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This week I've been doing a major overhaul of the /wire/core/ directory structure aimed at improving and adding documentation. Now all core classes that will receive their own API.md documentation also have their own directory. The /wire/core/ directory kind of resembles the /wire/modules/ structure now. In addition, new API.md files have been created for the Pages, Page, PageArray, Modules and Module, all of which also improve the online API reference documentation too, which is what those links are linking to. We'll continue adding more API.md documents every week. Every time a new API.md file is completed, it gets sent over to the WireTests module to verify that everything documented in the API.md works exactly as stated. So new tests have been committed to that module as well, and more will be getting added every week. In addition, ProcessWire now has a CLI (command line interface) installer. Installing ProcessWire is as simple as typing this from the command line: php install.php When you do that, it'll present you with the installation options (see below). For human users, the "Standard usage" option is likely to be best, while AI agents will likely prefer the "Alternate usage" option: Standard usage: php install.php --generate Generate ./install-config.php for you to edit php install.php --config install-config.php Install from settings in ./install-config.php Alternate usage: echo '{"dbName":"mydb",...}' | php install.php Install from settings in JSON string php install.php --json '{"dbName":"mydb",...}' Install using an inline JSON string Other: php install.php --help Display all options That last option "--help" displays a giant screen of options, so I won't repeat it here, but take a look if you are interested. New versions of FieldtypeTable, FieldtypeCustom, FieldtypeCombo and FieldtypeRepeaterMatrix next week. Lots more in progress here too so stay tuned! Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

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.

This will retire my whole set of ProcessWire skills... and I love it! I really enjoy the pace and direction you, @ryan, and ProcessWire are going now. Let alone AgentTools in a fresh installation of ProcessWire does some magic with LLMs (from super cheap Mistral, Deepseek, to great models like Kimi 2.6, MiniMax 2.6, and to Opus 4.6/7 and Codex 5.4/5) which was NOT possible in that way 6 weeks ago. 🥰

You need an M5 Mac with 128GB RAM, I think (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmuX-Al7DUs&t=173s) I have a M4 Pro Mac Mini with 24GB RAM. I cannot run anything more demanding than Qwen3-VL-8B, as the model must be kept in memory (you don’t want to wait for a model to load, I load it before starting to work on something and unload it at shutdown). I do not use Qwen3-VL-8B for coding, instead I use GLM, Gemini subsriptions (and recently, for that given project only, the client pays for Claude subscription so that I can use it). I also like the image descriptions Qwen3-VL-8B generates. IMHO, strangely, it is better than any other LLM I’ve ever tried in this use case. My only issue with Qwen3-VL-8B was that in chat mode it spits out emojis by default all the time, which I hate, but the “NEVER use emojis!” system prompt in LM Studio solved that.

I'm back from the future lol. I studied some php in the mean time and I understand what use and & do now haha. https://www.johnfarrell.fr Eventually got round to implementing things. There are still a few things to fix overall. Your suggestions work well, I used slideshow image tags and it pulls in images into my home page slider from a WireArray based on that. Only thing is, it would be nice if I could change the images for mobile portrait layouts, based on the user-agent. Some of my designs don't really suit portrait viewing. I thought about using MobileDetect, and make the slider pull images with another tag, say slidermobile. It looks like that doesn't play nicely with ProCache though... I don't want to change the url for mobile either...as I've printed qr codes for the site already 😅 Any suggestions? A PHP solution would be nice but maybe JS is needed. I may make a seperate post in case others find this useful. The last topics on this are old:

PromptWire is now at v1.9 and includes a few new features and fixes. The list below is AI-generated... Diagnostics can run against production The eight read tools (pw_health, the four pw_db_* ones, pw_logs, pw_last_error, pw_clear_cache) now accept site: local | remote | both. Previously site: remote was silently ignored and queried the local database instead. Bulk page push to remote or both pw_pages_push accepts targets: local | remote | both. Pages go in parent-first order so newly-created parents exist before their children try to attach. Pull pages back from production pw_page_pull source: remote fetches a page that was edited directly in the production admin and writes it into your local sync tree, so you can re-edit and push back without touching the live admin. Phantom diffs eliminated from pw_site_compare Page content is now hashed deterministically across environments. Identical content produces identical hashes regardless of timezone, page-array storage order, or whether a date field has an output format set. pw_modules_list Lists installed modules with version, file path, and install state. Pass site: both to compare local vs production install state in one call. pw_users_list Lists users with id, name, email, roles, and any member_* fields. Pass includeAll: true for every non-system field on the user template. pw_resolve Bulk name-to-id lookup for fields, templates, pages, roles, permissions, users, or modules. Translates names into the equivalent IDs on the target site without one round trip per name. pw_inspect_template Like pw_get_template but each field comes back as {name, type, label}. Designed for spotting fieldgroup differences before pushing changes. File inventories include .module files and symlinked module directories Previously the file sync silently skipped any modules developed in symlinked sibling repos. pw_modules_list bugfix (v1.9.1) The default call with no classes filter was returning null class names. Caught during release validation and patched the same day.

