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As some of you might know from my monthly newsletter I have been struggling with how to proceed with my commercial modules. It's a long story, but last year I reached a point were something had to change. The main problem is that building and selling modules for ProcessWire has never been sustainable for me. Not even close. It has been a lot of work to build the shop. It has been a lot of work to provide proper docs. It has been a lot of work to create videos about the modules so that interested people can get an idea of my modules. That's fine. I knew it would probably not be easy. But I wanted to try 🙂 You never know if you don't try. And I've had hope that it is possible. Unfortunately I don't have this hope any more and that's why I have to draw a line under it. That's also fine. I've learned a lot and I'm really thankful for anybody that has sent some Euros to a stranger that they have never met in person and that excludes any refund 😄 So for me the decision was taken. It took me quite some time to get there, but here we are. There was just one problem left: My clients. They have put trust in me and I didn't want to disappoint them. Just drawing a line might be a good solution for myself but might be a terrible solution for them (and their clients as well). Just not providing updates and keeping selling them is also not my style. With open sourcing my modules I try to find the best solution for everybody involved and I want to especially thank @FireWire for helping me get there 🙂 What does that mean? I'm using my modules in many of my own projects, which means that I will likely keep them alive for some time. On the other hand I don't plan to develop a lot of websites any more and many modules are somewhat feature complete as @FireWire helped me to realise, so there are no bigger updates planned for any of my modules at this time. Also, none of my modules is tested with the new admin theme. If you want to help out on that front, I'll be happily merging PRs, but as I'm not using it myself I'm not going to fix any issues or adding support for it in my spare time. So if you want to keep using my modules: Go ahead and have fun! 🙂 If you find the modules helpful it's always nice to let me know. Hope this is a good solution for everyone! Thx for reading and all the best.

This week I’m going to briefly tell you about what we’ll have for you next week. If all goes according to plan, the new admin theme will be committed to the dev branch by this time next week. Technically it’s not a new admin theme in the module sense, but rather a new look for the AdminThemeUikit theme. (The original look will be there too, should you want to keep using it.) There are a lot of cool things about the new look, but here’s a few things to whet your appetite: 1. It comes with a “dark” mode, and a really fantastic dark mode at that. Every user can choose whether they want a light or dark version of the theme, or they can switch on-the-fly from any page. Both the light and dark versions of the theme are equally beautiful and refreshing. 2. The configuration screen lets you choose what your “main” color is for the theme, whether using predefined traditional PW colors, or a color picker where you can choose your own. 3. This theme also customizes the look of TinyMCE, so that it fits right in with the rest of the interface. 4. If you want to change more about the appearance of theme than what’s on the module config screen, you can do so with a custom CSS file. And there are more than 30 CSS variables that are easy to understand and customize. More next week, so stay tuned!

Padloper is dead! Long live Padloper! It is official! Padloper is now ProcessWire Commerce. ProcessWire Commerce is a free, open-source fully featured e-commerce module (plugin) for building and managing fully function online shops (stores) in ProcessWire. It is flexible, extensible, highly customisable, scalable, robust, multilingual by design and battle tested. Pro Support ProcessWire Commerce is designed to be easy to develop with and to use. For some, you might need extra reassurance that professional help will be available if you need it. Or, you might have a question about how to perform a certain thing or wish to support the project to ensure that any issues are dealt with quickly. Or you might want to sponsor a particular feature. If this is you, Pro Support and custom development can be purchased from my website. Community Support These forums. Donations If you value my work or my work helps support your work or you just want to say thanks, please consider donating. Thanks! Requests Modalities are still being worked out. Please note: I'll add features at my own pace; if and when I can (reasons for this discussed elsewhere in the forums). I'll focus on security, PRs and maintaining the project and major bug fixes. I hope community will contribute. Sponsored (pay for a feature) features: This can be by individuals or community driven. Please contact me for availability. Known Bugs ProcessWire Commerce Admin GUI is broken in the new admin theme, i.e., ProcessWire 3.0.248 (or newer). Save + Exit and similar broken on some pages at some recent ProcessWire version. Manually order creation broken (backend). Please file bug reports in the repo here - https://github.com/kongondo/ProcessWireCommerce/issues. Contributing This is a community project. All contributions are welcome! We are still working out how the 'how'. Documentation Please see this thread. Other Important Stuff Migrating from Padloper. Community help request. Tech Stack ProcessWire (PHP). Vanilla JS htmx Alpine JS Tailwind CSS MySQL Download Here you go!

This week ProcessWire has an awesome new admin design thanks to the work of @diogo and @jploch of KONKAT Studio. You can get it now on ProcessWire’s dev branch! Read the latest blog post for details, screenshots, Q&A with the designers, and more: https://processwire.com/blog/posts/new-processwire-admin-redesign/

I have never been loyal to tools for the sake of it. If something stops earning its keep, I move on. The reason I have stayed with ProcessWire for close to ten years is simple: it continues to make sense for how I work. I still look after sites I built many years ago, and most of them just run. No rewrites, no upgrade stress, no feeling that past work is a liability. The API has stayed stable, and when it has changed, it has been deliberate and predictable. That matters when you are responsible for client sites long-term. What really locked me in early on was the front-end freedom. PW never told me how a site should look or behave. It gave me solid building blocks and allowed me to choose. I can build very different sites without switching platforms or fighting opinionated defaults, and that freedom is something I value. The forum is another reason I am still here. You, the people in this community, take the time to understand a problem before jumping to solutions. That is very rare. The discussions are thoughtful, practical, and grounded in real experience, and I have learned a lot simply by reading how others approach things. And finally, trust. I trust ProcessWire not to chase trends simply for attention, and not to trade clarity or performance for fashion. Ten years on, it still feels like a system built by people who actually build websites. For me, that combination has been hard to beat.

This week on the core dev branch there are several new hookable methods added to the Page class. While many of them may be redundant with hooks already available on the Pages class, those on the Page class are more convenient to use in some cases, especially when it comes to using custom Page classes. It's helpful because you can hook CustomPageClass::method rather than Page::method to more easily target specific types of pages. Or you can override the methods in a custom page class, without having to hook them at all. I'll get into this with more details and examples in a future blog post that goes in-depth on using custom page classes. Here's a summary of the methods that were added with links to their API reference documentation pages: Page::addReady() Page::added() Page::addStatusReady() Page::addedStatus() Page::removeStatusReady() Page::removedStatus() Page::cloneReady() Page::cloned() Page::deleteReady() Page::deleted() Page::editReady() Page::moveReady() Page::moved() Page::renameReady() Page::renamed() Page::saveReady() Page::saved() Page::renderPage() The above is just for this week, but there's quite a bit more in 3.0.253 relative to 3.0.252, so be sure to check the last issues from ProcessWire Weekly for more details.

