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Something I've wanted in ProcessWire for a long time is full version support for pages. It's one of those things I've been trying to build since ProcessWire 1.0, but never totally got there. Versioning text and number fields (and similar types) is straightforward. But field types in ProcessWire are plugin modules, making any type of data storage possible. That just doesn't mix well with being version friendly, particularly when getting into repeaters and other complex types. ProDrafts got close, but full version support was dropped from it before the first version was released. It had just become too much to manage, and I wanted it to focus just on doing drafts, and doing them as well as we could. ProDrafts supports repeaters too, though nested repeaters became too complex to officially support, so there are still some inherent limitations. I tried again to get full version support with a module called PageSnapshots developed a couple years ago, and spent weeks developing it. But by the time I got it fully working with all the core Fieldtypes (including repeaters), I wasn't happy with it. It was functional but had become too complex for comfort. So it was never released. This happens with about 1/2 of the code I write – it gets thrown out or rewritten. It's part of the process. What I learned from all this is that it's not practical for any single module to effectively support versions across all Fieldtypes in ProcessWire. Instead, the Fieldtypes themselves have to manage versions of their own data, at least in the more complicated cases (repeaters, ProFields and such). The storage systems behind Fieldtypes are sometimes unique to the type, and version management needs to stay internal [to the Fieldtype] in those cases. Repeaters are a good example, as they literally use other pages as storage, in addition to the field_* tables. For the above reasons, I've been working on a core interface for Fieldtypes to provide their own version support. Alongside that, I've been working on something that vaguely resembles the Snapshots module's API. But rather than trying to manage versions for page field data itself, it delegates to the Fieldtypes when appropriate. If a Fieldtype implements the version interface, it calls upon that Fieldtype to save, get, restore and delete versions of its own data. It breaks the complexity down into smaller chunks, to the point where it's no longer "complexity", and thus reasonable and manageable. It's a work in progress and I've not committed any of it to the core yet, but some of this is functional already. So far it's going more smoothly than past attempts due to the different approach. My hope is to have core version support so that modules like ProDrafts and others can eventually use that API to handle their versioning needs rather than trying to do it all themselves. I also hope this will enable us to effectively version the repeater types (including nested). I'm not there yet, but it's in sight. If it all works out as intended, the plan is to have a page versions API, as part of the $pages API. I'll follow up more as work continues. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week I've been working on something a little different: developing a new site profile in ProcessWire. Actually, I should probably call it an application profile rather than a site profile, as it's not a website profile. Instead it's a profile for an invoicing application in ProcessWire. Though you would install and run it on a web server, but it would be an independent application rather than part of a website... perhaps something you run in a subdirectory, subdomain, or even localhost. This is something I've been wanting to build for awhile—ever since the invoice service I use raised their rates beyond my budget. So I thought I'd build a replacement that I could use, as well as share for others that might have a similar need. I think it might also be a pretty decent PW profile example in general, too. I'd originally considered building it as a Process module but decided not to for a few reasons. Though the biggest one is that a site profile enables the greatest potential for customization and expansion according to each person's needs. Since you can expand upon it by adding your own fields and templates, or editing existing ones, most can really tailor it to their own needs a lot more easily than they could if it were a Process module. Likewise, since the actual invoices (and invoice emails) are rendered from front-end pages, you can customize the look and feel of them to match your brand very easily. (This is something I always wished I could do with the invoice service I've been using previously) This invoice profile requires nothing other than the ProcessWire core. It has no 3rd party or Pro module dependencies. I've got it largely functional at this stage, though will be putting a couple more weeks work into it before releasing it. I'd like to build in the option for clients to pay an invoice with a credit card (via Stripe) for instance. Below are a few screenshots of the work in progress. First is the page-list which shows the current invoices in the system and their status. (click image to view larger) As you can see, there are also pages for Clients and Settings. The client pages contain all the information about each client that invoices can be created for. The Settings page is where you can edit your own company information, logo and billing preferences. Next is the invoice editor. Here we have a repeater for each line item in the invoice. We also have a repeater for payments. All of the totals add up automatically as you type (Javascript added via hooks). They are also calculated automatically at the server side, so that everything stays consistent whether working with the API or in the page editor. (click image to view larger) At the bottom of the invoice editor you'll see a collapsed input for "Invoice action". This is where you can select actions to apply to the invoice. The two we currently have are "Email invoice to client" and "Email invoice to another address". Next up is what we see when viewing the invoice on the front-end. This is just the output of a template file but it is optimized for printing, saving to PDF and sending through email. I've kept it intentionally simple but of course the logo would be replaced with your own and all markup/styles are fully under your control. (click image to view larger) What I plan to add next are payment options, enabling a client to pay by credit card right from the invoice URL or email. What do you think, is this type of PW profile useful to you or someone you know? I've initially built it towards my own client invoicing needs, but I'm curious what other features you would like it to have? Or do you think it's better to keep it simple so that people can more easily take it in different directions? Thanks for your feedback. Have a great weekend!

140 commits, 55 resolved issues, dozens of new features, eight contributors, and five new pull requests make yet another great new version of ProcessWire. This week I’m happy to announce another new main/master branch version of ProcessWire, version 3.0.210. Like most main release versions, there is a lot here. This post covers some of the most notable additions and improvements— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.210/

I did my first talk ever yesterday @ PHP Meetup Vienna!! Once more everything was a lot more work than I first thought, but I'm quite proud of the result 😎 What do you think? Did I forget something important? It was really hard to put 10 years into one hour... The recording was not planned at first, but I thought I'd just give it a try and everything worked quite well 🥳 If you like what you see please share it with others so that ProcessWire gets the attention that it deserves 🙂 Special thanks to @gebeer for showing me ProcessWire in 2013 🤗

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Holidays! The plan is to release a newyear main/master core version. I'm not currently aware of any showstopper issues specific to the current dev branch, but if you are aware of any, please report them in the GitHub issues repo (or reply to an existing issue report), as the dev branch will soon become the master branch. There's not yet a hard deadline, so whether it's end of December or the 1st week of January, we'll have a new release out shortly. The dev branch is very stable right now (likely more stable than the master branch) so it's a good time to get a new version out. I've also been holding off on several larger updates to the dev branch in anticipation of this merge to master and new release, so I've likewise been holding back on any commits that would add more to test. Once we get a new main/master release out there, the dev branch will then get InputfieldTinyMCE merged into it and there will be some JS library updates, along with other larger updates, and those that would need dev branch testing. Thanks for reading and I hope that you have a great holiday weekend and week ahead

PAGEGRID – A visual page builder for ProcessWire. Design fully responsive websites (or parts of them) without writing any code. Use ProcessWire's native templates (and fields) to create your own blocks. Rearrange and resize items in a visual way and use inline or modal editing to quickly edit the content of your website. (The demo uses AdminThemeCanvas but it will work just fine with the core Uikit Theme) Try PAGEGRID for free Checkout the online demo. PAGEGRID is not free software. However, you can try PAGEGRID on your local machine or on a test server as long as you need to make sure it is the right tool for your next project. … and when you’re convinced, buy your license. Get it here Download from GitHub Download from Module Directory Requirements ProcessWire 3.0.210 or greater Currently the dev version of ProcessWire 3.0.216 or greater has some bugs with PG. (I have a working fix, and it will be comming soon). Please use the latest master release of ProcessWire for now) Installation Go to “Modules > Site > Add New“ in your admin Paste the Module Class Name "FieldtypePageGrid" into the field “Add Module From Directory“ Click “Get Module Info“ On the overview, click “Download And Install“ On the following screen, click “Install Now“ More install options Module install guide Site profile install guide Get up and running Quick start Create your own blocks or install the PageGridBlocks Module (installs premade templates and fields for PAGEGRID blocks). What's PAGEGRID? page-grid.com – Get to know PAGEGRID. Documentation – Read the official documentation. Issues – Report bugs and other problems. Forum – Whenever you get stuck, don't hesitate to reach out for questions and support. Why I build it ProcessWire is super flexible in itself and lets me build whatever I want. But building a custom website can be a lot of work. For some projects, I've ended up using a lot of templates and fields. To make my pages more flexible, I sometimes build my own little page builder based on the RepeaterMatrix or PageTable module. While these page builders were great for the specific site I was building them for, they were never flexible enough to be used for new projects, so I ended up customizing them frequently. The more complex they became, the harder it became to use them for my clients. After playing around with some WYSIWYG page builder tools, I realized that while they can save me a lot of time, they can also be very limiting or have expensive subscriptions and somehow tie you to their ecosystem. So I decided to build my own page builder based on the most flexible CMS I knew. Concept This fieldtype Renders block templates and adds drag and drop functionality in admin, as well as enable inline editing for text, and file fields. It also let's you manipulate CSS in a visual way to design fully responsive websites (or parts of them) without writing code. The fieldtype comes with an optional style panel to manipulate CSS properties directly on the page. You can customize the panel or disable it completely from the module settings (and just use a CSS file that you include in your template). The data to style the items is stored directly on the item using PW's meta data (no extra fields are created). Don't want to give your client all that power? Use ProcessWire’s powerful permission system to control what your clients can edit. You can then also grant access individually to the style panel, resize or drag functionality using ProcessWire's build in permission system. Features Blocks are just pages Blocks are defined by native PW templates and fields Manipulate CSS grid or flexbox based layouts in a visual way to design fully responsive websites (or parts of them) Encapsulated frontend code (PAGEGRID renders the template of your frontend inside an iframe in the backend) Design and editing features can be disabled for certain roles (using ProcessWire's build in permission system) Inline editing of text, textarea, TinyMCE (supports latest version), ckeditor and file fields Simply drag and resize to manipulate grid items directly inside the backend Manipulate grid columns and rows directly on the page (use any number of columns you want) All style manipulations are saved as JSON and used to generate dynamic styles that you render in your main template (no inline styles) Nested groups/grids (child pages of nested blocks are created under group parent) The style panel supports adding custom classes and assigning styles to them. These classes can be used globally on all pages (a css class is also a page) The style panel supports selecting html tags to style tags globally across the whole site Global blocks work with page reference field (changes on one page, changes all blocks on all pages) Manual and auto placement of grid items blocks and nested blocks can be cloned Redo/undo and copy/paste shortcuts Editing block items in modal sidebar immediately updates frontend (Ajax Save). Define custom icons for your blocks via native template settings (template -> advanced -> icon) Automatic page save (Changes are getting saved via ajax, no need to click the save button) NEW: Option to automatically load lazysizes lazyloader (V 0.1.0) Changelog V 0.1.0: Feature: Option to automatically load lazysizes lazyloader (Module Settings > Plugins). V 0.1.5: Fixed bug: Tabs not working when editing items via modal panel. V 0.1.6: Fixed bug: Setting height in VH unit was not working. V 0.1.7: Feature: Option to hide save button (and use automatic ajax save ) if there are no other fields than PAGEGRID on the content tab (Module Settings > Interface). V 0.2.0: Fixed bug: Custom block wrapper element <p> was not working with inline editor. V 0.2.0: Fixed bug: Inline editor would sometimes not save after clicking cancel and then edit item again. V 0.2.0: Feature: Now it's possible to add classes to elements inside richt text fields via style panel. V 0.2.0: Fixed bug: Inline editor was not working after first item was added to the page (needed reloading the page). V 0.2.1: Feature: Updated PageGridBlocks Module: Using TinyMCE as the default editor. V 0.2.1: Feature: Updated PageGridBlocks Module: Group/container wrapper element can now be changed to <div>, <section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <nav>. Thanks to everyone who helped me improve my coding skills and for the support of this great community! Special thanks to @diogo for the valuable feedback and @ryan for this great CMS and his support for the PageFrontEdit module!

This is one of those rare weeks where I've got a lot of projects in progress, but all are in the middle, none are at a convenient Friday conclusion for this weekly update. In progress are some core updates, Pro module updates, other module updates, and a client project that's keeping me busy. So I don't have anything new or interesting to report this week, but I like to still check in and say hello, and let you know I'm not running low on coffee or anything like that. 🙂 I hope that you have a great weekend!

