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For me ProcessWire combines the best of two worlds: The world of CMS/Blogging Platforms like WordPress and the world of Frameworks like Laravel or Symfony. I think edit: I had to let AI write my brain-dump in a more professional way and I could not have said it better: My quick and dirty prompt (don't blame me for grammar etc 😉 ) I know we can debate about AI in general but I think it is very interesting to get this "birds eye view" of aggregated data as it somewhat shows the current information that lies around the web at the moment: I also think that ProcessWire is a perfect alternative for systems like Typo3 and I bet that there are many many developers out there that would be super happy if they knew that ProcessWire existed! See this showcase for example. I think this says a lot! More people need to know about ProcessWire, especially the folks that are not using (or do not want to use) WordPress. All the people that expect building a website to be a "click-click install this plugin that plugin" experience are not our target audience. But all the people looking for alternatives and being unhappy with typo3/drupal/etc. are! ProcessWire lacks a good page building concept. Don't want to say more about that as it would fill a whole other topic 🙂 Many need a second look. Me 10 years ago included! At first sight I totally underestimated the power and beauty of this system. I hope the new website can help to change that 🙂 https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-typo3 High traffic site? Loads of content? Why is nobody thinking of ProcessWire in that case? And here is what AI thinks about Typo3 vs. PW: Really excited to see the new design and website 🤩 Good luck and all the best 🚀 Thx for building and sharing such a great masterpiece with us!

At this point it's a bit hard to put myself in the shoes of someone just getting here, but some highlights from the top of my head: The community is awesome 🙂 The ability to define and modify data structures in the admin using an easy-to-use GUI is still a huge deal. One can quite literally create a full-blown application just by clicking around the admin, especially when combining it with something like ListerPro (though that's a commercial tool, so may be a bit off scope here). Even for those with zero programming know-how, getting a simple ProcessWire powered site (or app) up and running is a (relatively) easy task. Selector engine makes querying data extremely easy, and selectors also scale exceptionally well for complex needs. Most beginners are unlikely to need to know how sub-selectors or OR groups or more complex operator types work, but there is a lot of flexibility hidden underneath. For those that have worked (or fought) with WP_Query, our selector engine is a major selling point. Right out of the box there's a lot of stuff there that even some of the most advanced content management systems don't have — custom content types, amazing language support, numerous field types and inputfields, etc. Honestly, the language support alone is more advanced than anything I've seen in other systems so far, with or without plugins. While it's impossible to compete in numbers with WP, there are actually a lot of high quality modules for ProcessWire. One probably won't be able to carve out a custom application just by slapping modules on top of modules, but there's a whole lot of stuff that they can do. Once you're familiar with the system, extending it with modules and/or hooks is easy. Did I mention the community? Also, ProcessWire is open source and free to use with no strings attached. Unlike some other systems. (Sorry, had to go there.)

ProcessWire has a lot of great features that make it better than many competitors. I'm sure there's much more, but here's a start: Build anything Powerful field types and unlimited templates allow you to build anything. Simple yet powerful API ProcessWire gives you the tools to build what you want, easily and in record time. Headless or hybrid Create a REST or GraphQL API or a traditional website. Any template engine Twig, Blade, Latte or plain PHP? We've got you covered. Multi language Reaching an audience in multiple languages is not an afterthought but built right into the core. Powerful permissions Let users see only what they need to see, with a fine grained permission system. Easily Extensible Modules can change or extend almost any aspect of the system. Long-term backwards compatible We know you hate breaking changes. So do we.

A storm rolled through Saturday and somehow severed our fiber internet connection. So I was offline for half of the week. But that was fine because I didn’t need an internet connection in order to start developing the new PW site design. I’ve been busy primarily with the template files and CSS this week and am making good progress and having fun. One of the new additions to the site is one suggested by the designers, which is to have a features section and call attention to and provide more details about ProcessWire’s broad set of features. For each feature, we'll have a short title, a 1 sentence summary, and a body copy page of details (if they click to "learn more"). As I begin writing the content for this, I could use your help: What are the features of ProcessWire that you think deserve the most attention? (Especially when it comes to attracting new users). I’ll be writing text to describe a dozen or more features in detail, but wanted to make sure I’m focused on those that are most interesting to our current and future users. Thanks for your feedback, and have a great weekend!