Image Hotspots Allows a Repeater field to be used to define hotspots on an image. Being able to add multiple fields of any type to the Repeater provides flexibility for the information you can store for a hotspot. Setup 1. Install the module. Two decimal fields will automatically be created on install: hotspot_x and hotspot_y. You can set custom hotspot and highlight colours in the module config if needed. 2. Create a "single" image field (i.e. maximum number of files = 1) that you will use store the image that will have hotspots defined on it. Add this field to a template. 3. Create a Repeater field and add the hotspot_x and hotspot_y fields to the Repeater. Add any other fields you need to store information about the hotspots you will create. Save the Repeater field. 4. In the "Details" tab of the Repeater field, expand the "Image Hotspots" section (this section appears for any Repeater field that has the hotspot_x and hotspot_y fields). For "Image field", select the image field you created in step 2. The "Image height" setting defines the maximum height of the image when displayed in Page Edit. 5. Add the Repeater field to the template you added the image field to in step 2. Usage in Page Edit When an image has been saved to the image field, the Repeater field will display a preview of the image at the top of the field. Click "Add New" to create a new hotspot. The hotspot appears at the top left of the image initially and can be moved by clicking and dragging it to the desired location on the image. The X/Y coordinates of the hotspot will be automatically updated as the hotspot is moved. For precise adjustments you can modify the X/Y coordinates directly and the hotspot position will be updated. To identify which Repeater item corresponds to a given hotspot, click on the hotspot. The corresponding Repeater item header will receive an orange outline. Click the hotspot again to remove the orange outline. To identify which hotspot corresponds to a given Repeater item, expand the Repeater item and focus either the X or Y coordinate fields. The corresponding hotspot will be highlighted in orange. On the frontend It's up to you to display the hotspots on the frontend in any way you need. The values of the hotspot_x and hotspot_y fields are percentages so when given absolution positioning over the image your hotspot markers can preserve their positions as the image scales up or down in a responsive layout. https://github.com/Toutouwai/ImageHotspots https://processwire.com/modules/image-hotspots/

This week I’ve bumped the dev branch version number to 3.0.249. This includes a little under 20 commits with various small updates, also including several to the new AdminThemeUikit default theme. This will likely continue for a couple more minor versions on the dev branch as we continue to optimize and improve it. See dev branch commit log for more details. I’m currently developing a portal application in ProcessWire for a client, and also working to finish up the ProcessWire.com website with the new design. We’re getting very close to having it technically ready, leaving just some writing for the homepage and features sections of the site. So the new site could be online in as soon as the end of the month. Stay tuned! Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

ProcessWire’s API is accessible through API variables and it provides multiple ways to access them. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach and this post aims to cover them all. We also look at how to add your own API variables as well. https://processwire.com/blog/posts/api-variable-best-practices/

I hope you’ve had a good week. My kids have been on spring break from school for the last week, so we took them to the beach for a week. The weather was great, so I didn’t get much time at the computer. We’ve just returned and now I’m anxious to focus on ProcessWire. While I don’t have much to say this week, hopefully by this time next week I’ll have much more to write about, so stay tuned and have a great weekend!

Hello! 👋 I'm thrilled to (re-)introduce WireWall — an advanced security firewall module for ProcessWire that I've been actively developing and refining in production for months. After blocking massive amounts of malicious traffic (99.98%+ on my e-commerce sites) with zero impact on real users, it's time for a refreshed community announcement with all the latest features from v1.3.4. What is WireWall? WireWall turns your ProcessWire site into a secure fortress with enterprise-grade tools: city-level geo-blocking, full IPv6/CIDR, multi-layer bot protection, true stealth mode, rate limiting fixes, and file-based caching that easily handles 1M+ IPs. Key Features (as of 1.3.4) Geographic Control City-level blocking (e.g. Philadelphia, Beijing, Sydney) Subdivision/region blocking (Pennsylvania, New South Wales, Île-de-France) Country blocking (blacklist/whitelist 200+ countries) MaxMind GeoLite2 integration (Country + ASN + City) — 0.5-2ms lookups HTTP fallback (ip-api.com) when MaxMind not available Full IPv6 + CIDR support Bot & Threat Protection Bad bots, scanners, vulnerability tools AI training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, GrokBot, Perplexity, etc.) Fake/headless browser detection (Puppeteer, Selenium, etc.) VPN/Proxy/Tor detection (multi-API chain) Datacenter blocking (AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, etc.) ASN blocking & whitelisting (block/allow entire networks) Security & Rate Limiting Configurable rate limiting with burst handling & permanent/temporary bans JavaScript challenge for suspicious traffic IP whitelist/blacklist with CIDR Priority system — now 16 levels (logged-in users at #3, trusted modules at #2) Stealth & UX True silent 404 mode — plain "Not Found" text (no HTML/branding) Beautiful custom block page with location/IP display Custom redirect or message on block Option to completely disable AJAX protection (fallback for tricky integrations) Performance & Management File-based cache — scales to millions of IPs, no DB overhead Cache UI with stats & per-type clear buttons Detailed logging (city/region/ASN included) Admin area always protected (triple-layer) Real-World Results On production sites (e-commerce + others), WireWall consistently: Blocks 99.98%+ of attacks/scrapers/VPN fraud Zero false positives for logged-in users & legitimate traffic (thanks to priority fixes) Handles spikes without issues after rate limiting improvements Eliminates most cloud-based automated probes Installation (Quick) cd site/modules/ git clone https://github.com/mxmsmnv/WireWall.git Then in admin: Modules → Refresh Install WireWall Configure (start with rate limiting + VPN detection + bad/AI bots) Monitor: Setup → Logs → wirewall Priority System (how requests are evaluated) Admin area → always ALLOW Trusted ProcessWire module AJAX → ALLOW Logged-in users → ALLOW (new in 1.3.4 — unconditional bypass) IP whitelist → ALLOW Allowed bots / IPs / ASNs → ALLOW Rate limiting → BLOCK if exceeded IP blacklist → BLOCK JS challenge → CHALLENGE VPN/Proxy/Tor → BLOCK Datacenter → BLOCK ASN blocking → BLOCK Global rules (bots/paths/UA/referer) → BLOCK Country blocking → BLOCK/ALLOW City blocking → BLOCK/ALLOW Subdivision blocking → BLOCK/ALLOW Country-specific rules → BLOCK First match wins. MaxMind Setup (strongly recommended) Free GeoLite2 databases → fast & offline. See README or https://wirewall.org for setup guide. Requirements ProcessWire 3.0.200+ PHP 8.1+ Resources GitHub: https://github.com/mxmsmnv/WireWall Releases & Changelog: https://github.com/mxmsmnv/WireWall/releases Landing: https://wirewall.org License: MIT (free for commercial use) Why build this? ProcessWire deserved a native, scalable, granular firewall with city-level control, offline capability, and proper exception handling — things missing or hard in other solutions. Happy to answer questions, hear about your security setups, or debug any issues! Feedback from the community has already shaped big improvements (like the recent logged-in & stealth fixes). Best regards, Maxim