TL:DR I've updated a PW page we've built 9 years ago for the first time and it's still a solid experience. Backstory Back in May I was on a crowded train somewhere in the middle of Germany. Now working as a "Consultant" who builds slidedecks instead of websites, I happily noticed the men next to me talking about responsive webdesign with his friend. During the obligatory "This train is late" announcement we started to chat. My seatmate, a geography teacher, recently attended a web workshop at a large Hamburg agency. He told me he now understands the value of a CMS for updating their site and he wonders how to build a responsive layout. They don't get paid for this and work on their homepage in their spare time. And they have a Typo3 installation 😅 Back in 2013, together with my friend Marvin, we've rebuild our school website with ProcessWire optimized for mobile devices. Launched in 2014 this was quite an impressive feat including online time tables, a working event calendar (with import feature) and many small nice touches. After my encounter on the train, I checked the page and yes, It's still online and updated daily! The next day I wrote my old teacher a short email if we should have a closer look into the underlying tech and within minutes I got a super happy reply that he is so glad that somebody would help (again). So let's dive into what we've done. Situation First some details about this ProcessWire installation that is updated by a few teacher on a regular basis. Over the 9 years they've wrote nearly 900 news articles and kept more than 250 pages up to date. The asset folder is over 11GB. Build with Processwire 2.4 (?) and lots of janky code we've updated the page once to 3.0.15 somewhere in 2016 quick and dirty. They even used the old admin layout. ProCache, CroppableImages3 and a few other plugins were used. Every single one of them required an update It's used the classical append-template approach with a single big "function.php" included file. It's running on PHP 5.6 and for whatever reason no PHP update was enforced by the hoster (But the admin panel screamed at me) A privacy nightmare: Google fonts embedded directly, no cookie banner and a no longer working Google Analytics tag included The old ProcessDatabaseModule made a database backup every week as planned over all these years. Nice. No hacks, no attacks and all teachers are using their own account with assigned permissions Changelog I've updated the page with a focus on making it stable and reliable for the next 9 years. After making a development copy of the page, I've started working on the following changes: Updated ProcessWire and all modules to the latest stable version. After reloading a few times, no errors encountered Updated the whole templates to make it work with PHP 8.2 Removed all externally hosted scripts, disabled cookies for all regular visitors and introduced a 2-click-solution for external content Reworked a few frontend style issues around the responsive layout, made slight visual changes for 2023 (e.g. no double black and white 1px borders) Ported the image gallery feature to more templates (Big wish of the people updating the site, they've used a workaround) Cleaned up folder and structures, removed a few smaller plugins and admin helpers no longer needed All this was done back in May and - with a big break - completed now in October. It took a few days and most of the time was spent figuring out our old code. Learnings ProcessWire is robust as f*ck. I just clicked "Update" and it mostly worked instantly I nearly removed features for the PHP update. A custom written importer for the proprietary XML schedule was hard to debug and understand (5-dimensional-arrays...). Gladly I've tossed a coin and just gave ChatGPT the php function source and error message and within a single iteration it updated the code for PHP8. The "responsive" CSS framework aged badly. The used 960gs skeleton uses fixed widths for the responsive layout. I couldn't get it be wider than 320px on mobile screens. So the site is responsive but with a slim profile for now. Replacing it would be a complete layout rewrite Result and looking forward The Werkgymnasium site is now updated and live again. It still loads superfast and looks great after all these years. We have a few more features planned to help our editors input new content but overall it just works. Looking forward a few issues remain. ProCache would require the paid update but it still works fine. The layout needs improvement on mobile screens. There is still an error with the pagination. We'll cleanup the code more and then make the whole template public on Github so that maybe a few students after us can continue with the updates. Maybe even rebuild the frontend one day. I hope I can give you an update in a few years again. As a closing note: I'm still grateful for the amazing community here and all the features ProcessWire has to offer. My daily work no longer resolves around websites but PW has a permanent spot in my heart. Thanks Ryan and all the contributors.

This week the core dev branch version has been bumped to 3.0.231. There are about 15 commits in this version relative to the previous. In the dev branch commit log you'll find a good mix of issue fixes and improvements. If you are already using the dev branch, this version is worth the upgrade. If using the main/master branch then it should be a safe upgrade as well, though none of the updates are urgent. And it won't be long till they are also merged to the main/master branch soon too. This week I've also been working on 2 new related modules: FieldtypeDateRange and InputfieldDateRange. These modules allow selection of starting and ending dates to support a date range. It also calculates and stores the number of days and nights for querying and sorting purposes. The "date from" and "date to" can be independently queried from $pages->find(), as can the days or nights. The InputfieldDateRange module can be used independently of its companion Fieldtype module, making it possible to use the date range Inputfield in FormBuilder or other Inputfield forms. One context where the Inputfield might be useful is when selecting travel dates on a front-end form, such as one from FormBuilder. When used as a Fieldtype, you might use it to specify availability of something, start and end dates to publish content, event dates, or any number of other use cases. Below is a screenshot of the Inputfield as well as its configuration tab. The JS-based input widget comes from an existing package that I've made some modifications to, and it works really nicely, with a polished and easy-to-use UI. I originally found it booking some travel online, and really liked the way it worked. I was able to track it down on GitHub here and thought it would be useful to build an Inputfield module around it. It can be set up to work like the core date picker where it appears when you focus in the input, or it can be configured "inline" where it is alway s visible (and the related text input is hidden). In the following screenshot, I've specified that Sundays can't be used for start/end selections and that November 23 is not available. The selected range spans two months. If you want it to span more months, you could click the right arrow in the December calendar to find your desired month, leaving the first calendar in November. In this manner, you can select ranges that span multiple months, or even years: Here's the Inputfield configuration screen so far. All of these settings are hookable as well, as some of them are more likely to be useful dynamically, especially min/max start and end dates, non-selectable dates, etc. (Note the screenshot below does not necessarily reflect the settings in the screenshots above). More on this next week. Have a great weekend!

The master/main branch is now updated to version 3.0.225. Early next week I'll be adding a git tag for the version number as well. I usually like to merge dev to the master/main branch first, let it marinate for a day or two, and then tag it. That's because once we tag it, it triggers other services to pick it up and broadcast it. So letting it marinate for the weekend just adds a layer of comfort, for whatever silly reason. That's pretty much how I've always done it. When I did the merge, it reported 511 files changed, 76421 insertions(+), 23539 deletions(-), so there's quite a lot in this version. There's enough, that I'm going to need another week to document it all into a new blog post, which should be ready by this time next week. Our contributors list also continues to grow nicely with this new version. Thanks to all those that have submitted PRs, reported issues, and submitted feature requests. Big thanks to @matjazp in particular who has been helping a lot in identifying, testing, organizing and even coding the solutions for numerous issue reports. More details on this new version next week. Until then, thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

In a recent GitHub issue report, I was asked about output formatting in ProcessWire, and where more information could be found about it. I know I've written about it numerous times, and went to locate the documentation page, only to find we didn't have one! Output formatting is such an important topic, so here is everything you need to know. I hope you'll find it simple enough, but also useful and thorough— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/output-formatting/

I was in New Orleans at the gymnastics Nationals most of this week. In her age group and level, my 10-year old daughter won 4th overall and 3rd on bars and beam. After a long drive, we're now back home in Atlanta and it's been a very short work week, but there's still a new dev branch version to write about. ProcessWire 3.0.221 continues primarily with minor issue fixes, working towards our next main/master version. Included are 11 resolved issues, 2 PRs, and code contributions from @matjazp and @dotnetic. In terms of new features, this version updates the language translating _n() function to support languages that consider 0 quantities as singular rather than plural in calls like _n('%d item', '%d items', $quantity); Previously this call has always used the plural "items" version for 0 quantities (i.e. "0 items"), which is correct in English, but may not be in other languages like French (as I've learned from issue #1757, though I think it has come up once before too). To define whether a language should consider 0 quantities plural or singular, use ProcessWire's language translation tool: Setup > Languages > [any language] > Find files to translate > wire/modules/LanguageSupport/LanguageTranslator.php ... when translating that file, you'll see the setting at the top labeled "Is zero (0) plural or singular?": That screenshot above also shows another new feature that was added, which is the ability to use Select and Radios fields when defining translatable text. Previously you could only use text, textarea and number fields. Let's say you wanted to have the person translating choose a color name for the language as part of the translation: $color = __('Red'); // What color? type=radios options=[Red, Green, Blue] As before, the "What color?" part is an optional description for the translatable text. Also as before, the "type=..." defines what Inputfield type to use. The supported values are any Inputfield name (minus the "Inputfield" part). Known to work values for this include: text, textarea, integer, float, radios and select. The "options=[...]" is the newly added part, and this enables you to define the selectable options for select or radios inputs. If you wanted to use separate value and label, you can also do that. In the example below, city abbreviations are used for the values and full city names as the labels: $city = __('ATL'); // What city? type=radios options=[ATL:Atlanta, CHI=Chicago, NYC:New York City] Another example is the one we used in the core for plural vs. singular here. By the way, if any of your values or labels need a literal comma, you can optionally use a pipe "|" as the separator rather than a comma. This ability to use Select and Radios is a fairly minor addition, but does open up better support for having certain language settings (rather than just translatable text) be part of language translation packs going forward. The plural vs singular setting for 0 seemed like a good first one to support with this. Next week we'll continue preparing our next main/master version. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week the ProcessWire core version on the dev branch has been bumped to 3.0.207. Relative to the previous version, there are several minor issue resolutions and improvements (commit log). I also recommend this version if you are testing out the InputfieldTinyMCE module, which will likely be merged into the core near the end of the year. Speaking of that module, it also received updates this week with the biggest being the addition of improved lazy loading modules for the Normal (non-inline) editor. Rich text editors are one of the most heavyweight input types you can use, so not having to initialize them all during page load is a major performance benefit, especially when you've got multiple fields using them at the same time. With these new lazy-loading modes, the Normal editor has many of the benefits of the Inline editor in terms of page editor performance, but without any of the drawbacks. The new default setting is to "load editor when it becomes visible". This ensures that resources aren't spent loading editors that are hidden behind editor tabs, fieldsets or language tabs, until they are needed. The other lazy-loading option ("load editor when clicked") is the most aggressive lazy loading option. It shows a preview of the editor content but doesn't actually load TinyMCE until you click the preview to edit it. Lastly, I've also been working on a new module (WireSitemapXML) that generates sitemap.xml output, but in a way that I think is more configurable than the other modules available for it. It also supports multi-language sitemaps, URL segments, various hooks and more. While I've got it in use already, I'm going to spend more time on the documentation before releasing it. That's all for this week, have a great weekend!

This week I'm happy to report that the InputfieldTinyMCE module is now released. It is currently released in the modules directory and GitHub but the plan is it will be merged into the core, likely before the end of the year. No need to wait till then though, as you can start using it today. Please consider the module in beta for the moment, though the TinyMCE library itself is in a stable state. A lot of the work that went into developing this module went into the configuration aspect. Here are a few a more details that weren't covered in last week's post: After installing the module, on the module configuration screen, you can decide whether several settings should be configurable for each field, or if you want to just configure them with the module (affecting all fields): One of things that I thought was important was to make it a lot simpler to add custom classes/styles to the editor. I always found this kind of a pain in CKEditor. So in TinyMCE, I made it so that you can just define these custom styles with the field settings using just simple CSS definitions. InputfieldTinyMCE takes care of converting to a format that TinyMCE can understand (for its menus), as well as the styles to show in the editor. For instance, I wanted to add some common Uikit text classes to a custom "Uikit" group in the Styles dropdown: And here's the result in the editor: The markup produced has the correct Uikit classes in the markup so that on the front-end of my site the output is Uikit ready. You can add 3rd party or your own custom plugins from the module settings: And then you can enable them for any field in the field editor: These are just a few interesting tidbits, but there's a lot more. Also, if you didn't see last week's blog post, that covers a lot more too. Either way, I'd encourage you to download InputfieldTinyMCE, give it a try and please let me know how it works for you. If you come across any bugs, please open an issue report. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Continuing from last week's post and discussion, ProcessWire 3.0.218 decouples the modules system from the cache system. Now the modules system maintains its own internal caches (at least once you do a Modules > Refresh). It'll still use the $cache API as a backup (temporarily), but now you can safely export the database without the "caches" table, or even delete the "caches" table, if you want to. It'll get re-created as needed. In this version, work also continued on the new WireCacheInterface (and major updates in WireCache) so that we could support external modules to handle cache storage. This capability is kind of similar to how we support 3rd party WireMail and WireSessionHandler modules. The first example is WireCacheDatabase, which is the default cache storage handler for the core. And today we have a new module called WireCacheFilesystem that replaces the default WireCache database storage with a file-system based storage, once installed. It's not yet clear if there are major benefits one way or the other (cache in database vs. file system), as I've not been able to put all this new code through performance testing yet. I'd definitely be interested to hear if anyone has a chance to test things out. I expect the file system might be faster for reading caches, while the database may be faster for writing caches. At least that's what I found with a few preliminary experiments, but they haven't been very thorough, so take that with a grain of salt. I thought we needed at least 2 examples of classes implementing WireCacheInterface before we'd be ready to support potential 3rd party WireCache modules. I imagine that 3rd party modules getting into dedicated cache options independent of database or file system is where we'll start to see major performance benefits. At least for sites that use the cache heavily. That's all for this week, have a great weekend!