Hi @ryan there are a lot of modules I was working on. I began creating them even before the company project itself got underway (these are apps intended for internal use), anticipating what I would need based on the initial requirements and my prior experience with ProcessWire projects. I wanted to avoid conflating module development with the development of the core application itself. That said, this meant I was able to test some of the modules incrementally, as the need arose; however, a significant portion of the project remains to be completed, and there are other modules—on which I performed only limited initial testing—that I haven't actually put into use yet. In fact, they could be considered by the community as proofs of concept, given that I am not strictly a "professional" developer; I'm a graphic designer, and my role within the company is as Webmaster. Nevertheless—thanks to ProcessWire's ease of use—I have spent years implementing tools that assist the various departments in their daily operations. All these modules were built around a philosophy of "Simple": they get straight to the point regarding my specific needs, though I am not sure whether they would prove useful to others. I have never worked with Git or a version control system, nor have I ever published modules before, so I have no idea what the best way to proceed would be; if you could offer me any guidance, I would be very grateful.

ProcessTranslatePage 1.5 + 1.6 Two new versions released — improved glossary handling and a second translation provider. 1.5 — Better glossary management The module now detects free DeepL accounts (limited to one glossary) and warns instead of showing an error. Existing glossaries on your account are shown as a dropdown so you can select one manually, and there's a new "Delete glossary" option in the settings that removes it from DeepL while keeping the entries in the language fields. 1.6 — Added Google Cloud Translation option My main motivation here was that I just discovered DeepL has discontinued new free API plans, so Google Cloud Translation is now available as an alternative. Both providers support the same field types and write modes. Setup for Google requires a GCP service account; the full steps are in the readme. Glossary support remains DeepL-only for now, as Google's glossaries require a Cloud Storage bucket which seemed a little bit too much effort for the effect. Locale codes (DE, de, EN-GB, en_gb …) are normalised automatically on runtime now, so the format in the language fields doesn't matter anymore.

Ok, we are back in business. Stemplates (Free) is now working more cleanly with the 3rd party module. This won't be an issue again for any other module that relies on template names to function. I had to make a few other changes, but Stemplates is better for it. Here's the updated list: ✅ completely non-destructive ✅ doesn't modify your templates or fields ✅ doesn't touch system templates (admin, repeaters, etc.) ✅ doesn't alter your workflow (if anything, it simplifies it) ✅ free from manual aliases, no mapping files, no rewrite rules to maintain ✅ template files follow your renames automatically (no manual moves, no copy-paste, no backup file shuffle) ✅ third-party modules that reference template names keep working after a rename ✅ API calls using the old template name continue to work transparently ✅ every rename and every config update is logged to Setup → Logs → stemplates so you always have a full audit trail ℹ️ adds a Setup → Stemplates admin page for browsing your folders (purely additive, you can ignore it) ℹ️ writes to the database only when you rename a template, and only to keep other modules' template pickers in sync

I tried integrating Columns, but it had issues with drag-and-drop blocks. So I released the beta version without it. The most important thing now is the stability of the beta version so we can move on to adding other features. Roadmap: Dark theme - there is a bug now, you need to change the reverse colors Localizing text in the editor so that it looks native on websites with a different language set in the admin panel Multilingual support - for example, for websites from Switzerland and Belgium, this is more relevant. Gallery (Slider) - the ability to upload multiple photos at once Textformatter support to allow connection to other text processors Columns plugin for adding column view If you know what works poorly or doesn't work at all, and would like to add something, I'd be happy to hear your suggestions!

Version 2.3.15 includes 9 new validation rules for ZIP folders and a new possibility to remove automatically added notes on certain validation rules (if needed). You will find more information about these changes in the CHANGELOG.md.

I feel the same way when things I'm used to change. E.g. the switch from XD to Figma a few years ago felt unfamiliar at first and it slowed me down. Mainly because I had a lot of things stored in my head that turned out to be different. Now it's the other way around and I could never go back to working with XD. I was also pissed at apple when they updated the OS to use the new Liquid Glass design system, now everyone seems to love it and designers copy it (still not the biggest fan, but I can live with it now) 🙂. I hope the new theme will grow on people. The simpler color scheme (compared to the original Uikit theme) and CSS variables make theming much easier. You can quite easiely customise it to your taste if you don't like the defaults. And it shares some concepts with AdminThemeCanvas like the fixed header and a more minimal modern aesthetic that fit very well for a web app like PW in my opnion. I am using the Konkat theme for all my new projects. @diogo has already sent detailed documentation for the Konkat theme to Ryan, which he will hopefully publish on the site soon. The new docs are especially interesting for module developers. @maximus has also done a great job with the style system guide. I think that will also help demonstrate the benefits of the new theming system. The theme now also supports UIkit components out of the box. We will have to wait a bit for Ryan to decide where those docs will be published. AdminTheme Canvas has served me well for many years, and I’m glad so many of you have used it! If anyone wants to take it over, feel free to send me a DM. But I think it’s better to use the core theme as a replacement.