Hi everyone, This module completely replaces the default ProcessWire image sizing engine with the powerful Intervention Image v3 library. The goal was to modernize how we handle images in ProcessWire, bringing in features like AVIF support, superior resizing quality, and strict aspect-ratio handling, while keeping the API compatible with what you already know. 🚀 What does it do? Replacement: It hooks into Pageimage. You can keep using $image->width(300), $image->size(800, 600), or $image->crop(...) just like you always have. Modern Formats: Automatically handles WebP and AVIF generation. Smart Responsive Images: It introduces a configuration-based approach where you define Breakpoints, Grid Columns, and Resizing Factors. The module uses these settings to automatically calculate and generate the perfect srcset for your layouts. ✨ New Methods: render() and attrs() While standard methods work as expected, I’ve added/updated methods to handle modern HTML output: 1. $image->render(string $preset, array $options) This outputs the complete HTML tag. It automatically handles: The <img> tag with srcset and sizes. The <picture> tag with <source> elements if you have enabled extra formats (like AVIF/WebP) in the settings. Lazy Loading & LQIP: It automatically generates a Low Quality Image Placeholder (pixelated/blur effect) and applies a base64 background to the image tag for a smooth loading experience. // Example: Render a 'landscape' preset defined in module settings echo $page->image->render('landscape', ['class' => 'my-image']); 2. $image->attrs(string $preset, array $options) Perfect for developers who use template engines like Twig or Latte, or prefer full control over their HTML. This returns an array of attributes instead of an HTML string. $data = $page->image->attrs('landscape'); // Returns array like: // [ // 'src' => '...', // 'width' => 1200, // 'height' => 675, // 'srcset' => '...', // 'sources' => [ ... ], // Array for picture tag sources // 'style' => 'background-image: url(data:image...);', // LQIP Base64 // 'class' => 'iv-lazy ...' // ] ⚙️ Configuration Strategy Instead of hardcoding sizes in your templates, you configure your design tokens in the module settings: Breakpoints (e.g., 1200px) Aspect Ratios (e.g., 16:9) Grid Columns (e.g., 1-1, 1-2, 1-3) Factors (e.g., 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2 for Retina support) The module calculates the necessary image dimensions based on these combinations. If you request a specific aspect ratio, it ensures strict adherence to it, preventing 1px rounding errors. 📝 A Note on Documentation I wanted to get this into your hands as soon as possible, but due to a heavy workload, I haven't finished writing the detailed README.md yet. Currently, you can grab the code from GitHub (link below). I will submit this to the official ProcessWire Modules Directory after add some other features and after update readme.md Download / GitHub: GitHub Repo I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions!

This week on the dev branch there are some issue fixes and new features. ProcessWire’s modal JS alert functions have been upgraded to use Uikit modals. Previously they were using Vex modals, but it appears that Vex is no longer maintained, so when we ran into an issue with them it just made sense to switch to Uikit for this, at least when AdminThemeUikit is the current admin theme. The JS functions affected are ProcessWire.alert(), ProcessWire.confirm() and ProcessWire.prompt(). All of which can be found in ProcessWire’s main.js file used by admin themes. ProcessWire’s Markup Regions output method was updated this week to support class removal by wildcard or regular expression. When you specify a class attribute with a class name that starts with “-“ that means that you want to remove that class from the element you are overriding/appending/prepending. Previously you had to specify the full class name you wanted to remove. Now you can specify a wildcard like this: <div id="content" class="-uk-width-*" pw-append></div> That would make it remove all classes from #content that start with "uk-width-". You may place the wildcard anywhere in the expression that you want to, enabling you to remove by prefix or suffix. But if that’s not enough, you can also specify a regular expression like this, which would do the same thing as the above: <div id="content" class="-/^uk-width-.*$/" pw-append></div> That's probably overkill for most, but between the “/“ delimiters, you may use any PCRE regular expression. Usually when we add a class to a markup region, we just specify it like a regular HTML class attribute. But if you want to add a class that would match what you are removing, you’ll want to prefix your class name with a plus sign. That tells the Markup Regions processor not to remove it even if it matches your rule. For example, the following would remove all uk-width classes and then add a uk-width-1-4 class: <div id="content" class="-uk-width-* +uk-width-1-4" pw-append></div> Regarding the new ProcessWire website: it’s nearly done except for the homepage. I’m saving the best part for last. I’m not saying the site will launch tomorrow, as there’s still a lot of detail work to take care of too. But I did want to say that a lot of progress has been made and hopefully it won’t be too much longer before we launch it. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