On the dev branch this week we have a good collection of issue fixes and feature requests. The dev branch commit log has all the details. One feature added this week which I think could come in very handy is #520 (via @Jonathan Lahijani) which adds the ability to hide individual images in an images field. When an image is hidden, you can see and work with it in the admin, but it gets removed from the field value on the front-end of the site at runtime, effectively hiding it. I know I'll use this a lot, particularly on photo galleries where I may want to remove an image or two from appearing in the grid of photos, but don't necessarily want to delete them. Images can be hidden (or unhidden) from the Actions select of each image, where you'll see a "Hide" option (or an "Unhide" option if the image is already hidden). Hidden images are also dimmed out when viewing the images field in the admin. On the API side, you can hide or unhide images and files using $image->hidden(true) to hide, $image->hidden(false) to unhide, and $image->hidden() to get a true or false as to whether or not the image is hidden. Though this will only be useful on unformatted field values, since hidden images are automatically removed from formatted field values. The same can be used with regular file fields, but we don't currently have a UI/interface for hiding or unhiding items from regular (non-image) file fields. Likely we'll add one soon, but I figured it's likely to get more use with image fields than file fields, so figured we'd start there. More next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week core updates are focused on resolving issue reports. Nearly all of the 10 commits this week resolve one issue or another. Though all are minor, so I'm not bumping the version number just yet, as I'd like to get a little more in the core before bumping the version to 3.0.202. This week I've also continued development on this WP-to-PW site conversion. On this site hundreds of pages are used to represent certain types of vacations, each with a lot of details and fields. Several pages in the site let you list, search and filter these things. When rendering a list of these (which a lot of pages do), it might list 10, 20, 100 or more of them at once on a page (which is to say, there can be a few, or there can be a lot). Each of the items has a lot of markup, compiled from about a dozen fields in each list item. They are kind of expensive to render in terms of time, so caching comes to mind. These pages aren't good candidates for full-page caches (like ProCache, etc.) since they will typically be unique according to a user's query and filters. So using the $cache API var seems like an obvious choice (or MarkupCache). But I didn't really want to spawn a new DB query for each item (as there might be hundreds), plus I had a specific need for when the cache should be reset — I needed it to re-create the cache for each rendered item whenever the cache for it was older than the last modified date of the page it represents. There's a really simple way to do this and it makes a huge difference in performance (for this case at least). Here's a quick recipe for how to make this sort of rendering very fast. But first, let's take a look at the uncached version: // find items matching query $items = $pages->find('...'); // iterate and render each item foreach($items as $item) { echo " <!-- expensive to render markup here ---> <div class='item'> <a href='$item->url'>$item->title</a> ...and so on... </div> "; } That looks simple, but what you don't see is everything that goes in the <div class="item">...</div> which is a lot more than what you see here. (If we were to take the above code literally, just outputting url and title, then there would be little point in caching.) But within each .item element more than a dozen fields are being accessed and output, including images, repeatable items, etc. It takes some time to render. When there's 100 or more of them to render at once, it literally takes 5 seconds. But after adding caching to it, now the same thing takes under 100 milliseconds. Here's the same code as above, but hundreds of times faster, thanks to a little caching: // determine where we want to store cache files for each list item $cachePath = $config->paths->cache . 'my-list-items/'; if(!is_dir($cachePath)) wireMkdir($cachePath); // find items matching query $items = $pages->find('...'); // iterate and render each item foreach($items as $item) { $file = $cachePath . "$item->id.html"; // item's cache file if(file_exists($file) && filemtime($file) > $page->modified) { // cache is newer than page's last mod time, so use the cache echo file_get_contents($file); continue; } $out = " <!-- expensive to render markup here ---> <div class='item'> <a href='$item->url'>$item->title</a> ...and so on... </div> "; echo $out; // save item to cache file so we can use it next time file_put_contents($file, $out, LOCK_EX); } This is a kind of cache that rarely needs to be completely cleared because each item in the cache stays consistent with the modification time of the page it represents. But at least during development, we'll need to occasionally clear all of the items in the cache when we make changes to the markup used for each item. So it's good to have a simple option to clear the cache. In this case, I just have it display a "clear cache" link before or after the list, and it only appears to the superuser: if($user->isSuperuser()) { if($input->get('clear')) wireRmdir($cachePath, true); echo "<a href='./?clear=1'>Clear cache</a>"; } I found this simple cache solution to be very effective and efficient on this site. I'll probably add a file() method to the $cache API var that does the same thing. But as you can see, it's hardly necessary since this sort of cache can be implemented so easily on its own, just using plain PHP file functions. Give it a try sometime if you haven't already. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

I'm off work this week, so I don't have any new ProcessWire updates, but just wanted to wish you a Happy New Year! Looking forward to a great 2024!

This week updates continued with various .js files in the core (for jQuery 3.6+ compatibility). A few external libraries were also updated to the latest versions, including jquery-tablesorter, jquery-ui-timepicker, magnific-popup and vex. And finally, InpufieldTinyMCE has been added to the core! That's a lot of updates, but there's not a lot more to write about these updates because we covered the jQuery updates last week, and InputfieldTinyMCE has been the topic of several past posts. But now we've got everything together and running smoothly in ProcessWire 3.0.216. I think we're now ready to focus on getting the next main/master version out in the coming weeks. There likely won't be an update next week because I'll be traveling for a few days, but will be back to a regular schedule the following week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week we take a look at a new rich text editor for ProcessWire, why we chose it, some highlights, screenshots, and why we think you’ll like it— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/new-rte-for-pw/

This last week my wife and daughter took a trip to NYC and it was my daughter's first time there. I was browsing around online looking at things they could do and so I visited the Guggenheim museum website to look into that option... I've always been a fan of the building, a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece. In addition to New York, I learned from the website that Guggenheim also has museums in Abu Dhabi, Bilbao and Venice, so I clicked through to view them as well. I really liked the Venice Guggenheim website, which had a much nicer website than the other locations. It was such a nice site that I was curious what they were running, so I viewed the source and... not WordPress (like the others), but ProcessWire. What a nice surprise. Then I was curious about who made such a nice site and there was a credits link in the bottom right corner that says the site was made by basili.co, nice work! It's always fun to come across a ProcessWire powered website randomly like that, and I thought you all would enjoy this one too. This week there are fairly minor updates on the core dev branch. Though the updates include one I've been meaning to do for a long time: improve the API for processing Inputfield forms. Previously there's been no way to check if a form is submitted, short of checking an $input variable yourself. Today I committed an update that adds a $form->isSubmitted() method that solves that, and more. It can identify which form was submitted, which submit button was used, and it also performs additional checks to make sure it's a valid submission before deciding that it's a form worth processing. It improves reliability, accuracy and security. Next week I'll be updating several of the admin forms to use it, among other updates. A few other useful helper methods were added to the Inputfield forms API as well. I realize that these updates may only be of interest to module authors, but I like keep you up-to-date with the week's updates either way. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week I've continued work on the page versions support that I wrote about last week. While the main PagesVersions module needs more work before it's ready to commit to the dev branch and test externally, it is so far working quite well in internal testing. I mentioned last week how it will support an interface where Fieldtypes can declare that they will handle their own versions. That interface has been pushed to the dev branch as FieldtypeDoesVersions. I've also implemented it with the Repeater Fieldtype, which is visible starting here. Repeaters are so far working really well with versions! As far as core Fieldtypes go, Repeater, PageTable and FieldsetPage are likely the only ones that will need custom implementations. For ProFields, RepeaterMatrix already works with the implementation in the core Repeater (already tested). It's possible that other ProFields will not need custom implementations, though not yet positive. The module that provides version capability is called PagesVersions and the plan so far is to make it a core module that provides API version support for pages. A separate module provides interactive version support in the page editor. I've built this module initially so that I can test versions more easily, but it'll be expanded to provide a lot more. Below is a screenshot if what it looks like in the page editor Settings tab so far: As you can see, you can Edit or Restore any existing version. You can also create a new version from the Live version, or any other version. And of course you can view and delete any versions. When you Restore a version, it essentially replaces the live version with the one that you are restoring. All of this can be done from the module's API as well. Note that the API is provided by a $pagesVersions API variable that is present when PagesVersions module is installed. The API method names and such are a bit verbose right now but may be simplified before it's final. // Get page and add a new version of it $page = $pages->get(1234); $page->title = 'New title'; $version = $pagesVersions->addPageVersion($page); echo $version; // i.e. "2" // Get version 2 of a page $pageV2 = $pagesVersions->getPageVersion($page, 2); // Update a version of a page $pageV2->title = "Updated title"; $pagesVersions->savePageVersion($pageV2); // Restore version to live page $pagesVersions->restorePageVersion($pageV2); // Delete page version $pagesVersions->deletePageVersion($pageV2); Thanks for reading! More next week.

After 8 months in development we are excited to bring you ProcessWire 3.0.226 main/master. This version has a ton of great new features, improvements and optimizations, plus more than 100 issue fixes. This post takes an in-depth look at highlights from this great new version. While there's even more in this version than is covered fully here, we hope this gives you a good taste of what you'll find in 3.0.226! https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.226/

Sometimes you need to execute a slow task after some event occurs in the PW admin, and normally you have to wait for this task to finish before you can continue using the admin. This is because PHP is "blocking", meaning that while one thing is executing nothing else can execute. There are potentially lots of different kinds of tasks that could be slow, but just as an example suppose you want to generate resized variations of images on a page, and there are a lot of images. You might have a hook like this so that any non-existing variations are created when the page is saved: $pages->addHookAfter('saveReady', function(HookEvent $event) { /** @var Page $page */ $page = $event->arguments(0); // When a gallery page is saved if($page->template == 'gallery') { // Create an image variation for each image foreach($page->images as $image) { $image->size(1200, 1200); } } }); When you save a gallery page in the PW admin, the admin will be unresponsive and will only load again after all the variations have been created. I wanted to find a way for slow tasks to be triggered by events in the PW admin and for the website editor not to have to wait for the task to finish before continuing with other work in the admin. Inspired by this StackOverflow answer I came up with the following solution that seems to work well. Using the image variations task above as an example... First we make use of the URL hooks feature to set up a URL that can trigger tasks to run when it is loaded: // A URL that will trigger tasks when loaded $wire->addHook('/run-task/', function($event) { $input = $event->wire()->input; // A simple check to avoid unauthorised access // You could implement more advanced checks if needed if($input->post('key') !== 'cTdPMBQ7x8b7') return false; // Allow the script to keep running even though we have set a short WireHttp timeout ignore_user_abort(true); // The "create variations" task if($input->post('task') === 'create-variations') { $page_id = (int) $input->post('page'); $p = $event->wire()->pages->get($page_id); // Create an image variation for each image foreach($p->images as $image) { $image->size(1200, 1200); } return true; } return false; }); Then in the Pages::saveReady hook we use WireHttp to load that URL and post parameters that define what task to run and anything else needed for the task (in this case the ID of the page that has been saved). $pages->addHookAfter('saveReady', function(HookEvent $event) { /** @var Page $page */ $page = $event->arguments(0); // When a gallery page is saved if($page->template == 'gallery') { // Load the /run-task/ URL using WireHttp $http = new WireHttp(); // Set a short timeout so we don't have to wait until the script finishes // Timeout values shorter than 1 second can be tried once a core issue is fixed // https://github.com/processwire/processwire-issues/issues/1773 $http->setTimeout(1); $url = $event->wire()->config->urls->httpRoot . 'run-task/'; $data = [ 'key' => 'cTdPMBQ7x8b7', 'task' => 'create-variations', 'page' => $page->id, ]; $http->post($url, $data, ['use' => 'curl']); } }); By doing it this way the task runs in a separate request and the website editor doesn't have to wait for it to finish before they can continue working in the PW admin.

