one side of your screen, then opening the Forum (and logging in) in another browser on the other side. As you (and anyone else) visits pages on the forum, you should see things update in the tracker. Also open up the console on the tracker page to see uptime/memory and viewing user count data as they come in. If you read this far, thank you for your time, and I hope this was of some interest or use to you.

Will post repo asap next week!

If you're on PHP 8 and a new-ish version of Latte, you should be able to use the nullsafe operator to safely get the value: <body n:class="$page?->category?->value"> On PHP 7, you can still use the similar nullish coalesce operator, which in this case behaves identically: <body n:class="$page->category->value ?? ''">

You can probably find the executable file from /home/<username>/.config/composer/vendor/bin -folder so running /home/<username>/.config/composer/vendor/bin/wirecli should work. If you want to use it without the path you should add that path to your shell $PATH-variable.