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

This week on the dev branch we've got several commits with various core improvements and fixes. @adrian has been using Claude Code to suggest core optimizations (focused mostly on the PageFinder) and so he sent the suggestions to me. (PageFinder is the brains behind the $pages->find() method, and many others). I took the suggestions and coded them into our PageFinder, but didn't want to mess with what was already working well, so put them in a new class named PageFinder2, at least temporarily. If running the latest dev branch, you can enable PageFinder2 by adding the following to your /site/config.php: $config->PageFinder('version', 2); The most significant changes are: using subqueries for subselectors rather than separate independent queries; Reusing PageFinder instances (keeping a pool of typically 1-3 PageFinders rather than creating a new one for each $pages->find() operation); and lots of in_array() calls have been converted to isset() lookups, which should technically be faster (still the case in PHP8?, I'm not sure). There were some other changes as well. Theoretically these changes should make PageFinder even faster than it already is. I did quite a bit of testing and found that for the most part it performs the same as PageFinder v1. But then I came across a rather complex selector that translated to a much faster PageFinder operation, nearly twice as fast, and that convinced me it was worthwhile. While PageFinder v2 is not consistently faster than v1, there are some situations where it can be a lot faster. I'm not totally clear on what those situations are just yet, but I'll be doing more testing. In other situations it also can use a lot fewer queries, though that doesn't necessarily translate to a performance difference. But on the whole, all of Claude's suggestions were quite good, regardless of performance improvements. I was pretty impressed with what Claude Code had suggested, so decided to install it on my computer too. I've found it's particularly good at finding bugs. I'll ask it to do a code review on a core file, and it always has good suggestions. It uses ProcessWire terminology too. For instance it pointed me to an object that wasn't properly "wired to the ProcessWire instance", and that's something you'd only ever hear in ProcessWire land. Claude code also helped with improvements to our DatabaseQuery* classes, PagesVersions module, Wire base class, NullPage class, and minor updates to the PagesLoader* classes. I'm not having it write any code just yet, but am having it suggest where improvements can be made. I like to code. I asked it how it knew so much about ProcessWire, and it said that it stays up-to-date with the forums, the website, API docs, and GitHub repo. Thanks to @adrian and @Jan V. for recommending it to me (Jan V. uses it to manage this webserver), I can see how it's going to be a big help to ProcessWire with its suggestions and ideas, I'm already learning a lot from it. And if you get a chance to try the updated PageFinder, please let me know how it works for you. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Everything you need to know about custom page classes, from beginner to advanced. You'll find time saving tips and tricks, pitfalls, best practices, and plenty of examples too— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/custom-page-classes/

Nested Checkboxes An inputfield for Page Reference fields that groups options by their parent page, and optionally by grandparent page too. This can help editors understand the grouping of the selectable pages, and also makes it quicker for an editor to select or unselect an entire group of pages. The checkboxes at the parent and grandparent level are not for storing those pages in the field value - only for quickly selecting or unselecting groups of pages at the lowest level of the hierarchy. For example, in the screen recording above the "Cities" Page Reference field allows only pages with the "city" template, and the pages at the country and continent level are not included in the field value. The inputfield is only for use with Page Reference fields because the structure comes from the page tree. Requires PW >= v3.0.248. Configuration For each field that uses the inputfield you have these options: Checkboxes structure: choose "Parents" or "Parents and grandparents". Collapse sections that contain no checked checkboxes: this option makes the inputfield more compact. There are also the standard column width and column quantity options familiar from the InputfieldCheckboxes inputfield. These apply to the selectable pages at the lowest level of the hierarchy, and the structure is arguably more readable when these are left at their defaults. https://github.com/Toutouwai/InputfieldNestedCheckboxes https://processwire.com/modules/inputfield-nested-checkboxes/

Hey, everyone, here at frameless we frequently work with clients who already have a website but aren't happy with it and want us to rebuild it from scratch. Whenever possible, we use ProcessWire for new web projects – no surprise there, given the flexibility and clean API we all love. For smaller sites, migrating content is usually straightforward – a bit of copy/paste and you're done. But for larger projects with hundreds or thousands of records across multiple database tables, this quickly becomes tedious and error-prone. Over the years, we've written various import scripts and parsers to handle these migrations. We finally decided to clean them up and package everything into a proper module that we'd like to share with the community. Introducing: Data Migrator Data Migrator is a Process module that imports external data (SQL dumps, CSV, JSON, XML) directly into ProcessWire's page structure – including automatic creation of templates, fields, and even PHP template files. Key Features Multi-format support – Import from .sql, .csv, .json, and .xml files Automatic type detection – Recognizes emails, URLs, dates, booleans, integers, etc. and maps them to appropriate ProcessWire fieldtypes SQL schema parsing – Extracts column types from CREATE TABLE statements for better field mapping Foreign Key handling – Detects FK relationships and sorts tables by dependency order Dry Run mode – Preview exactly what will be created before committing anything Full Rollback – Undo an entire migration with one click (removes all created pages, templates, and fields) Template file generation – Automatically creates ready-to-use .php template files in /site/templates/ How it works Upload your data file (SQL dump, CSV, JSON, or XML) Review the analysis – the module shows detected tables, columns, suggested fieldtypes, and sample values Fine-tune if needed – override fieldtypes via dropdown, configure FK relationships Run a Dry Run to preview all changes Execute the migration – templates, fields, parent pages, and data pages are created automatically If something's wrong – hit Rollback to cleanly undo everything Requirements ProcessWire 3.0.0+ PHP 7.4+ Links GitHub: github.com/frameless-at/ProcessDataMigrator Modules Directory: /modules/process-data-migrator/ We've been using the methods and classes bundled in this module internally for a while now and it has saved us a lot of time on migration projects. We hope it's useful for others facing similar challenges. Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome! Cheers, Mike

I hope that you all had a nice winter holiday (Christmas, etc.) or are still on holiday till the new year. Not a lot to report this week since I’ve been on holiday too, but we finally launched that site that’s been keeping me busy for the last few weeks, so I’ll hopefully be spending a lot more time in the core this coming week. I'll get the site posted to the sites directory once some more of the post-launch details are taken care of. One thing I learned in launching that site is that Markup File Regions work great during development, but not so great on a busy site (at least a site using Amazon’s EFS file system, which is very slow). I ran into all sorts of strange issues so ended up converting the file regions back to regular old static CSS and JS files, and then everything ran smoothly again. So as solid as the file regions are during development, they will need more work before I use or recommend them in production. That’s the way it goes with developing new stuff sometimes. There is however a pretty nice improvement to Markup Regions committed this week though. Prior there were some limitations as to what could populate what. Typically output before the <html> (i.e. from template files) populated into output that comes after the <html> (i.e. a _main.php file). But now it is possible for the population of content to go in either direction. Further, more nested elements can also populate less nested (or non-nested) elements. It’s a little hard to explain, but basically, you don’t have to think too much about when and where you can populate things as Markup Regions will figure it out in the final output. This makes it even easier to use and hopefully more foolproof than before. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week we have some useful upgrades to ProcessWire’s Markup Regions system. These upgrades make Markup Regions even more flexible and intuitive by reducing the dependence on HTML id attributes. Here is a new blog post that covers it in detail— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.250/