The new dev branch version 3.0.222 contains about 20 commits and 16 issue resolutions. In terms of new features, last week I mentioned some upgrades to WireHttp, and below are this week's additions: Multi-language month and day names The WireDateTime class (aka the $datetime API variable) has been updated to support multi-language month and day names. Now all month and days are translatable in the WireDateTime file (/wire/core/WireDateTime.php). So if you request any date in a format that uses month names or abbreviations, or day names or abbreviations, they now support multi-language, whether you requested it from the wireDate() function or the $datetime API variable. ProcessWire has long supported multi-language month and day names when using a PHP version prior to 8.1 and you've requested a strftime date format that uses them. But PHP 8.1 dropped the multi-language supporting strftime() function, without leaving a suitable replacement. PHP's IntlDateFormatter can't be relied upon since it's not always compiled with PHP. But as of PW 3.0.222, now we have a suitable replacement. Though it does require you to translate the 7 days and 12 months for file /wire/core/WireDateTime.php using ProcessWire's language translation tool. Note that unlike the previous strftime() solution, the new solution no longer requires you to use strftime() format codes and you can instead use regular date formats and they will be translated automatically. New conditional hooks that match by argument type Another new addition this week is support for conditional hooks that match by argument type. I think this is especially useful combined with ProcessWire's custom page class support. It enables you to make a hook apply only to methods containing arguments of a specific type. For instance, if you had a custom page class "ProductPage" for template "product" and you wanted to capture the "Pages::saved" event for pages of that type (ProductPage) you could do so like this: $wire->addHook('Pages::saved(<ProductPage>)', function($event) { $product = $event->arguments(0); /** @var ProductPage $product */ $event->message("ProductPage '$product->title' has been saved"); }); In addition to supporting class or interface names, you can also specify regular PHP types such as <array>, <string>, <int>, <object>, etc. For more details on this type of hook see the new Conditional hooks that match argument type section of the Hooks documentation. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Before the recent and major core updates to WireCache and Modules, we were on track to get a new main/master version out. I'd like to get back to that, as we are now 10 dev versions ahead of the main/master branch, and with some pretty good and major improvements. That's why I've been focused largely on minor issue fixes the last couple of weeks, getting into more of the fine tuning stuff, and likely will be the next couple of weeks as well. Thank you for opening issue reports as you come across stuff to report. Thanks also to @matjazp who's been helping out in the issues repo, maintaining existing reports and often helping to solve them too. I'm thinking we may have a new main/master version ready soon as July, next month. Most of next week I'll be in New Orleans attending the gymnastics nationals where my 10 year old daughter is competing. Since I'll be out of town, there likely won't be a lot of commits next week. Though there may be enough to bump to the next version, 3.0.221, I'm not sure yet. In any case, have a great weekend and week ahead!

The ProcessPageList module now has a configuration setting where you can select pages that should not be shown in the page list. For example, maybe once you've set up your 404 page, you don't really need it to display there anymore, except maybe in debug mode. Or maybe you don't ever need the "Admin" page to display in the page list. This new feature lets you do that, and for any page that you decide. Next, a "Usage" fields has been added to the "Basics" tab in the Field editor, just like the one in the Template editor (requested feature #445). This shows you what fields are using the template. It's essentially the same information that you'll find in the "Actions > Add or remove from templates" feature, but easier to find, especially for people newer to PW. That's all for this week, I hope you have a great weekend!

In the last couple of weeks I've been working on the page versions support in ProcessWire (recap here and here). This week the new PagesVersions module was committed to the core. Though please consider it very much "beta" at this stage. Along with this, the core dev branch version was bumped to 3.0.232. The API reference page for PagesVersions is now live here: https://processwire.com/api/ref/pages-versions/. Note that the module is not installed by default, but once running 3.0.232, it can be installed by going in your admin to Modules > Wire > Pages > PagesVersions. In addition, a related development module named PagesVersionsPro has also been released. This module uses the new API from the core PagesVersions module. This module will eventually be merged with or replace ProDrafts. The new PagesVersionsPro support board and module is currently visible to ProDrafts, ProFields and ProDevTools subscribers here. Unlike ProDrafts, PagesVersionsPro gets all of its version abilities from the core, and instead just focuses on providing an interactive interface to them in the page editor. To word it another way, the module does not extend the PagesVersions module in the way that ListerPro extends Lister. Instead, it just provides a web interface for it. I think this is a better long term and more sustainable strategy for handling version support. Core version 3.0.232 also adds version support for nested repeaters and FieldsetPage fields. Support was added in those Fieldtypes directly. Still remaining are PageTable (core) and Table (ProFields), both of which will need their own implementations for versions like Repeater and FieldsetPage needed. But following that, there won't be any unsupported fieldtypes to my knowledge. ProcessWire Weekly published its 500th issue! Congratulations and big thanks to @teppo for his incredible work with ProcessWire Weekly, it is truly outstanding! Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week we've got a few minor issue fixes and a couple of pull request additions on the dev branch. Pull request #251 thanks to @Jan Romero added a download button to the thumbnail images in InputfieldImage. I wasn't sure we really needed that, but really liked his thinking behind it, which was envisioning the ability to add more custom buttons/actions for images. So while I didn't specifically add the download button, I added the proposed system for adding any custom buttons, and then applied that same thinking to some other parts of InputfieldImage. And we'll talk about how to add that Download button here. 🙂 First, let's look at how you might add your own download button, and note we're using this as just an example, as you might add any kind of button this way. A new hookable getImageThumbnailActions() method was added for this purpose. So here's how you might hook it (in /site/ready.php) to add a download button: $wire->addHookAfter('InputfieldImage::getImageThumbnailActions', function(HookEvent $event) { $image = $event->arguments(0); // Pageimage $class = $event->arguments(3); // class to use on all returned actions $a = $event->return; // array $icon = wireIconMarkup('download'); $a['download'] = "<a class='$class' href='$image->url' download>$icon</a>"; $event->return = $a; }); With that hook in place, here's what it looks like when you hover a thumbnail image. And if you click that Download icon, it downloads the file to your computer: or in list mode (download icon appears in right corner next to trash): I was thinking it would be useful to also be able to add custom actions after you click the thumbnail, and it shows the image edit features. So let's add a Download button there instead, by hooking the new getImageEditButtons() method: $wire->addHookAfter('InputfieldImage::getImageEditButtons', function(HookEvent $event) { $image = $event->arguments(0); // Pageimage $class = $event->arguments(3); // class(es) to use on all returned actions $buttons = $event->return; // array, indexed by action name $icon = wireIconMarkup('download'); $buttons['download'] = "<button class='$class'><a download href='$image->url'>$icon Download</a></button>"; $event->return = $buttons; }); And the result looks like this (see new Download button after Variations button): We also have that Actions dropdown that you see in the screenshot above. This is already hookable but we've not had any good examples of it. In this case, you need two hooks: one to add the action to the <select> and another to handle the processing of the action when the page is saved. So in our next example, we'll demonstrate how to display verbose EXIF information about whatever image(s) the action was selected for. In this first hook, we'll add the action to the Actions <select>: // Example of adding an “Get EXIF data” action to the <select> $wire->addHookAfter('InputfieldImage::getFileActions', function(HookEvent $event) { $image = $event->arguments(0); // Pageimage if($image->ext == 'jpg' || $image->ext == 'jpeg') { $actions = $event->return; // array $actions['exif'] = 'Get EXIF data'; $event->return = $actions; } }); And in this next hook, we'll handle the action, which gets called when the page editor form is submitted: // Example of handling an “Get EXIF data” action $wire->addHookAfter('InputfieldImage::processUnknownFileAction', function(HookEvent $event) { $image = $event->arguments(0); $action = $event->arguments(1); if($action === 'exif' && file_exists($image->filename)) { $exif = exif_read_data($image->filename); $event->warning([ "EXIF data for $image->name" => $exif ], 'icon-photo nogroup'); $event->return = true; } }); And here's what it shows after you hit save (for any images that had the action selected): The screenshot above is truncated because it was about twice is big as what's above. All the above code examples are also included in the phpdoc for each of the relevant hookable methods in the InputfieldImage module. For another recent useful addition, be sure to check out ProcessWire Weekly #454 (last week) which covered some new options available for the language translation functions like __text('hello'); where you can now tell it what kind of input type (and how many rows) to use in the admin translation interface, via inline PHP comments. Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great weekend!

The TinyMCE 6 rich text editor opens up a lot of new and useful abilities for ProcessWire users. In this post, we'll take a look at a few of them, and how you can start using them now, with a focus on those that are unique to ProcessWire's implementation of TinyMCE— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/using-tinymce-6-in-processwire/

If you haven't yet noticed it, @teppo has hit the 500th issue of PW Weekly! That is a ridiculously massive milestone and an amazing achievement, and after some quick maths, also tells me that he's held strong for almost 10 years now! I'm not sure what's more surprising, that he's managed to keep it going continuously for this long, or that I remember when he started it... That's a long darn time. I may not be a hugely active member of the community, but I'm darn proud to be a part of it regardless. Thank you so much for your devotion to the PW Weekly project, @teppo!!!!

