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Hi fellow devs, this is a somewhat different post, a little essay. Take it with a grain of salt and some humor. Maybe some of you share similar experience. I don't really mean to poop on a certain group with certain preferences, but then, that's what I'm doing here. I needed to write it to load off some frustration. No offense intended. Good Sunday read :-) React Is NPC Technology Have you ever really looked at React code? Not the tutorial. Not the "Hello World." An actual production component from an actual codebase someone is actually proud of? Because the first time I did, I thought there'd been a mistake. A failed merge. HTML bleeding into JavaScript, strings that weren't strings, logic and markup performing some kind of violation you'd normally catch in code review before it got anywhere near main. "Fix this," I thought. "Someone broke this." It looks broken because it is broken. That's the first thing you need to understand. JSX is a category error. Mixing markup and logic at the syntax level - not as an abstraction, not behind an interface, but visually, literally, right there in the file - is the kind of decision that should have ended careers. Instead it ended up on 40% of job postings. And here's the part that actually matters, the part that explains everything: Nobody can tell you why. "Everyone uses it." Go ahead, ask. That's the answer. That's the complete sentence, delivered with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned whether a thing should exist before learning how it works. The argument for React is React's market share. The case for Next.js is that your tech lead saw it on a conference talk in 2021 and it was already too late. You're supposed to hear this and nod - because if everyone's doing something, there must be a reason, right? The herd doesn't just run toward cliffs. Except. That's literally what herds do. The web development community, bless its heart, has a category of decision I can only call NPC behavior. Not an insult - a technical description. An NPC doesn't evaluate options. An NPC reads the room, finds the dominant pattern, and propagates it. React is on every job posting = React is what employers want = React is what I need to know = React is what I reach for. The loop closes. Nobody along the chain asked if it was right. They asked if it was safe. Safe to put on a resume. Safe to recommend. Safe to defend at the standup. React is the framework you choose when you've stopped choosing and started inheriting. The 10% who actually think about their tools - they're out there running Alpine.js. Which is 8kb. Does the same job. No build step required. Add an attribute, the thing works. Revolutionary concept. They're running htmx, which understood something profound: the web already has a protocol for moving data, and it was fine. You didn't need to rebuild HTTP in JavaScript. You just needed to reach for the right thing instead of the fashionable one. Let's talk performance, because "everyone uses it" is already bad enough before you look at what it actually does. React ships 40-100kb of runtime JavaScript before your application does a single thing. Your users wait while React bootstraps itself. Then it hydrates - a word that sounds refreshing and means "React redoes on the client what the server already did, because React can't help it." Then they invented Server Components to fix the problem of shipping too much JavaScript. The solution: ship different JavaScript, handled differently, with new mental models, new abstractions, new ways to get it wrong. They called it an innovation. I once worked with WordPress and React together. I want you to sit with that. Two philosophies, neither of which is actually correct, stacked on each other like a complexity casserole nobody ordered. WordPress solving 2003's problems with 2003's patterns. React solving 2003's problems with 2013's patterns that created 2023's problems. Together they achieved something genuinely special: all the drawbacks of both, and none of the advantages of either. The PHP you want but in a different way and the hydration you couldn't prevent, serving pages that load like it's apologizing for something. Twenty years building for the web and I've watched frameworks rise and fall like geological events. ColdFusion, anyone? Remember when Java applets were going to be everywhere? Flash was going to be the web. Then jQuery saved us. Then Angular saved us from jQuery. Then React saved us from Angular. Rescue upon rescue, each one leaving more complexity than it cleared, each one defended by exactly the same people who defended the last one, now wearing a different conference lanyard. ProcessWire. That's what I build with. Most developers have never heard of it - which is not a criticism, that's the evidence. You find ProcessWire because you went looking for something specific, evaluated it, and it fit. It doesn't have conference talks. It doesn't have a VC-funded developer relations team. It has a forum full of people who chose it. That's a different category of thing entirely. The same 10% who finds ProcessWire finds Alpine. Finds htmx. Makes decisions that don't optimize for defensibility in interviews. Builds websites that load fast because they don't carry React around everywhere they go. There's a physics concept called a local minimum. A place where a system settles because the immediate neighborhood looks stable - the energy gradient points upward in every direction, so the system stops. Stays. Convinces itself it's home. Even if a global minimum exists somewhere else, at lower energy, lighter, simpler - you'd have to climb first, and the herd doesn't climb. React is a local minimum. The web settled here when it got tired of looking. Stable enough. Defended by enough career investment. Surrounded by enough tooling and tutorials and framework-specific bootcamps that switching costs feel existential. The ground state - simpler, faster, closer to what the web actually is - sits somewhere else, past a hill that looks too steep from inside the valley. The ground state is always simpler. That's not a philosophical position. That's thermodynamics. They don't want you to know that.