Thanks for all the feedback on the new admin design last week. Based on the amount of feedback and requests we’ve received, it sounds like there’s a lot of interest and enthusiasm in the new design, which is fantastic. I’ve been making note of all the suggestions and will talk through them with Diogo and Jan at KONKAT Studio next week. There have been several good ideas mentioned. I was able to implement a couple of them already, including separately configurable light/dark mode main colors, and inline embedding of custom SVG logos (so the color can be styled). Personally I’m loving the new dark mode and have been spending most of my time in it. But I’m really digging the new light mode too, so I suspect I’ll settle into the “auto”, getting the best of both worlds according to the time and/or daylight. If you’ve not yet upgraded to ProcessWire 3.0.248 you are in for a treat when you do. Like anything new and on the dev branch, there may be some things yet to add and fix, but even in this initial release, I think you’ll find the new admin design to already be a beautiful and refreshing upgrade. At least that has been my experience. Thanks again to @diogo and @jploch for their great work with this. Have a great weekend!

Iconify Icon A bundle of fieldtype, inputfield, and admin helper modules for searching and displaying Iconify icons. Over 200,000 open source vector icons are available for selection. Requires the FileValidatorSvgSanitizer module. Be sure to abide by the license terms of any icons you use. The license of each icon set is viewable on the Iconify website. Fieldtype and inputfield modules When the FieldtypeIconifyIcon and InputfieldIconifyIcon modules are installed you can create a field of type IconifyIcon. Field config options Iconify icon set prefixes: In most cases you will want to define one or more icon set prefixes for the field, to limit the search to those particular icon sets. This is because the number of icons available through Iconify vastly exceeds the maximum of 999 results that can be returned via the Iconify search API. You can find the prefix of an icon set from its URL by browsing at https://icon-sets.iconify.design/. For example, the prefix of the icon set browsable at https://icon-sets.iconify.design/mdi/ is "mdi". Enter the icon set prefixes into the config field separated by commas. Icon preview size: Enter a width/height in pixels for the preview of the selected icon if you want to override the default. Using the inputfield Type an icon name (or part of an icon name) into the search input and a list of matching icons will be displayed. You can hover on an icon in the results to see the set prefix and name of the icon. Click on an icon to select it. If you have not defined any icon set prefixes in the field config then you can limit the search to particular icon sets by entering icon set prefixes into the search input before a colon. For example, entering "mingcute,tabler:flower" would search for icons with "flower" in their name from the "mingcute" and "tabler" icon sets. When the page is saved the selected icon is downloaded from Iconify, sanitized via the FileValidatorSvgSanitizer module, and stored within the /site/assets/iconify/ directory. Icons are not automatically deleted from this directory if they are no longer used in a page value, but if you want to clean up this directory at any point you can delete it and icons will be automatically re-downloaded when they are next needed. The field value The formatted value of a IconifyIcon field is a WireData object with the following properties: set: The icon set prefix name: The icon name path: The path to the icon file url: The URL to the icon file svg: The SVG code of the icon raw: The raw icon value that is stored in the database For example, if your icon field was named "icon" and you were outputting the src attribute of an <img> tag, you would use $page->icon->url. Or if you were outputting inline SVG code you would use $page->icon->svg. The unformatted value of a IconifyIcon field is the raw database value. Normally you won't need to deal with the raw value when using the inputfield, but if you want to use the API to set a field value then the format of the raw value is iconify--[icon set prefix]--[icon name]. Example: iconify--mingcute--flower-line. Example of object properties: Using Iconify icons in the ProcessWire admin Installing the AdminIconifyIcon module allows you to use Iconify icons as field, template or page icons in the ProcessWire admin. Icons used in the ProcessWire admin are monochrome so any colours or shades in selected icons will not be preserved. Module config You can define icon set prefixes and the icon preview size in the module config. These settings are applied to the inputfields used to set Iconify icons for fields and templates. Field and template icons An "Iconify icon" field is added to the Edit Field and Edit Template screens. When this field is populated it overrides any selection in the core "Icon" field and this field is hidden. Page icons To use an Iconify icon as a page icon for admin pages in the ProcessWire menus, create a IconifyIcon field named "page_icon" and add it to the "admin" system template. For any page using the admin template (e.g. a page representing a Lister Pro instance), open it in Page Edit and select an icon in the "page_icon" field. An example of a "Countries" Lister Pro instance with an Iconify icon: https://github.com/Toutouwai/FieldtypeIconifyIcon https://processwire.com/modules/fieldtype-iconify-icon/

This week the dev branch core version has been bumped to 3.0.254. Relative to 3.0.253 this version contains 14 commits with around 10 bug fixes and 5 feature additions. The biggest addition is Markup File Regions, which I’ve used literally every day since adding the feature two weeks ago. Fingers crossed, but I haven’t had to fix anything or make any adjustments to it so far, so it’s been very stable and reliable. I’m currently working on a client project (collaborating with Pete, Diogo and Jan P.) and that’s kept me busy the last 2-3 weeks, and likely will for a couple more. So there aren’t likely to be a lot of commits to the core during that time, but I’ll be very ProcessWire focused for sure. Working on projects using ProcessWire (as opposed to just working on ProcessWire) has always been key. But I’ve also been wanting to get the next main/master version out as soon as possible (as I’ve mentioned a couple times recently), so will be trying to do both. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Hello everyone, I’m happy to share a new module I’ve been working on: WireMagnet. We often face the requirement to offer "gated content" (like Whitepapers, PDFs, or Zip files) where users need to provide their email address to receive a download link. While there are external services for this, I wanted a native, privacy-friendly, and lightweight ProcessWire solution. What does WireMagnet do? WireMagnet handles the entire flow of capturing leads and delivering files securely. It intercepts form submissions, logs the lead, and sends an email with a unique, temporary download token. It prevents direct access to the files (assets are not just sitting in a public folder). Key Features: Secure Delivery: Generates unique download tokens (valid for 24 hours) and serves files via wireSendFile(). Double Opt-In (DOI): Optional support for DOI to verify email addresses before sending the file. Automated Emails: Automatically sends the download link (or attaches the file directly if preferred). AJAX Ready: Comes with built-in Alpine.js support for seamless, reload-free form submissions. Lead Management: Logs all subscribers (Email, IP, Timestamp) to a custom database table (leads_archive). Admin Interface: View leads and export them to CSV directly from the ProcessWire backend. Easy Integration: Render the form with a single line of code. How to use: Install the module. Create a page (e.g., using a lead-magnet template) and upload your file to a file field. Output the form in your template: // Render the subscription form (default field: 'lead_file') // The module automatically handles success/error messages and styling. echo $modules->get('WireMagnet')->renderForm($page); // OR: Render for a specific field (e.g., if you have multiple magnets or custom field names) echo $modules->get('WireMagnet')->renderForm($page, 'my_custom_file_field'); // OR: Override the button text manually echo $modules->get('WireMagnet')->renderForm($page, 'lead_file', 'Send me the PDF!'); Configuration: You can configure the sender address, email subject, DOI settings, and styling preferences (like button text) in the module settings. Download & Source: GitHub: https://github.com/markusthomas/WireMagnet Modules Directory: https://processwire.com/modules/wire-magnet/ I'm looking forward to your feedback and suggestions! Cheers, Markus