I posted a (rather lengthy) comment about some of the ways I work with my clients. I'll be posting some of that here where reading it in context can help the message as a whole. I've been a web designer/developer for ~15 years in many capacities like freelancing, in-house employee, and now at my own one-person company (I'll get into why that's different than freelancing). I've been the new guy on the bottom rung of the ladder, and a director at an ad agency. I don't think that I'm special or that I have it all figured out! I feel this comes from a culmination of experience, long hours, mistakes, and trying my best. I'll group some topics together and give some briefs on each: on being a web professional, building value/client relations, and yeah things don't always go well. Building skills in these areas may help boost performance in things like getting clients on board with ProcessWire, differentiating yourself from other web services, being confident in what you charge, and building both a great reputation and long-term relationships. Get on the bus, we're leaving our comfort zones. Here comes the disclaimer. How and where you work matters. The market you operate in matters, competition, local economy, etc. That's why I'm not going to say "here's how to come up with what you should charge" or "this one neat trick will change the game". These are my experiences, I think some of what I share will be things you can implement yourself, some may inspire you to think of something different, and other stuff might just be rubbish. I also think that knowledge unshared is knowledge lost- so please share your critiques, experiences, and suggestions below. Your opinion and experience matters! Onward! Note- my language will tend to lean towards freelancers and individual operators but if you're a formal employee this all 100% applies to you as well. Take a moment to envision the company you work for as your client. It becomes relevant very quickly. On being a web professional Being a web dev isn't easy. Taking anything you love (going to make an assumption there) and doing it professionally means doing what you like and slapping on a bunch of stuff you don't to make it work. It also means you need to up your game in places that involve things that "orbit" web development. It is always a good idea to break focus and bring in new skills that complement and increase your expertise. This is necessary so you can be more than a really good developer- you can become an expert. An expert professional proactively learns as much as possible, they can speak with authority in many areas related to their work through verifiable fact and with consideration for others and their needs. A professional works to be good at what they do but also has skills in multiple areas that allow them to do that. It means the difference between building a website and building an effective website. A professional values: Being a clear communicator. Always #1. Being an educator Being a solution Being a student Some of those seem obvious, so let's unpack 'em. Being a clear communicator means more than speaking well. It means conveying your ideas in a way that others can understand and appreciate. It also means working to understand others because that will affect what you say next. Communication requires translating your technical knowledge into layman's terms and rather than stop at stating a fact or good idea, following up with why. This helps others value things as much as you do and shows respect for others in that you believe that they deserve to know. You are a translator you modify your attitude and approach based on how other people are engaging you by being aware and paying attention. Being an educator means bringing others in on your knowledge. Education helps avoid arguments and shows that other people deserve to know more about what you do. I told a client the other day that there are a lot of people who do technical work that don't take the time to educate those around them, that means what you're doing is just a black box of mystery to them. How can they value what you do if they don't understand it? People have become comfortable with "well I'm not smart enough to do that" or "that's too complex for me", I start with the idea that everyone is capable and it is up to them to find their limits. We aren't teaching them how to program, but we should let other people in on things they might care about. This has to be done in a way that the person you are talking to feels like they are being elevated and not become embarrassed or have feelings that they are ignorant for not knowing something. Example: A client in a meeting started reviewing the mockup and picking it apart. "I don't like the color of that button, and why is it located there? Maybe we should move X above Y. I want the form over here not at the bottom." I addressed each of their concerns. I explained that the button is located there because we know from studying user behavior that it is more likely that people will engage. The color of the button is also a UI strategy, if you look across the entire site you'll see that buttons that do something we want them to do are the same color. The "Menu" button is the same color as the "Sign Up" button, we'll have encouraged interaction by normalizing the experience and by mentally associating that color with action. The background of the call to action form at the bottom of the page is the same color as the button- because it indicates an action that you should take. Being a solution means either providing the solution, or if it isn't possible, brainstorming an alternate option. My least favorite situation is the "yes or no" decision. I try to provide a "yes or yes", where we have two options that can address a concern- even if one isn't as good as the other, or isn't what someone had in mind- you have shown that you are here and ready to work on overcoming a challenge. That makes you and your client a team. A "yes or yes" situation means that you have "become the solution", because that's how people will think about what you bring to the table. This one is worth an example from an experience I just had the other day: The client puts together events and sells tickets online. It's a reasonably large event that means a lot of people buying tickets. A lot of people were buying at the last minute, tickets sell out, and people rushing to buy may need help under pressure, both mean unhappy customers. This means a big influx of customer service requests that are difficult to handle. So: "We are trying to think of a way of how to change the shopping cart system to fix this issue but not sure how." Yes/No - "We could work on that but it may be complex work and will be a challenge to solve the problem by the next ticket date. It's up to you whether that's worth it." Yes/Yes - "Yes it's certainly possible to work on the store, we could also consider having an email sign up form on the website and then send an email when tickets go on sale, then reminders so that it can make it easier on everyone to space out the purchases and prevent last minute pressure. I'm open to both, what do you think?" I worked on a Yes/Yes solution, and they felt a lot better, and they no longer have to worry about it. I also communicated and educated by pairing my suggestion with a clear "why it's a good idea", and then I invited their input after sharing. They're signing a retainer contract with me this week. Being a student seems obvious, but it means being an effective student. We learn how to code better and try new things but it's important to get out of your box. This allows you to be more of an authority on web overall and others will see that as something they can and should trust. It's easy to study what you like, but sometimes you gotta take the classes you don't like to graduate... Here are a few: Get to know how to design websites that work. Learn UI best practices, learn about what parts of web design actually drive conversions things like speed, the number of fields on a form, effective calls to action, the difference between a web developer and a web professional is knowing how to merge what you build with what it has to accomplish. I don't do SEO services, but I have taken a lot of time to study it and understand how my work can be the absolute best when it comes to future performance. It goes beyond semantic HTML. Be familiar with what Google ranks by, the things that matter, and understand what is more important than others. It will affect the structure of the site, it means you will be doing things like creating pages that you probably wouldn't think to. Be good at technicals! Sure you've got a good looking site, but have you truly taken time to study typography? Off the top of your head, do you know what the most effective width of paragraph text on a page leads to more reading by visitors? Do you know an effective length of copy? Learn human/web psychology. How do colors affect perception? What if animations aren't just for making things pretty and cool. etc. Read and study stuff from great people like Mike Monteiro's "Design is a Job" because it will open your eyes a lot to the work you should be doing to support the work you're already doing. Also go watch his video titled "F*ck you, pay me" (spoiler: bad words) Before every project I assume that web design changed and it's up to me to check in on the latest information. Google "web design best practices 2023" before designing, head over to Stitcher.io to check out the latest that PHP has to offer and great tips- using new features may save you time, make your code ready for the future, and keep from using something that will be deprecated (WHY IS MY SITE BROKEN? YOU JUST BUILT IT!). I'm serious. Every single project. I assume my knowledge is out of date in some way. Remember: being honest and saying "you know, I'm not sure but I'll research that and get back to you" or "I'm unfamiliar but that's not something I can't figure out" is a hallmark of a trustworthy professional. Do not be a snake oil salesman, do not lie to get the job, don't be a know-it-all. Learn to defer to others who have more experience than you, for me those are SEO specialists, SEM specialists, and sometimes graphic designers. This shows respect for the work others do and you may get some partners to work with in the future. I have SEO and SEM people I trust and can recommend at the drop of a hat. This also makes you a solution, because you have others ready to help you solve problems. If you get caught BSing your way through something, you won't get away with it. Eventually they'll find out and you won't work with them again. I know people who have dropped off the map because of their arrogance or inability to be humble, you know who gets the phone call for work? Me, not him- and some of the people I work with have known him longer. Building value/client relations If you've made it this far in this ridiculously long post, you'll guess why this section comes after being a web professional. Using communication, education, solutions, and a student are pretty much the only way you can build value. Building value validates your hourly rate, or the price for a project. Those skills create intangible value, "my web person is more expensive, but they're honest, open, and always works with me to get what we need done even when I'm not sure what to do." Be mindful that if you wish you could charge more, consider starting from the basics and build more value. Keep in mind that your clients have a job. They have a business to worry about, they probably need to go pick up their kids from school, payroll is due, and why are sales down this month?! Doing your best to make their experience working with you low stress and relieve them of extra work is invaluable. To build value and establish strong client relations you have to stop thinking like a developer and start thinking like a business- PLOT TWIST: not your business, your client's business. Your work needs to reflect that this is more than a website or web application, it's going to solve problems and be a net gain for their organization. You need to think as if you had an office down the hall, act as if their deadlines matter, through the way you work with clients they should feel like worrying about a website is off the table and they can get back to what their real job is. You know what matters to you? Their profits. What else matters? Their employees effectiveness, their customer satisfaction, etc. Your website/app may highly impact all of those things (and probably will). I had a manager tell me after a presentation for a new product page on a website "I was really impressed, you think like you own a business". Mission accomplished. My response? "I really appreciate the compliment, but it really is a culmination of the work you, me, and the rest of the team have done. I really appreciate you helping move the project forward." Most of the following about initial client meetings and writing a proposal is taken from my other comment so you can skip it if you've read it already. Building value starts from the first time you talk about a website. When we first meet I work to lead the conversation in a way that gets me as much information possible to do the best work I can, to let clients know that I'm here for the "big picture", and to get them to think about what their next website means for them and how much it's worth. In my initial meeting I type a lot of notes and I always discuss the following 7 topics: This may sound odd, but what does your business do? I've looked at your current website, but would like to hear that from you. (There's a chance they haven't updated their current website due to reasons we've talked about here, or that the content doesn't do a good enough job). What are your plans over the coming year? Do you plan on expanding to new locations? New products/services? (Not always, feel the client out to see if they're positioned for this- it also lets you think about whether you need to consider this for the site architecture/code) What do you want visitors to do when they get to your website? What does success look like? Filling a form? Calling? Getting them to your online shop? Visiting your location in-person? Stick around for ad revenue? Explain that websites are supposed to do things with purpose. Open up the conversation about how a website is not a brochure, it's a live business asset that establishes brand strength, is often first impression of a business, and because we just discussed what conversions look like in the previous question- a tool that works 24/7 on their behalf. What do you like about your current site? What don't you like about your current site? Is there something that you want your website to do now that it doesn't now? Get everyone in the room to think about how this isn't a replacement website, we're leveling-up here and it's time to get strategically creative. You'll see that all requires communication, education, solutions, and a being a student. After this, I talk about my values and what is important to me when working with clients. Think about the typical idea that "programmers are hard to work with" or "the IT guy is a jerk and is abrasive". We need to overcome that with new potential clients because it's safe to assume that they've had some not-great experiences. I talk with them about these things that matter most to me: Communication. Always #1. They already know that I've taking the time to communicate, now they know that it's my priority and it makes them realize how much we've been talking about them. This is another thing that I can almost guarantee has not been said to them. Ownership. Businesses/people should own their properties and assets. True ownership means being able to use and update it. If there are services along the way (like maybe Google Tag Manager) or a new hosting company then it should be an account their business owns and I'll guide them through any process to do so. If I were to be unavailable someday- you won't be stuck with a website that was dependent on me. Performance. Re-iterating the need to aim for conversions. Adhering to accessibility rules for legal and user friendliness reasons. Making the site 100% (like Google Lighthouse 100%) SEO ready when it comes time for a specialist to optimize. These questions almost never fail to get potential clients to go wide-open with you. Every single thing we have talked about has now built value and price follows value. This is where we end the first meeting and I tell them that I want to review my notes and put a proposal (I never call it a "quote") together for them and that we can meet/call next. This first meeting usually ends up taking 1-1.5 hours, an initial meeting I had last week took 2. My proposals run 2+ pages. The opening paragraph is the introduction to the project and the approach- if they said they want to expand then the website "will be built with your goals for expansion in mind". The next are bullet points that now re-iterate much of what we talked about in our initial meeting (the 7 questions). Next I talk about timing, to head off "how long will it take"- that this project is a collaboration where we depend on each other to get content, approve designs, consider the features that the website is going to have, etc. We're all in this together, and I am invested in this with them. You're now thinking about their concerns before their questions and you've worked to control that conversation. If I'm asked for more detail, I say that we will set timelines for each stage when we get started- so when design starts the timeline is X, when that is approved we set the next timeline, etc. Then comes the price but I close with the terms of payment. It's usually 40% to get started, 40% on design approval when we go to code, and 20% on launch. Now the client is looking at the price in terms of affordability over the coming X amount of time. Here's what this process has done: my language says "I'm an agency" not "a person who does websites". The client has probably talked to me more than they ever have to other web people. They've shared the good and bad, we have a relationship, and now you have absolutely everything you need to do your best work and they know that. They probably also haven't encountered someone who wants the website to achieve conversions. They now know me as an expert. When you establish relationships with clients consider these items: Don't talk about other clients too much unless you're building rapport and talking about wins before they sign a contract. After that it's like a husband talking to his wife about his girlfriend. You can break this rule if you're talking about a success they've had that you want this client to have and correlate- because you're making it about the client you're talking to. Don't let a client feel like you're too busy or rushed. If an existing or past client needs help with something and it's small- consider what's worth more to you: the money you can bill, or the value of a client relationship. Only consider this if it's small and you can afford it- there is never anything wrong with billing a client. Be selective of who you do this with, don't do it often. Don't create a pattern and expectations. If you do this, be explicitly clear in an email (document it) with something like "I took care of that issue. This on is on the house so we'll skip the bill on this one. Let me know if you need anything else!" Make sure these are small, it makes a client feel like you aren't nickle and diming them. Do not overdo this. Don't do this to win over a bad client. Keep it for your best customers. Yeah, things don't always go well If you're still reading this ridiculously long post... Sh!t happens. You miss a deadline, you got a flat tire, your dog ate your homework. You misconfigured someones DNS and took their site down. Whatever. I would argue that if something goes wrong it's almost always the best opportunity to show how good you are. The only thing that people remember more than a problem is how you handled it. Be honest about it, admit fault, own it. If it was due to an error on someone else's part, I generally try to stay tame on blame and explain what went wrong rather than who did it- unless it was a) something egregious, or b) the person that did web work for them previously. You're not trying to dunk on them (be diplomatic) but you are there to solve problems and making sure they understand why you're now working with them and the other person isn't can be positive. Did a potential client reject your proposal (surely you aren't calling them quotes, right?) Try to negotiate if you're in a position to do it. If you've built value and it really does come down to cost, then look to have the value you've built help in negotiating. Etc. Random stuff I don't send invoices, my billing platform does. Built in document emailing, automated reminders for late clients, time tracking, reporting, expense tracking, customer portals, online payments through Stripe (and others), customizable branding, etc. If you don't have one, check out InvoiceNinja. It's open-source, built on Laravel, has an API, and you know how to put stuff on a web server, right? 😎 Create a subdomain like billing.yourdomain.com and it's pretty much ready to go. An update email describing less progress on a project than a client may want to hear is better than saying the same thing after they had to ask because they haven't heard from you. Keep communication open and going, let them know that you are thinking about them. Consider offering web hosting to clients when you feel like it's a good fit. Easy and inexpensive, I use StatusCake to monitor all the sites I host so I know if anything goes wrong. So my hosting is "private, exclusively for my clients, and monitored 24/7" Spin up a VPS at a reputable place. For managed hosting I use Dreamhost, for unmanaged Digital Ocean. I have a Dreamhost VPS and a separate managed MySQL DB VPS It's not really an "income source", you don't have to charge much, but it pays for all of my hosting and domain fees (including for my billing platform). They're happy, I'm happy. Very convenient to work on client sites when you don't have to juggle passwords for GoDaddy or some service they've set up. Should you be a company or a freelancer? Up to you. Historically I was a freelancer, then this year I formed an LLC. You don't have to do it but there are benefits Professional image, taxes, a more formal business interaction, legal protections Shows my clients that I'm as serious about what I do for my clients as they are. Consider creating a "marketing deck" Agencies create these to display their services and offerings. They're usually tailored to a specific client, but having a general one to provide people I'm interested in working with is a great professional document. Make it look nice, you don't have to print it, just create a PDF to have and mail. What else can you do? Can you offer more services beyond websites? I provide "web services", so design/build new websites, update/maintain/optimize existing websites Offer building integrations between platforms, provide CRM work where needed if possible Analyze business practices to help optimize workflows Research and provide recommendations for software that solves problems Help manage existing platforms, and train others to use them Think about how a developer gives you the tools for analysis, problem solving, and fast learning. You may learn software faster than other people- I've offered to learn software and then teach it to people who already use it. Think about what you can do that solves a problem while at the same time lowering the bandwidth for employees at a company. This went on waaaaay longer than I thought it would but I just shared whatever came to mind. If you are interested in seeing the deck I put together for my services (and have a reputable account with a history here in the forums) PM me. I don't want to share it in the open since it contains PII. If you found any of this useful, shout out to @kongondo for encouraging me to share. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts, critiques, and suggestions! As always, I am 100% open to being wrong about things that someone else could help me be right about.