+1. This may not sound very shiny and impressive, but you see a lot of systems where URLs are somehow divorced from the data structure and it’s a big turn-off for me. PW’s more manual routing features (urlsegments, path hooks) are also awesome.

Sure: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/markdownload-markdown-web/pcmpcfapbekmbjjkdalcgopdkipoggdi?hl=en-GB

ProcessWires ❤️ features Custom Fields and templates Selector engine Multi language Freedom of output Tree hierarchy with clean urls Permissions system Extensibility: Modules and hooks Image handling. Thumbnails included Community

Ever felt like your ProcessWire emails look like they're stuck in 1999? You know the drill - sending emails is super easy with WireMail: $m = new WireMail(); $m->from('foo@bar.com'); $m->to('xxx@yyy.com'); $m->subject('Hello there!'); $m->bodyHTML('<h1>This is great!</h1><p>I am an ugly mail...</p>'); $m->send(); But let's be honest - they look about as pretty as a website built with Microsoft FrontPage! 😅 🪄 Enter the Mail Pimp Hook! Drop this magical hook into your /site/ready.php (or even better Site.module.php), and watch your emails transform from ugly ducklings into beautiful swans: <?php $wire->addHookBefore('WireMail::send', function(HookEvent $event) { // double check that we got a wiremail instance // this also tells the IDE what $mail is (to get IntelliSense) $mail = $event->object; if (!$mail instanceof WireMail) return; // get current mail body $html = $mail->get('bodyHTML'); if (!$html) return; // get email layout markup $layoutFile = wire()->config->paths->templates . 'mails/default.html'; if (!is_file($layoutFile)) return; // replace ##content## with actual mail content $html = str_replace( '##content##', $html, wire()->files->render($layoutFile) ); // write new body to mail $mail->bodyHTML($html); }); The HTML Just create a beautiful MJML template at /site/templates/mails/default.mjml, put ##content## where your email content should go, convert it to HTML and BOOM! 💥 Every email gets automatically wrapped in your gorgeous template. No more CSS wrestling matches, no more "Why does this look different in Outlook?" headaches. Just pure email beauty, automagically! ✨ Now your clients will think you spent days crafting those emails, when in reality, you're sipping coffee while your hook does all the heavy lifting. Work smarter, not harder! 🚀 #ProcessWire #EmailMagic #NoMoreUglyEmails PS: This is the MJML template that I used: <mjml> <mj-head> <mj-attributes> <mj-all font-family="Tahoma" /> <mj-text line-height="140%" /> </mj-attributes> </mj-head> <mj-body background-color="#efefef"> <mj-section background-color="#ffffff" background-repeat="repeat" padding-bottom="30px" padding-top="30px" text-align="center" > <mj-column> <mj-image align="center" padding="25px" src="xxx" target="_blank" width="200px" alt="Logo" ></mj-image> <mj-text>##content##</mj-text> </mj-column> </mj-section> <mj-section> <mj-column> <mj-text font-size="10px" color="#a0a0a0" align="center" > powered by <a href="https://www.baumrock.com/" style="color: #158f66" >baumrock.com</a > </mj-text> </mj-column> </mj-section> </mj-body> </mjml> VSCode has an extension to get a live preview and export MJML to HTML: And here are some other free templates: https://mjml.io/templates I use https://www.base64-image.de/ to add the logo to my mail template as src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4QAWRXhpZgAATU0AKgAAAA..." to avoid headaches with image paths, remote assets blocking etc.

So much to agree with in all of the above. My brief contribution: I came to ProcessWire having used WordPress and CodeIgniter. WP was fine if you just wanted a really simple website, but rapidly got frustrating if you needed something a bit more (adding a bookings capability to my holiday let website involved all sorts of contortions). CodeIgniter (ok, a bit passé now, I know) worked ok but needed a lot of coding and was a bit of a straitjacket. I looked at a whole load of CMS alternatives - Drupal etc. - but only ProcessWire had the right balance between CMS and CMF based on a really simple and intuitive concept (everything is a page). Completely unopinionated, but quick to get something working which can then be built on as necessary. As your needs grow, so you realise that PW grows with you.