Last week I was on a boat, far from any computer, so that’s why there weren’t any updates. This week I’m back in the office and back to work on the core. The focus has been primarily on optimizations and issue fixes (see dev branch commit log). There were also a couple commits related to PHP 8.4 support. Issue fixes and optimizations will likely continue to get more focus as we get closer to our next main/master version.There are also some Pro module updates in the works as well. Have a great weekend!

I'll be on the road today picking up my daughter from a summer camp that’s 4 hours away. So I'm spending the day in the car rather than at the computer. As a result, I don’t have anything major to report this week, but wanted to say hello before I left for the day. Progress continues on everything we’ve talked about in recent weeks. I’m also working on a client project, building a ProcessWire based login portal that is kind of a front-end to a Salesforce system. It uses LoginRegisterPro, FormBuilder and ProFields Custom Fields. I’m making some improvements to those 3 modules as I go. For instance, LoginRegisterPro will be getting an email-to-login option. When enabled, if you submit the login form but leave the password blank, it’ll email you a link to automatically login. The feature is optional and not enabled by default. More next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

I'm currently traveling so don't have anything major to report this week, but wanted to check in. I am posting this from my phone in the car (don't worry, I'm not driving) and I'm not great at typing from my phone so will keep it short. 🙂 Progress continues on the ProcessWire admin design and the website, and I can't wait till we can share it with you. We may soon get another master/main version merged from the dev branch, as there have been a few updates in the last several weeks that I think our stable version would benefit from, and a few more to come as well. More soon! Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

@mattgs This is a very friendly community as a whole. But to be fair, both of you guys posted kind of unfriendly messages. And both of you make good points too. There are some big challenges in the world right now, none of us are perfect, and we've all got to do the best we can, where we can. So I think it's good that you guys have these environmental concerns, and we all should, and it's good to communicate these, share and learn, while also being friendly.

Hi everyone, First of all I had no idea, which category would fit best ... I'd like to share a little tool I've been working on to make the initial setup of ProcessWire even faster, especially when working on remote servers without SSH access. What is it? kickstart.php is a modern, single-file installer/loader for ProcessWire. Instead of uploading thousands of files via FTP, you just upload this one file and it handles the rest. Key Features: Version Selection: Choose between the master (stable) or dev branch directly from GitHub. Smart Multi-Language: Built-in support for English, German, Spanish, and French (with automatic browser language detection). Modern UI: Built with Tailwind CSS, AlpineJS, and smooth animations using Anime.js. Pre-flight Checks: Automatically checks for PHP version requirements and prevents overwriting existing installations. Automatic Cleanup: Removes the downloaded ZIP archive and temporary folders after extraction. How to use it: Upload kickstart.php to your webroot. Open it in your browser. Choose your version and click install. Once finished, click the button to start the official ProcessWire installer. I hope some of you find this useful for your workflow! Feedback and suggestions are always welcome. Cheers, Markus kickstart.php Improved Version now available on GitHub: https://github.com/markusthomas/ProcessWireKickstart

Hi everyone, I wanted to share a small utility module I’ve put together to help keep the /site/modules/ directory tidy. What it does: When updating modules ProcessWire renames old module directories by prepending a dot (e.g., .ModuleName). Over time, these "hidden" backup folders can clutter your file system. ProcessModuleCleaner identifies these orphaned directories and allows you to delete them directly from the admin interface. Key Features: Automatic Detection: Scans your site modules folder for any directory starting with a dot. Native UI: Built specifically for the ProcessWire backend using UIkit 3 classes for a seamless look. Interactive Selection: Uses AlpineJS for a fast and responsive "select all" and delete workflow. Safe Deletion: Uses ProcessWire's WireFileTools for reliable recursive directory removal. How to use: Install the module. Navigate to Setup > Module Cleaner. Review the list of found folders. Select the ones you want to remove and click "Delete". Screenshot / UI: The module displays a clean table with the folder name and the last modified date, so you know exactly how old those backups are. GitHub: https://github.com/markusthomas/ProcessModuleCleaner Module Directory: https://processwire.com/modules/process-module-cleaner/ I hope some of you find this helpful for keeping your production or development environments clean! Feedback is always welcome. Cheers!

This week I’ve been working on some useful additions to our Markup Regions system, but I don’t have those additions quite ready to commit to the core just yet. Hopefully next week they will be ready. What it involves is the ability to populate regions within CSS, JS, SCSS, LESS files. So I might output a <style> tag in my markup (for example), but the styles go into a CSS file rather than in the HTML output. That CSS file combines and contains all such instances, and can then be loaded from a dedicated <link> tag in the document head. You could do the same with JS, but using <script> tags instead. I’m not sure I’ve explained it well just yet, so I’ll have a better description of it next week, along with some practical examples. It’s very simple and I think examples will make it obvious. Stay tuned, have a great weekend and thanks for reading!