Happy New Year! This week we've got ProcessWire 3.0.209 released on the dev branch. Consider this version a release candidate (RC1) for the master/main branch. Relative to 3.0.208, this version contains primarily issue resolutions and minor improvements (commit log). If you have a chance to test it, please let us know if you run into any major issues by reporting them here. So long as no new major issues surface, by this time next week my hope is that we'll have the dev branch merged to the master/main branch for version 3.0.210. This week one of my clients pointed me to https://chat.openai.com/ which is really quite interesting. It's an artificial intelligence that you can chat with, and it knows quite a lot about ProcessWire and how to code in ProcessWire. Though it knows a lot about a lot of different APIs, and actually a lot about everything, not just development related stuff. But I mention it here because of how it appears it's been trained fairly well in ProcessWire. When I asked it for examples of what CMSs it knows how to code for it told me WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and ProcessWire. I'd encourage you to get an OpenAI account to try it out, it can blow your mind. Ask it questions like how to develop a ProcessWire module, how to build a search engine in ProcessWire, how to use pagination in ProcessWire, or anything you can think of. It seems to have an answer for everything. The client that told me about it is currently using it to write AWS scripts for him, and he said it's saving him a lot of development time. What I also find interesting is not just how it seems to have an answer for everything, and that it knows how to code, but also that it makes mistakes pretty regularly, and recognizes those mistakes when you point them out... and apparently learns from them. That's basically how we work. For example, I asked it how to resize an image in ProcessWire and it explained through text and code examples how to use the size() method on image fields. But it also told me that I could use the $options argument to specify the type of resize interpolation (bicubic, linear, nearest, etc.) and ProcessWire has no such option. When I told it that, it apologized and corrected its code example, and also explained more details about the size() method's $options argument. There was another instance where it made a mistake (trying to do a PHP math operation within a string) and I explained that PHP doesn't support that. It essentially said "I know that, but my example doesn't do that". Then I asked it to double check its example because it didn't look right to me, and then it replied (paraphrased) "Oops, sorry, you are right, here's a corrected version." Anyway, it's just kind of funny to me that I'm talking to a computer with these kinds of interactions, and how it seems to "think" and learn a lot like we do. It will be interesting to see where this technology leads. Currently it is a free research preview, where I suppose we are helping to test the AI and help it learn, but it's very interesting and engaging just to talk with it. Also worth noting is that it does not have internet access (other than to chat with people). So it can't go and hunt down information from websites, actually making it that much more impressive in my mind.

This week the new ProcessWire Invoices site profile has been released on GitHub here: Invoice Application Site Profile. This particular profile is much broader in scope than the others I've developed for ProcessWire, so will benefit from more descriptive information about what it includes, how to use it and modify it, and how you might build further from it. That info will all be coming next week in a new blog post. But feel free to download and install the site profile sooner if you'd like. If you are already familiar with ProcessWire, then perhaps most of it will be self explanatory. While this site profile doesn't cover everything that you might do with an invoicing application, it does cover everything that I've needed over the last year of using it with my clients. Though admittedly, I don't have a lot of clients, nor do I send a lot of invoices. Given that, when my existing invoicing service raised the monthly rate from $3/month to $20/month (a year or so ago), that's what motivated me to build this site profile. And it does everything my previous invoicing service did, and in fact does it better. While much of it was built several months ago, major improvements have been made to it over the last couple of weeks, preparing for it for release as a ProcessWire site profile. My hope is that you'll find this site profile easy to work with, and easy to build out further where needed. For instance, I imagine some may want to add in the ability to pay an invoice. It would be relatively simple to add in FormBuilder with its Stripe Processor plugin, or perhaps some other payment solution. But all my clients pay by check, whether physically or digitally, so I've not needed to add payment ability to the application yet. In any case, I hope that you find this site profile useful, and please let me know if you run into any issues with it or have suggestions for future upgrades to it. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

The core version has been bumped to 3.0.233 this week. While there aren't a lot of commits, there are some major updates to the core PagesVersions module. I also thought a version bump would be helpful as there's also a new PagesVersionsPro version released which requires features only available in 3.0.233. The PagesVersions module is now pretty much finished in terms of its API and feature set. This week the ability to save and restore partial versions was added, and that was the main remaining thing. By partial versions, I mean the ability to specify what fields are included when a version is saved or restored. Though I think it's primarily useful on the restore side. So if you find you just want to restore one or more particular fields from a past version, rather than all the fields, now you can. The core PageTable field was also updated to support versions, partially anyway. It supports versioning of items already in the page table, but doesn't handle versioning of items that you might add or remove within a version. It turns out it's going to be a lot of work to do that, so I settled with just partial support for this week. As it is, if you add a new item to the PageTable while in a version, then it'll ask you if you want to import it once you edit the live version. If you delete an item, it'll be deleted from all versions. That's how it works temporarily until it fully supports versions. ProFields Table now also supports versions. But there is one case where it doesn't: paginated table fields. A future version of Table will add support for that. Until then, the PagesVersionsPro module does make it clear when a paginated table field won't be added to the version. So now all fields in ProcessWire are supported, except for certain scenarios in PageTable and Table fields. A new version of the PagesVersionsPro module was released as well, and this is posted in the PagesVersionPro support board download thread here. This module made a lot of progress this week and will continue to evolve in the coming weeks. I'll copy/paste the version 2 changelog for it below this post. This weekend or early next week I also plan to release new versions of ProFields Table and Combo. These versions facilitate versions when doing partial save or restore operations that include file or image fields in Table or Combo fields. I hope that you and your family have a wonderful Winter/Christmas/Hanukkah/Festivus holiday! Version 2 changelog for PagesVersionsPro Added the ability to select which fields are included during a restore. When doing a restore, it now detects which fields differ between "live" and "version", making it easier for you to choose which fields to restore. When editing a version the “Delete” tab in the page editor now refers to deleting the version rather than trashing the page. The “compare” option has now been improved so that it can better detect differences between the live and version page. During restore, if you “Choose which fields to restore” you now have the option to compare them individually to see what is different between live and version. Added "page-edit-versions" permission so that you can limit the capabilities of this module to specific user roles.

There are a few commits on the dev branch this week, but nothing particularly notable. I had to do some client work this week but also ventured back into the Invoice site profile, which I mentioned quite awhile ago, but hadn't yet released. I'm hoping to finish that up and release it as another site profile option for ProcessWire very soon. Perhaps as soon as next week. I had originally planned on building out that Invoice site profile quite a bit more, but having used it for my own invoices for many months (maybe a year?), I think it's better to keep it simple. Otherwise I'd be making assumptions about what others might need. Even in its relatively simple state, it suits my own needs well. And I think if it gets more complex, then people are less likely to explore and modify it, making it less useful as a site profile. The site profile is also simple enough right now that it doesn't need to be a Pro module or need Pro-module support. Since we don't have a lot of site profiles to choose from, I'd rather keep it free. It is admittedly more of a mini application than a website, which is why I think it might bring some more diversity to the available site profiles. Chances are it won't replace whatever invoice service you might be using, but I think it's still pretty useful, whether using it to create invoices, or just using it to explore more of ProcessWire. More next week. Have a great weekend!

There hasn't been a lot of activity on the core this week, as I've been wrapped up in a ProcessWire-based client project (same one as last week). I'd like to put in a few more updates before bumping the version number, which will likely be next week. This week I also released a new module to accommodate a feature that had been requested more than once, but since it's not that commonly needed, I thought it was better to put it in a module rather than the core: Custom Inputfield Attributes for ProcessWire This module enhances both the interactive and API configurability of fields in ProcessWire (both admin and front-end). It can add custom attributes to Inputfields in ProcessWire, FormBuilder, or other Inputfield forms. Custom attributes can be configured interactively in the admin, or they can be added via this module’s API method. Custom attributes can be added to the <input> element of an Inputfield or they can be added to the wrapping .Inputfield element. You can add any attribute that you want (with a few exceptions), whether replacing or appending existing attributes, adding data-* attributes or any other named attribute. This module is available for download now on GitHub with more details on the module info page. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

ProcessWire 3.0.219 on the dev branch focuses primarily on a major overhaul to the core $modules system. The Modules class had grown into more than 5000 lines of code — all related to modules, but with lots of different areas of focus within that. It had become a little bit messy, fragile and hard to maintain at that size. I've had @todo notes in the class to "clean it up" for quite awhile, but this week I finally got to it. The approach is similar to that of our $pages API (Pages class), which is split into separate classes for page finding, loading, editing, caching, etc. The Modules class has been split into several much more focused classes for module information, installers, loaders, files, flags, duplicates, and configurations. This leaves the main Modules class as the gatekeeper, making it less fragile and easier to maintain. If this overhaul was perfect, you shouldn't notice any difference, and the public $modules API remains as before. But with such significant overhaul that took a full week to complete, there's also an increased potential for temporary errors, so please let me know if you encounter any. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week we've got a new core version on the dev branch, version 3.0.208. This version includes 15 new commits with a combination of issue resolutions and new features. See the dev branch commit log for full details. In addition, we have new versions of the following ProFields modules: FieldtypeTable, FieldtypeTextareas, FieldtypeMultiplier and FieldtypeFunctional. (Last week a new version of FieldtypeCombo was released as well). These are all posted in the ProFields downloads thread. These versions all add support for the new InputfieldTinyMCE module, in addition to other regular improvements and updates. I think that completes the list of modules I've developed that needed an update to support InputfieldTinyMCE. Speaking of InputfieldTinyMCE, it also received updates this week, primarily focused on resolving reported issues. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