It's possible that I'm still missing the point, but if the underlying problem is that there are multiple data sources with differing data formats, there are only two top level approaches that I can think of: write a separate import script / profile / configuration for each data source, or write an adapter per source that converts them to single, uniform format, which you can then import. For me personally scraping is never the preferred option, as it comes with a number of potential issues. For one you may not be able to scrape all relevant data, or you may get malformed or partial data — and you may not know it before it is too late. Getting your hands on the raw data is almost always much, much better. At the very least I would contact each vendor before scraping to confirm that a) they think it is doable and b) it won't result in them blocking you due to your scraping tool exceeding rate limits etc. If you can't make sense of the data format you've got, ask for some kind of documentation. The worst case is that you need to figure things out on your own — that can easily lead to nasty issues, as your assumptions could be completely wrong. If there is no way to get solid documentation for the data, let your client know that it's essentially a guessing game at this point. Especially when money is involved that's not a great situation to be in. Anyway, from what I've heard so far this all seems completely doable, but could obviously get pretty time consuming — and hence costly 🙂

https://github.com/teppokoivula/ImportTool was built to handle a similar need, in case you want to check it out. It’s most useful for imports that may be needed again later, though; the idea is that you define an import profile, which can then be executed via the admin while also providing an input file for the data. Depending on the data I usually set limit somewhere between 50-500 pages and set the “on_duplicate” setting for the profile to “continue”. This way you can keep running the same import profile with the same data file until you’re done. This module is a bit unpolished, but in use on a few of our sites 🙂

Nervously! 😆 On a more practical note, I built an import from CSV routine that imports data in batches and requires the ImportPagesCSV module. In client's case it was to import user data exported to CSV files from their accounting system. ImportCSVPages imports the CSV data to pages under page named "Imported Customers CSV". Hard set limit was 50 per run. In site/ready.php: // Turn imported CSV customer list to users $wire->addHookAfter('Pages::saved', function (HookEvent $event) { $pages = $event->object; $page = $event->arguments(0); if ($page->id !== 5251) return; // Import Customers - use your own Import data parent page if ($page->children->count === 0) return; $return = $event->return; $users = wire('users'); foreach($page->children('limit=50') as $child) { // check user not already created $childEmail = $child->email; $emailAlready = $users->get("email=$childEmail"); if($emailAlready->count > 0) { wire('log')->save('myclient', "User with email,". $child->email . " already exists"); continue; } $customer = new User(); $customer->of(false); $customer->template = 'reseller'; $customer->name = $child->name; $customer->parent = 1033; // change to the 'real' parent, eg products $customer->addRole('login-register'); $customer->pass = bin2hex(random_bytes(10)); $fields = $child->getFields(); foreach ($fields as $field) { $fieldName = $field->name; $customer->of(false); if ($customer->template->hasField($fieldName)) { $customer->set($fieldName, $child->$fieldName); } elseif ($field->children) { // for fields within fieldsets foreach ($field->children as $child) { $childName = $child->name; if ($customer->template->hasField($childName)) $customer->set($childName, $child->$childName); } } } if(!$customer->hasRole('login-register')) $customer->addRole('login-register'); $customer->save(); $pages->delete($child); } $event->return = $return; }); Having a hard limit of 50 helped if things went wrong and didn't trigger timeouts. Process is: Import the data under the "Imported Customers CSV" Check the data is OK If OK, edit and save the "Imported Customers CSV" page to invoke the hook If the import didn't work, I could easily delete all the child pages of "Imported Customers CSV", make adjustments and try again.

Yeah, Yifan has some great videos on the subject. And context is all that matters. Since LLMs nowadays support larger context windows, we can take advantage of that and pass quite a lot of docs for in-context learning. I have a docs folder in each project, mostly with markdown files that contain detailed requirements for a feature, documentation for obscure libraries etc. I then pass those to the assistant via the @files feature when needed. This makes a big difference in code quality. Haven't used PW-specific examples but will definitely try that out. So thanks for sharing this idea! I am using a Browser extension for downloading webpage content as markdown. It is quite fast and much cheaper than passing this in via @web to windsurf, which eats up lots of credits.