I don't want to be too blunt and I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never referred a client to a software or service website as part of the education process. It doesn't do anything for them. You are the expert. The person making the pitch should be able to fully explain the technology stack to the extent that the conversation requires it in language they can understand because we are the interpreters. Clients trust me because I am the expert and the top 3 things they care about are these, in this order: How much is this going to cost me? Why don't we use xxx? (or, our current site is xxx I'm not sure we want to switch) When is it going to be done? Sending a client to any site for tools or software is like saying "here, do your own research". The ProcessWire site, like any other development tools/software sites, isn't there to woo clients. Most clients don't care enough to take time and truly understand it because that's not their job. If a curious client is in a position to go to websites like ProcessWire, several steps have been skipped in the client discovery/planning process IMHO. I'd even go so far as to say that if a site has "Docs" or "Documentation" in the primary nav, it's not for clients and they shouldn't be there. I hope this isn't a too hot a take... I would say that improvements could be made iteratively with more use of color for contrast, emphasis, and indicating priority. I think it's a flexible design that can evolve in whatever capacity that may be needed. This has the ability to highlight some impressive facts and figures. No notes on the content, some elements could be integrated into the current design. Even then, facts and figures are for devs. I used the word "scalability" with a manager once and they stopped the conversation to ask "wait, what does that mean?" and still didn't care when I explained. A a CMS or framework site is never going to lead to clients translating what's on the page to time or money. In all likelihood, the conversation you are having with a client at 10:00 just followed a call with their product distributor at 8:00am, their accountant at 9:00, and at 11:00 they're meeting with other members in management. Personally, I would no sooner send someone to processwire.com than I would laravel.com. You are the time and money. I agree with this. I will go out on a limb and say the number of end customers who went to the Drupal site and left thinking they need a Drupal site isn't zero, but it's probably close. If someone is hiring a Drupal developer then they're in a role where it's part of their job to understand the tech stack even if they aren't a dev. Visiting wordpress.com, it doesn't target the end user but name recognition still draws business which overcomes the website entirely. This is fair. It doesn't take a monitor that computer professionals use to get this experience. All you need is a consumer iMac. I think iteration can address concerns. I don't want to belabor the point, but to be fair, did you ever send a client to the QuarkXpress website... Just a little joke ☺️ Cheers from a fellow old school developer who built their first website in 1997 and tinkered with QuarkXpress 🍻

Many websites these days are the feeding ground for AI bots. Especially this site! In this post we look at a tool for taming all the hungry crawlers and bots… https://processwire.com/blog/posts/throttling-ai-bot-traffic-in-processwire/

ProcessWire 3.0.251 has several updates to the AdminThemeUikit default theme by Konkat, a page-finding selector bug fix, and more. This version should fix the majority of reported issues with the new default theme in AdminThemeUikit, as well as cover the scope of Uikit features much more broadly. As we get closer to our next main/master version, we appreciate your help testing it. This version converts to “—pw” namespaced CSS variables. Previously variables were named like "—main-color" (no namespace prefix) and now they all have a "—pw" prefix, i.e. "—pw-main-color". Make note of that if you are using any custom CSS with the default theme by Konkat, as you may need to update your CSS variable names. This version also adds 3 new toggles (available in the AdminThemeUikit module settings). These toggles enable you to customize specific parts of the theme to be more similar to or consistent with the Original theme. They are intended to answer common feature requests for the theme. If you think any of these should be enabled by default, please let us know. Currently they require you to enable them in the module settings. These toggles include: Use bold headers for repeaters, files, images, etc. - This uses the selected “main color” as the background color of repeatable and sortable item headers, which results a treatment that’s heavier and more similar to the Original theme. Use buttons for page list actions - These makes the theme use page list action buttons that resemble those in the Original theme. It also slightly modifies the appearance of pagination links. Highlight focused inputs - This makes the color of an input change (to white or black) when it is the focused input. It makes select and text inputs have the same color presentation. And it makes TinyMCE have a white (or black) background when focused, rather than a muted background. In addition to the above, today’s version also adds version query strings to the CSS/JS files used by the Konkat default theme. Previously it didn’t, which due to browser caching could have caused some to see the incorrect output of the theme. ProcessWire 3.0.251 also fixes a bug with word matching operators that query the database, like those you might use in a $pages->find() selector. (Word matching operators are those with a “~” in them). If you attempted to match a word that was more than 80 characters long, it would cause the word to get filtered out of the query completely, rather than force a non-match. So if your selector was “a=b, c=d, e~=[81 character word]”, then it would behave the same as a “a=b, c=d” selector, with the “e” part no longer contributing to the result. The correct result here is to match 0 pages, but it would instead match public pages that matched selector “a=b, c=d”. It was corrected by truncating the long word to 80 characters, rather than removing it from the query. If you are using full-word matching operators in your site search engines, it’s worth throwing some 81+ character words at them just to see if it causes any issues with your results, perhaps matching incorrect, irrelevant or too many pages. If so, then you may want to upgrade to PW 3.0.251, or truncate your search text to 80 characters before putting it into the selector. i.e. $q = substr($q, 0, 80); Thanks to @adrian for finding and reporting the issue. Lastly, ProcessWire 3.0.251 contains a few other updates, such as the ability for Process modules to use icons in their headlines, a ProcessPageLister fix, and more. ProcessWire Weekly #584 covers a couple of them in more detail. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Ever needed a color picker on some kind of settings page? Didn't want to install and setup a full-blown colorpicker module? Here's a quick and dirty hook to change a regular text field into an <input type="color"> type of input: Before: After: <?php public function init(): void { wire()->addHookBefore('Inputfield::render', $this, 'changeFieldType'); } public function changeFieldType(HookEvent $event): void { $f = $event->object; $colorFields = [ Site::field_col_primary, Site::field_col_secondary, Site::field_contrast_primary, Site::field_contrast_secondary, ]; if (!in_array($f->name, $colorFields)) return; $f->attr('type', 'color'); } So right before the text input is rendered we change its "type" property to "color" and the browser will render a default color picker 😎 It once more shows how versatile ProcessWire is. And maybe it helps someone... 🙂 PS: Be advised that with that hack you only modify the optics of the field. The field will under the hood still be a regular text field, which means you'll not get any sanitisation or such from it and you might have to take care of that on your own. In my case it's a superuser-only settings page. So it is no issue at all.

This week I’m thrilled to report that we have a new website online. The site was designed by @jploch and @diogo of KONKAT Studio in Hamburg Germany. Here's a short announcement post about it— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/processwire-website-redesign/

Today I’ve merged the dev branch to the main/master branch in preparation for our next official tagged version, which is likely to be 3.0.255. I’ll likely git tag it with the version number early next week. This doesn’t mean that work on the next main/master version is complete. Just that no new issues have appeared that would warrant delaying it any longer. So while there’s still work to do, we’re also at a good point to start getting these updates on the main/master branch. As before, if you run into any issues after upgrading, please report them in the processwire-issues repo. I’ll compile and post a list of all that’s new in 3.0.255+ relative to 3.0.246 within the next week or two so stay tuned. There have been some really nice sites showing up in our sites directory lately. Thank you for those that have been submitting new ProcessWire-powered sites, and please keep it up! It’s great to see such awesome web design and development work.