In addition to site development work and ProcessWire core development, this week I upgraded my OS X version (from Mojave to Monterey), my PhpStorm version (from 2018 to 2022), and my Apache/PHP/MySQL environment versions. I tend to wait a bit too long between upgrades on my computer and so I ended up with a lot of things to resolve, and a still few remaining. While waiting for upgrades to install, I randomly came across one of the first sites I ever designed/developed out of college, working for Grafik in the year 2000: https://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/ ... I can't believe it's still there. It looks really dated now (it's 22 years old), but reminded me of how much things have changed in web design/development. While I'd been developing sites for a few years before this, it was just a hobby, and it wasn't until this time that it was my job. Back in 2000 there weren't a lot of people that knew how to create websites and it always felt like you were breaking new ground. Internet Explorer was king (and nobody liked it then either), Google was just a small startup, but AltaVista, InfoSeek and Yahoo were big. Sites were developed in a way that would make you cringe now. I don't think we used CSS hardly at all, but we did use tables for everything layout related. There was no such thing as "mobile" (the iPhone didn't come till 7 years later). There was no such thing as "responsive" layout and accessibility was pretty much an unknown. Most of the time we used images for a lot more than was appropriate (headlines and much more) because HTML and HTML fonts were so limited. It all seems so primitive now but what's the same is that it was fun then and it's fun now, actually it's more fun now. I don't have any point here, just that it's funny to look back at how much as changed. Last week I mentioned that we're likely to upgrade CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5 sometime in the next year. There were several comments about that and so just wanted to talk a little more about it. First off, I really like CKEditor 4, it's been a great fit for ProcessWire. If the company behind it was going to continue building and supporting version 4 after 2023 then we'd likely stick with it. But the CKEditor 4 end-of-life is sometime in 2023 and I don't think it's an option to stick with it (in the core) after the developer of it is no longer updating or supporting it... at least not long term. While CKEditor 5 is a different animal than CKEditor 4, it's also still the closest upgrade path from CKEditor 4, and I'm hopeful it will be able to serve as a near drop-in replacement from the perspective of users (only). My hope is that by the time we've completed the upgrade to CKE 5, our clients won't necessarily know the difference or have to re-learn anything, unless they want to take advantage of something new exclusive to CKE 5. From my perspective as a developer integrating CKEditor 5 into ProcessWire, the development side is not a drop in replacement for CKE 4 (not even close), as all supporting code will have to be redeveloped. By supporting code, I mean things like the code in the InputfieldCKEditor.module file, the code for our custom CKE plugins (pwimage and pwlink), as well as anything else development related that is referring to CKEditor. There's no doubt it'll be a lot of work. But the rich text editor is one of the most important input types in the ProcessWire admin, so it's fine, it's worth putting a lot of time into. As for CKEditor 5 being bloated relative to CKEditor 4, I very much doubt that's the case. It was a complete rewrite, the folks at CKEditor know what they are doing, and it's safe to assume it's even more optimized and streamlined than CKE 4. In terms of size, the download for CKE 4 and CKE 5 are both 1.7 megabytes. As I understand it, they started with a new codebase for CKEditor 5 in part to start fresh and avoid legacy bloat. So I see this upgrade as being the opposite of bloat. So what happens with CKEditor 4 in ProcessWire when it likely is replaced with CKEditor 5? So long as CKE 5 can be a near drop in replacement for our users, and for the markup it generates, then the CKE 4 module will move out of the core and into an optional module you can install from the modules directory, when/if someone wants it. On the other hand, if the transition is not completely clean between versions then we may end up supporting both in the core for a short period of time. Though I'm hopeful this won't be necessary. There are some other interesting looking editors out there that have been mentioned, and it'd be nice to have more input options available. I see something like Imperavi's Article as a good option for some but not a replacement for our current rich text editor. At least I know my clients would not be happy to have that big of a change occur from a PW version upgrade. Likewise, something like the Easy Markdown Editor is a great option for some, and I'd like to be able to install a module for that and use it in some cases. But folks used to using CKEditor 4 in their work would not be happy to have that big of a change either. CKEditor 4 works really well for what it does, and I think the goal has to be that clients using CKEditor 4 now should be able to continue doing what they are doing with as few changes to their workflow as possible. I'm hopeful we'll be able to get there with CKEditor 5, while also gaining some benefits in the process. Where other input options make a lot of sense is when building a new site where there aren't already users depending on one input method or another. And it may be that at some point (sooner or later) it will make sense for ProcessWire to have another textarea input option that's different enough from CKE to make it worthwhile. But in my opinion, that would be a potential additional option, not a replacement, as CKE is pretty well established and expected in PW.

Modules Directory: https://processwire.com/modules/rock-frontend Github: https://github.com/baumrock/RockFrontend

I hope that you all had a great holiday and New Years. This week on the dev branch is ProcessWire 3.0.234. This version contains 6 issue fixes, but the biggest update (and primary reason for the version bump) is that this version updates to the newest Uikit version in AdminThemeUikit. We hadn't updated it in awhile, so it's a fairly major upgrade. I found that it broke some really minor things and I fixed them as I found them. But please let me know if you come across any other Uikit upgrade issues I've missed. While it is a major Uikit upgrade, it was an easy upgrade thanks to the work of @bernhard and changes he made to the AdminThemeUikit module awhile back. Next week there will be more issue issue fixes as I catch up with the processwire-issues repo. There were a couple issue fixes already in progress this week that didn't make it in to 3.0.234 as I ran out of time, but they'll be committed to the dev branch next week as well. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Last week we had a big update of Pro modules and this week we have another batch of Pro module updates. These are now posted and available for download in the relevant boards: ProDevTools Profiler Pro (v3) ProDevTools Sitemap XML (v4) ProDevTools ProcessWire API Explorer (v5) ProDevTools User Activity (v7) LoginRegisterPro Frontend File Inputfield (v3) FormBuilder Stripe Processor (v3) FormBuilder Stripe Inputfield (v9) If you use the ProcessWireUpgrade module, it can also tell you when Pro module updates are available. In addition to the Pro module updates, we also have a new dev branch core version available: 3.0.228. ProcessWire 3.0.228 primarily focuses on fixing newly reported issues. We'll likely merge this version to the master/main branch sometime early next week because it contains a couple of fixes that belong on the master/main branch. For instance, there was a bug with ProcessWire's pages_parents table (present for the last year) that could affect the result on has_parent selectors in some situations. There was also a bug found by @Robin S where ProcessWire's image fields weren't using the stored/cached value for width/height on images, and instead was pulling it from the image file, which takes more time. So for image-heavy pages, 3.0.228 theoretically could offer a nice performance benefit (especially in the page editor), and is a worthwhile upgrade. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Like last week, work continued on preparing our next main/master version by working through remaining issue reports, this week with a focus on older and previously missed reports. Thanks for bumping up any that we may have previously missed. Thanks also to @matjazp for helping to identify and prioritize them. In addition, the version number was updated to 3.0.223 this week, as there were enough changes to warrant differentiating it from 3.0.222. It wasn't all issue fixes this week, as several minor additions and improvements were completed as well (see the dev branch commit log). Next week will continue along the same path. Thanks and have a great weekend!

This week ProcessWire 3.0.217 is released with 10 issue fixes, 2 PRs and a couple of minor additions too. See the dev branch changelog for details. Recently a client called me in a panic because they'd spent a few hours making edits to a page, and when they finally hit save, they were no longer logged in, so their changes were seemingly lost. I guess that their IP had changed somehow, or they kept the page editor open overnight or something. Whatever it was, they were now sitting at the login screen with their changes apparently lost forever. Luckily this person left that window as-is and contacted me to see if there was any way I could recover their changes. I quickly edited their /site/config.php file and temporarily added these: $config->protectCSRF = false; $config->sessionFingerprint = false; Next, I asked them to open another tab and login there. Once logged in, they returned to the tab where the page save failed, then hit "reload" in their browser, and their changes were saved. Phew. Thankfully that worked, but if it didn't, the next thing we were going to try was to open the browser inspector "Network" tab, and then copy/paste the edited content right out of the browser's POST data and into the CKEditor HTML source window. I imagine this has happened to others and perhaps they weren't so lucky as to recover the unsaved changes. So how can you avoid this issue? The best bet is to just save your work regularly. But that doesn't always happen, no matter how many times we communicate that to the client. So you can reduce the probability of it by making a couple adjustments to your config.php file. One change would be increasing your $config->sessionExpireSeconds. But the default is already 86400 seconds (1 day), and I'm not sure many really take more than a day between starting an edit and saving it... though I'm sure it happens. Another change would be turning off the $config->sessionFingerprint (or loosening it, see fingerprint settings). That's trading security for convenience, which isn't ideal, but it would prevent a changed IP address from expiring the session. Another thing you can do is install the ProDevTools UserActivity module, which keeps a ping going to the server, preventing you from getting logged out due to inactivity. Though this doesn't prevent a changed session fingerprint from logging you out, though it at least alerts you as soon as you've been logged out. Even the above changes might not completely solve this issue, and I don't like to tailor session settings around this case either (reducing security), so I've been thinking of alternatives. After dwelling on it for awhile, I started working on a module that saves non-authenticated POST requests sent to the page editor... saving data that would otherwise get lost. Then when you go back to edit the page, it alerts you that there are unsaved changes and asks you if you want to save them. When you answer yes and hit "save", it repopulates the unsaved POST data back into $input->post before the page editor has had a chance to process it. There are of course some security considerations here, so it has to be built carefully. I should also mention that it won't help much if it's the client's computer or browser that has frozen (there's the PageAutoSave module that can help with that). Though data loss due to a frozen computer/browser is likely even more rare than session loss. I don't have this module fully working just yet (it's a work in progress), but it's relatively simple so it probably won't take long. It's not going to catch everything; it won't save files, for instance. But it will catch the most likely cases, such as changes to those big "body copy" fields that someone might spend hours making edits with. I'll post more about it when I've got it a little further along, if there's interest. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week I've done some work on the core $cache API (WireCache) to make it able to support other cache storage options. To do that, I had to move all the storage code out of the WireCache class and into a separate class that implements the new WireCacheInterface. So it was kind of a major refactor. Now the WireCache class is independent of storage method, which will make it more flexible in the long term. The first class that implements the new interface is the new WireCacheDatabase. This contains the cache database-storage code that was previously in the WireCache class. But the plan is to also add a WireCacheFilesystem (in progress), and make it possible for others to develop WireCache modules, perhaps for Redis, Memcache, etc. I've been wanting to do this because in some cases I've noticed significantly better read performance from file-based caches. (Though admittedly, at the expense of write performance.) But it made me think it would just be better to have more cache storage options, and also be nice to take advantage of even better cache options available in different environments, like in the AWS environment we run this site on. One of the issues with changing the cache used by the system is that the $modules API (Modules class) depends on WireCache for quite a few things. And the modules basically can't load without the relevant caches being available. At present, $cache has to load before $modules, which makes the whole idea of WireCache-modules a bit of a chicken-or-egg first situation. So I've been working to decouple $modules from WireCache, or at least make it able to function if its cache isn't available on occasion. I made some good progress there, but found that there was a little bit of a performance hit in doing so, so I reverted those changes and put them behind a toggle in the Modules class to experiment with further. But while doing that, I found some other ways to improve the performance of the modules loader. So you'll find the dev branch boots a little faster this week. Maybe not noticeably so (since PW already boots fast), but measurably so. I'm always looking for opportunities to improve performance — even small performance improvements amount to large savings over time. While on the topic of caches, I've also added an experimental $pages->loader()->findCache($selector) method which works exactly like $pages->find($selector) method, except that it caches the page IDs that were found for a period of time that you specify in the 2nd argument (default is 60 seconds). I imagine this method would be useful for complicated or slow page finding operations that don't need to restart from scratch on every request. This is an alternative to markup caching for greater control. But since it caches the result of the find operation (page IDs), and not the actual pages, it has a different set of benefits (and drawbacks) relative to markup caches. I'm still experimenting with this method to get more feedback and make sure it's worthwhile, so far it appears to be. This will likely become accessible at $pages->findCache() once out of the experimental stage. That's all for this week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week we have a new core version available on the dev branch. Relative to the previous version, 3.0.212 contains 32 commits, 16 issue fixes and 3 PRs. Here's a list of what's been added: Improvements were made to InputfieldImage so that you can now add your own image actions with hooks. More details in this post and ProcessWire Weekly #455. Significant refactoring and improvements were made to the ProcessPageEditLink module. One of the most notable is that it now will retain HTML class attributes on links, even if not specifically configured with the ProcessPageEditLink module. This is useful if you've added custom classes for links in TinyMCE or CKEditor, but haven't also added them to the ProcessPageEditLink module configuration. Improvements were made to Text fields so that HTML Entity Encoder is now automatically added. This was covered in detail in last week's post and in ProcessWire Weekly #457. InputfieldEmail has been updated with optional support for IDN emails and UTF-8 local-part emails, per request. Two new $sanitizer methods have been added: htmlClass() and htmlClasses(). These sanitize HTML class attributes, and it's part of what enables us to support the custom class attribute support added in the ProcessPageEditLink updates mentioned above. Added feature request #480 to support configurable file extensions for translatable files (beyond .php, .module and .inc). Added a new uploadName() method/property to Pagefile/Pageimage objects that returns the original unsanitized filename as it was uploaded. Applies only to files uploaded since this feature was added. Be aware the filename is unsanitized so be careful with it. This was to partially answer feature request #56 and this solution was suggested by Bernhard Baumrock. Demonstrating the above, InputfieldFile now shows this original filename if you hover the file icon, and InputfieldImage shows it if you hover the current filename. HTTP requests that contain an accidental double slash in the URL now redirect rather than render the page. The PagesParents class was refactored so that it is now a lot faster in saving its data to the pages_parents table. This is very noticeable if you have a site with more than million pages when changing the parent of existing pages, especially those having children. Previously there was a [potentially very] long delay at large scale, now it is instant. More details on these updates, and additional updates can also be found in ProcessWire Weekly #455, #456 and #457. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