Hello there friends, As a learning challenge, with Claude Sonnet AI's help, I installed the PEST testing framework and created a bunch of tests for Ryan's Invoices site profile. I'm pretty happy with it. 🙂🙂 You can check the project on GitHub: https://github.com/sjardim/processwire-invoices-with-pest To try it, just install the site profile on a fresh PW project as instructed here: https://processwire.com/blog/posts/invoices-site-profile/ and copy my project's : the entire /test folder, phpunit.xml file and composer.json file and install composer dependencies. Next, in your terminal, run `./vendor/bin/pest --filter=InvoicePageTest` to see the magic. Here's a preview of the InvoicePageTest class: I hope this help you in your testing journey!

Nice. Just wanted to mention Cerberus as an alternative to MJML if you want to use email-friendly HTML templates directly.

Xforum is a proof of concept front end forum system and is currently for local testing only. To install, have a blank site ready using the newest Processwire version. Follow the instructions found in the xforum_install.txt file. There is no help documentation at the moment, but it is pretty easy to figure out once you click around a bit. I'll attach any new help files here as they are created. Have fun with it and any questions please don't hesitate. XforumPOC_1.0.0.zip

Interesting topic…have you seen https://gitingest.com to pull in specific code from a repo to give your chat more context?

No, spot on! Thx that was very helpful 🙂

Want to share the name of the extension? 🙂

That's really cool! Thanks! 🙂

Further to what @wbmnfktr said, I think ProcessWire can be described as a low code data designer. You still need a front end developer to build public facing pages, but potentially someone with no backend development skills can build a complex range of templates for different data. In more complex scenarios, yes, it might be necessary to write some modules or hooks, but a huge amount can be done without writing a single line of code, but later, if people want to package up and subject to source control, there are third party modules like RockMigrations that allow taking all the field and template definitions and storing them as migrations files. In a sense, ProcessWire in this respect is like a headless CMS of which there are a few out there that allow custom data design without coding. But wait there's more. ProcessWire can be used as a no code/low code headless CMS, but it also assumes that you'll want to output the data somehow, and give you all the tools to do it, without being opinionated. If you just want to output fields directly into HTML template files with some simple PHP codes, fine, you can do it. If you want to output as API calls and use a javascript frontend framework, you can do it. (Not a core feature, but there is a third party module to enable it) If you want to use a templating language, you can do it. (also via third party modules, or use your own)

The main reason I switched to ProcessWire was the fact that I could add an unlimited amount of templates with 100% custom fields to my projects. Back in the days WordPress had two types of content: posts, pages - I remember when the feature to have pages was added. 😂 So I started using Textpattern which allowed me to have at least 10 custom fields and individual page templates. Which worked pretty well for a while but ... after some time I needed more fields, more templates, and found ProcessWire. In that moment I was able to create templates for books, restaurants, movies, musicians, whatever type of data I wanted and needed. Fields became more than just strings or dates. It was possible to have textareas, repeaters, tables whereever and whenever needed. That was pretty much 10+ years ago. 🤯 Oh... and of course having this was awesome as well: an unlimited amount of backend users, user roles, access management, multilanguage support, resource friendly and worked perfectly fine even on low-end cheap shared hosting.

I took a way easier route and grabbed the one from Yifan here: https://gist.github.com/yifanzz/3cfb8f9065769ffbf94348255f85597d more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG-utUqVrb0 At one point I gave this one a try but will keep only parts from it in the next iteration of my rules file. https://github.com/kinopeee/windsurfrules/blob/main/v5-en/.windsurfrules Another thing I started doing is adding files with examples: PHP or programming isn't the real issue with any of the current bigger LLMs, but ProcessWire itself as there isn't that much training data around - compared to WordPress, NextJS, Angular, ... whatever. So adding the examples makes it pretty easy and drops the amount of credits needed by a good margin.

Just gave it a super quick try, while giving guidance based on existing code and purpose. I used Deepseek V3, as it is giving me more issues than Claude or OpenAI on average, and ... even though it was a simple task it did a great job. I need to test on the weekend with this as my current rules do things here as well - as they should. The rephrasing might just be the cherry on the top! Claude Sonnet does a great job as always but faster.

this tutorial shows an application of the field: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/8635-simple-example-for-widget-management/?p=83418 whereby the user is able to select what pages a widget shows on, using a selector, or series of selectors.. so in this scenario, a widget can end up showing under some very complex/flexible circumstances, such as: - all child pages of a particular page - selected pages almost anything you can think of in terms of selecting a page with the selector api