I use https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp for that. Very fast. The thing about the plan is that it's supposed to be reviewed before it is being applied, haha. But if you trust it without at least a quick glance, ok. I think Cursor can play sounds when it needs your attention. You could use that to notify you when you have to click the button. Wow. The "Full ProcessWire API access - Query, create, update, and delete pages" is the most interesting for me here. Working right now on a single-file PW-API-docs database based on https://github.com/memvid/memvid. Has semantic vector search (local embedding model), BM25 and all that good stuff. Also supports CRUD. I fed it a good part of https://github.com/phlppschrr/processwire-api-docs/blob/main/api-docs/index.md . File currently has around 35MB. Search is blazingly fast. I implement it as portable skill, not as MCP. Needs a little more love and testing but I'll drop it soonish.

Media Hub update The Media Hub now has a folder view Folders is the default name for the view. It can be renamed to Gallery, Collections, Assets, Media, etc. Media assets can exist in one or more Folders so essentially they operate like Tags Clicking a Folder name will filter the main MediaHub by items within that Folder (and optionally sub folders) On an Asset detail view, you can quickly add and remove an association to a folder Support for Folder nesting, renaming etc is working

Hi everyone, I’m excited to share a new module I’ve been working on: GrokImagine. It integrates the x.ai (Grok) API directly into the admin interface, allowing you to generate AI images on the fly for your Pageimage fields. Instead of leaving the CMS to generate assets, you can now do it right where you need them. Key Features: Progressive Loading: Unlike many AI modules that make you wait for the whole batch, this one loads images one-by-one as soon as they are ready. Batch & Variety: Generate up to 4 variations. The module intelligently tweaks prompts for batch requests to ensure you get different angles and compositions rather than duplicates. Aspect Ratio Control: Built-in selector for 16:9, 1:1, 9:16, and 4:3. Model/Resolution Settings: Support for both grok-imagine-image-pro and standard models, plus 1k/2k resolution toggles. Seamless Integration: Enable it only for specific image fields via the module settings. How it works: Enter your API Key from console.x.ai in the module config. Go to any page with an enabled image field. Type a prompt, hit "Generate," and watch the "skeletons" fill up with images. Click the ones you like (blue checkmark) and save the page—the module handles the WireHttp download and adds them to your field automatically. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/mxmsmnv/GrokImagine Installation: Download or clone into /site/modules/GrokImagine. Install via the Admin Modules dashboard. I’d love to hear your feedback or any suggestions for future features! 🍀

ProcessWire and photo-heavy sites go hand-in-hand. But these sites can also present development challenges, especially when cloning a large site. This post goes into detail about techniques you can use to keep lightweight development sites without all the photo/image overhead. https://processwire.com/blog/posts/developing-photo-heavy-sites/

Included are more than 70 issue fixes and 175 commits. Here we’ll zoom in on the numerous new features and improvements to the core for one of our best new versions yet! https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.255/

I’d like to bring attention to a long-standing organizational issue that affects projects with many template files. As projects grow, the /site/templates/ directory becomes cluttered with dozens (or even hundreds) of PHP files, making it difficult to maintain and navigate. The Problem Currently, ProcessWire doesn’t natively support organizing template files into subdirectories. For example, if you want to organize templates like this: /site/templates/ ├── warehouse/ │ ├── dashboard.php │ ├── packing.php │ └── packages.php ├── customer/ │ ├── dashboard.php │ └── packages.php └── sso/ ├── login.php └── callback.php You currently face several challenges: Alternate Template Filename field is unreliable - The admin interface often strips or resets the path when saving, especially if the file doesn’t exist at that exact moment No automatic discovery - You must manually configure each template’s file path Hooks don’t work as expected - Attempts to hook TemplateFile::getFilename or Template::getFilename don’t fire reliably Current Workarounds The existing workarounds are less than ideal: 1. Bridge files as suggested by @LostKobrakai // site/templates/warehouse-dashboard.php <?php namespace ProcessWire; include(__DIR__ . '/warehouse/dashboard.php'); This creates file duplication and maintenance overhead. 2. Manual Alternate Template Filename for each template: - Requires clicking through every template - Path validation often fails - No bulk operations Previous Discussions This has been requested multiple times over the years: Does PW support organizing Template files in sub Dirs? (2016) Template file in other folder than /site/template (2017) How do I organize a lot of templates? (2017) Proposed Solution I’ve opened a GitHub feature request with detailed suggestions: https://github.com/processwire/processwire-requests/issues/575 The core ideas: 1. Path persistence - The Alternate Template Filename field should reliably save paths like folder/filename.php 2. Automatic discovery - If a template named warehouse-dashboard isn’t found, check for /warehouse/dashboard.php 3. Template grouping in admin - Visual organization in Setup → Templates based on folder structure Why This Matters Large projects - Sites with 50+ templates become unmanageable Team development - Clear organization helps multiple developers Module development - Modules could bundle template files cleanly Modern standards - Most frameworks support organized file structures Use Cases This would benefit: Multi-role applications (admin, customer, warehouse staff interfaces) Projects with many page types Module developers who want to bundle templates Anyone with SSO/OAuth files, API endpoints, or admin tools What Can You Do? If you’ve faced this issue or would like this feature: 1. 👍 React to the GitHub issue 2. Share your use cases below 3. Suggest implementation approaches @ryan - Would love to hear your thoughts on this! Is this something that could be considered for a future release? Thanks for reading, and I hope this resonates with others who’ve felt this pain!