There are several updates on the dev branch this week (commit log), including issue fixes, feature additions and minor class improvements. One of the updates I'd planned to add this week was moving InputfieldTinyMCE into the core. However, I noticed that TinyMCE was up to version 6.4.1 now and we were still running 6.2.0, so I decided instead to upgrade ours to the latest and test it out for another week in its own repository. If all continues to work well, I'll likely commit it to the core in 3.0.215. If you have a chance to test the latest version of InputfieldTinyMCE, please do, and open an issue report if you run into any trouble. Last week the Wire Request Blocker module was released in the ProDevTools board and this week we have version 2, which includes several new additions: Added support for blocking groups. Added configurable settings for immediate block (rather than just a strike) for URLs and user agents. Added support for using RequestBlocker in other applications (like we use it here in IP.Board). Added a feature were you can manually test URLs or user agent strings to see how they match your rules. Added a configuration setting so you can choose whether or not to use a log file. Added a section to the docs on how to block URLs from your .htaccess file. As I wrote this post, the processwire.com site is getting hounded with dozens of IPs trying to locate backup or database zip/rar/tar/gz files, using every possible combination of filenames and extensions you can think of, including those that include the term "processwire". Remember to never leave backup files or DB dump files accessible by URL lying around on your server, because they will get eventually found. Adding these rules (below) to WireRequestBlocker's URL matching rules seems to mostly stopped those DB/backup hunting bots: /ba=/backups/|/backup/|/bak/|/back/ .txt=credentials.txt|backup.txt|password.txt|passwords.txt .sql=.sql.gz|.sql.tar|backup.sql|dump.sql|db.sql|database.sql|mysql.sql|.com.sql .tar=.tar.gz|.tar.sql|dump.tar|backup.tar|bak.tar|website.tar|backup.tar|www.tar .zip=backup.zip|bak.zip|.com.zip|well-known.zip|index.zip|public_html.zip|website.zip|dump.zip|wallet.zip|application.zip .rar=bak.rar|website.rar|backup.rar|www.rar .gz=website.gz|bak.gz|backup.gz|.com.gz /old/ WireRequestBlocker only knows its rules and doesn't know who's real and who's a bot, so be careful not to hit URLs containing those strings on this site or it might hit you with nothing but 403's for a few hours. 🙂 Next week is Spring Break here, so I'll likely be on a reduced schedule with kids home from school. Thanks for reading, have a great weekend! +75 more blocks (not shown)

Hello all, I wanted to share a proof of concept approach on how we can have an infinite scroll pattern without writing Javascript. We can achieve this with htmx. What you will get An overview page with a list of posts (PW pages). On initial page load 5 posts will be shown. When scrolling down and reaching the last post, another 5 posts will be loaded via AJAX in the background and appended after the last post until no more pages are found. Prerequisites You are using the delayed output strategy, with a _main.php appended. Just like using the default site profile when installing ProcessWire You are using markup regions, in my _main.php I have a div#content that will be used for the output of the posts Inside site/config.php $config->useMarkupRegions = true; Inside site/templates/_main.php <!-- main content --> <div id='content'> </div> For script loading I am using a custom $config->bodyScripts FilenameArray Inside site/config.php $config->bodyScripts = new FilenameArray(); Inside site/templates/_main.php before the closing </body> tag <?php foreach ($config->bodyScripts as $file) : ?> <script src="<?= $file ?>"></script> <?php endforeach ?> </body> PW page structure for this tutorial In the page tree I have a parent page "Posts" with template "posts". All child pages of that page have template "post" In the template "posts" settings in the "URLs" tab, check "Allow Page Numbers" and save. Needed for pagination. When viewing the page "Posts" all logic happens inside site/templates/posts.php site/templates/posts.php <?php namespace ProcessWire; // posts.php template file // add htmx js from site/templates/scripts $config->bodyScripts->add($config->urls->templates . 'scripts/htmx.min.js'); $limit = 5; $posts = $pages->find("template=post, limit={$limit}"); $lastPost = $posts->last(); $nextPageUrl = $page->url . $input->pageNumStr((int) $input->pageNum() + 1); $hxAttributes = array(); $hxAttributes[] = 'hx-get="' . $nextPageUrl . '"'; $hxAttributes[] = 'hx-trigger="revealed"'; $hxAttributes[] = 'hx-swap="afterend"'; ?> <?php if (!$config->ajax) : ?> <section pw-append="content" class="posts" hx-headers='{"X-Requested-With": "XMLHttpRequest"}'> <?php endif ?> <?php foreach ($posts as $post) : ?> <article class="post" <?php if ($post == $lastPost) echo implode(' ', $hxAttributes) ?>> <header> <h3><?= $post->title ?></h3> </header> </article> <?php endforeach ?> <?php if ($config->ajax) return $this->halt() ?> <?php if (!$config->ajax) : ?> </section> <?php endif ?> And that is all there is to it. Not a single line of Javascript, thanks to htmx. I followed the infinite scroll pattern from the official htmx examples. Now let's break the code down into easily digestible chunks // add htmx js from site/templates/scripts $config->bodyScripts->add($config->urls->templates . 'scripts/htmx.min.js'); This adds site/templates/scripts/htmx.min.js to our custom $config->bodyScripts FilenameArray so it will be loaded in _main.php. You can get the script here from unpkg.com. $limit = 5; $posts = $pages->find("template=post, limit={$limit}"); Sets our pagination limit to 5 and loads the correct set of posts. $lastPost = $posts->last(); Saves the last post of each set. We use this later to determine whether the htmx attributes should be rendered. $nextPageUrl = $page->url . $input->pageNumStr((int) $input->pageNum() + 1); We are building the link to the next "page" with the next set of posts. Will result in something like "/posts/page2", "/posts/page3" etc. $hxAttributes = array(); $hxAttributes[] = 'hx-get="' . $nextPageUrl . '"'; $hxAttributes[] = 'hx-trigger="revealed"'; $hxAttributes[] = 'hx-swap="afterend"'; Define our htmx attributes as an array. They will be added to every last post's HTML. Note the hx-get attribute which will be the URL for the AJAX call in the background. That request is triggered whenever the last post becomes visible inside the viewport while scrolling down. hx-swap afterend tells htmx to append the next batch of posts after the last post. <?php if (!$config->ajax) : ?> <section pw-append="content" class="posts" hx-headers='{"X-Requested-With": "XMLHttpRequest"}'> <?php endif ?> // and <?php if (!$config->ajax) : ?> </section> <?php endif ?> Renders the wrapping section tag only on initial page load which is a none AJAX request. Note the hx-headers='{"X-Requested-With": "XMLHttpRequest"}'. This adds an additional header to all AJAX requests with htmx. We need this header so ProcessWire understands that it is an AJAX request. Otherwise $config->ajax would always return false. See https://htmx.org/attributes/hx-headers/ for more info <?php foreach ($posts as $post) : ?> <article class="post" <?php if ($post == $lastPost) echo implode(' ', $hxAttributes) ?>> <header> <h3><?= $post->title ?></h3> </header> </article> <?php endforeach ?> Render each posts's HTML. If it is the last post, also render our htmx attributes. For brevity in this example I only output the post title. <?php if ($config->ajax) return $this->halt() ?> For AJAX requests stop execution of the template file and everything that follows. This prevents appending of _main.php for ajax calls. So we only get the desired HTML for the list of posts and no head, footer etc. Summary Compared to other approaches, htmx lets us control all our AJAX logic with a few html attributes. Really neat and concise. Easypeasy. I like that and will surely use an approach like this in future when infinite scroll is needed. What I like in particular is how easy this is implemented with ProcessWire's powerful pagination capabilities. If you have the same page structure, the code in site/templates/posts.php is working out of the box as is. I have this running on a standard PW multilang site profile with additions/amendments mentioned above under "Prerequisites". Here's a visual of the result:

This week on the core dev branch we’ve got some major refactoring in the Page class. Unless I broke anything in the process, it should be more efficient and use less memory than before. But a few of useful new methods for getting page fields were added in the process. (A couple of these were also to answer feature request #453). Dot syntax You may have heard of dot-syntax for getting page fields, such as $pages->get('parent.title') where “parent” can be any field and “title” can be any field that has subfields. This is something that ProcessWire has supported for a long time, but it doesn’t get used much because it was disabled when output formatting was on. So it wasn’t something you could really count on always being there. Now you can — it is enabled all of the time. But it’s also been rewritten to be more powerful. When using dot syntax with a multi-value field (i.e. any kind of WireArray value) you can also specify field_name.first to get just the first value or field_name.last to get just the last value. i.e. $page->get('categories.first'); will take a value that was going to be a PageArray (‘categories’) and return just the first Page from it. Bracket syntax With bracket syntax you can call $page->get('field_name[]') with the (‘[]’ brackets at the end) and it will always return the appropriate array value for the type, whether a PageArray, WireArray, Pagefiles/Pageimages, or regular PHP array, etc. This is useful in cases where you know you’ll want a value you can foreach/iterate. Maybe you’ve got a Page field that set set to contain just 1 page, or maybe you’ve got a File/Image field set to contain just 1 file. But you want some way to treat all of your page or file/image fields the same, just append “[]” to the field name in your $page->get() call and you’ll always get an array-type value, regardless of the field settings. This bracket syntax can also be used for getting 1 value by index number. Let’s say you’ve got a page field named “categories” that contains multiple pages. If you want to get just the first, you can just call $page->get('categories[0]'); If you want to get the second, you can do $page->get('categories[1]'); This works whether the field is set to contain just one value or many values. Using the first index [0] is a good way to ensure you get 1 item when you may not know whether the field is a single-value or multi-value field. Another thing you can do with the bracket syntax is put a selector in it to filter a multi-value field right in the $page->get() call. Let’s say you want all categories that have the word “design” in the name. You can call $page->get('categories[title%=design]'); If you want just the first, then $page->get('categories[title%=design][0]'); What’s useful about using selectors in brackets is that this does a filter at the database-level rather than loading the entire ‘categories’ field in memory and then filtering it. Meaning it's a lot more memory efficient than doing a $page->get('categories')->find('title%=design'); In this way, it’s similar to the already-supported option to use a field name as a method call, for instance ProcessWire supports $page->field_name('selector'); to achieve a similar result. Dot syntax and bracket syntax together You can use all of these features together. Here’s a few examples from the updated $page->get() phpdocs: // get value guaranteed to be iterable (array, WireArray, or derived) $images = $page->get('image[]'); // Pageimages $categories = $page->get('category[]'); // PageArray // get item by position/index, returns 1 item whether field is single or multi value $file = $page->get('files[0]'); // get first file (or null if files is empty) $file = $page->get('files.first'); // same as above $file = $page->get('files.last'); // get last file $file = $page->get('files[1]'); // get 2nd file (or null if there isn't one) // get titles from Page reference field categories in an array $titles = $page->get('categories.title'); // array of titles $title = $page->get('categories[0].title'); // string of just first title // you can also use a selector in [brackets] for a filtered value // example: get categories with titles matching text 'design' $categories = $page->get('categories[title%=design]'); // PageArray $category = $page->get('categories[title%=design][0]'); // Page or null $titles = $page->get('categories[title%=design].title'); // array of strings $title = $page->get('categories[title%=design].title[0]'); // string or null // remember curly brackets? You can use dot syntax in there too… echo $page->get('Page “{title}” has {categories.count} total categories'); I’m not going to bump the version number this week because a lot of code was updated or added and I’d like to test it for another week before bumping the version number (since it triggers the upgrades module to notify people). But if you decide to upgrade now, please let me know how it works for you or if you run into any issues. Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!