This is an inputfield module I made as a replacement for InputfieldPageListSelect, due to frustration with it not opening the page structure to the currently selected page. Please note the requirement of ProcessWire >= v3.0.248 when using it as an inputfield for a Page Reference field due to this now fixed core issue. The module doesn't make the PW version a strict requirement in case you just want to replace instances of InputfieldPageListSelect via the bundled ReplacePageListSelect module. Page Tree Select An inputfield for selecting a single page from the page tree. This inputfield is similar to the core InputfieldPageListSelect, but it has the following advantages: It automatically expands the tree to the currently selected page. This avoids having to drill down through the tree when you want to change the selection to a sibling or child of the currently selected page. This was the primary motivation for creating the module. It's faster to navigate through because the whole tree is rendered at once rather than branch by branch. It provides a filter feature to locate pages by title anywhere in the tree. When the tree is filtered you can hover a page title to see the breadcrumb path to the page in a tooltip. It provides buttons to clear the current selection, to restore a changed selection, and to scroll to the selected page. Configuration The following config options are available when using the module as an inputfield for a Page Reference field: Exclude admin pages: excludes pages from the tree that have the admin template (only affects superusers who can otherwise see pages with this template). Exclude pages by template: pages having any of the templates you select here will be excluded from the tree. Descendants of any excluded pages are also excluded. Limit for total pages in the tree: this limit is applied to the selector that finds pages for the tree (default is 5000). Limitations and considerations Performance seems to be reasonable when the tree consists of up to 5000 pages. Your mileage may vary and the module may not be suitable for sites with a very large number of pages (unless excluding pages by template in the inputfield configuration). Pages in the tree show their titles rather than any custom setting defined for the template "List of fields to display in the admin Page List". Page titles are only shown in the default language. The module does not reproduce some of the quirks/features of ProcessPageList such as excluding pages that are hidden and non-editable, and forcing the sort position of special pages like Admin and Trash. ProcessWire >= v3.0.248 is needed for the inputfield to appear as an option in Add Field due to this now fixed core issue. Replacing InputfieldPageListSelect in the ProcessWire admin An autoload module named ReplacePageListSelect is bundled with InputfieldPageTreeSelect. Install the module if you would like to replace all instances of InputfieldPageListSelect in the ProcessWire admin with InputfieldPageTreeSelect. For advanced use cases there are two hookable methods: ReplacePageListSelect::allowReplacement($inputfield): set the event return to false to disable replacement on particular instances of InputfieldPageListSelect. ReplacePageListSelect::getPageTreeSelect($inputfield): set excludeAdminPages, excludeTemplates and limitTotalPages properties on the event return InputfieldPageTreeSelect object when replacing particular instances of InputfieldPageListSelect. https://github.com/Toutouwai/InputfieldPageTreeSelect https://processwire.com/modules/inputfield-page-tree-select/

We've long wanted a way to utilise a CDN to offload images/files/videos from ProcessWire sites without losing all the native greatness of ProcessWire image and file field types. Having read various discussions on here about ways to approach this that never seemed to reach conclusion, I've thrown myself into creating a module that allows offloading of files to Bunny.net CDN as we need a solution for a specific project. I think this would be easily adaptable to any S3 compatible CDN but I've only tested on Bunny. ⚠️ This is still very beta! Use at your own risk! I've been conducting basic testing and so far, so good but there's bound to be holes or things that others may suggest better ways of doing. But I'm now at a stage where the insight/experience of the PW community might add value to the project - so I'm sharing now! Full disclosure: Once past the initial project scaffolding I've been using AI/careful prompting to write some of the code so that I can arrive at a prototype as quickly as possible. This seems to have worked well, although some of the code looks a little verbose and could probably be refactored later on. Also not security/pen-tested yet. https://github.com/warp-design/WireBunnyCdn/ Features: Automatically uploads images to Bunny storage on page save, including all variants and mirrors assets folder structure for simple merging back to local at a later date if needed. Automatically cleanses deleted files (or files from deleted pages) from your CDN. Option to mirror files to CDN or delete local copies (this is the main aim for me, otherwise we could just use ProCache). Handles (basic currently) image sizing - either using standard ProcessWire `$image->size(X,X)` methods or by implementing Bunny Optimizer for sizing using URL params. Rewrites image paths via CDN so that you can use standard `$page->imageField->url` calls with the output being a Bunny path rather than local PW path. Also handles the image previews in admin view. Roadmap: Support for video uploads (with optional separate CDN endpoint for Bunny Stream buckets). Support for front-end video output to templates using Bunny stream players/optimisation etc. Implement chunked/background uploads for large files. Support for other size() method options, like cropping etc and mapping to Bunny Optimizer equivalents. Anyway - look forward to hearing any advice/feedback/bug reports... I'm sure there's many!

Hi all! Just wanted to say hi and comment that I truly love the new website, it looks and feels great, both mobile and on desktop. It also has its own unique look instead of general day-to-day trends we so often see. Great work @diogo @jploch and @ryan! While we don't use ProcessWire at my current job, I still maintain few PW sites and I love the experience. Miss the community a lot, stay health and happy everyone!

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

Here's another website that i recently made that I would like to share with the community: https://www.w2-ingenieure.de/ W² Ingenieure (which is german and translates to "W² Engineers") is a small office that offers that develops, modernizes, and optimizes living and working spaces in Germany like: Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, and Lower Saxony. Whether for private households, commercial enterprises, public institutions, or industrial plants – they plan and implement customized solutions for even the most complex requirements. This project is a redesign of an existing website. While the old website had plenty of good content, there were multiple flaws in the design (especially the mobile version of the website) so my main task was not to make a from-the-ground-new-concept but to give it a better, functional and more polished look based on the CI. As we are talking about an engineering company that offers planning for the construction industry the look of the site hat to be sleek, clean, somehow modern and overall "serious". We are not talking about a design-agency website here. Tech Talk: - UiKit as frontend framework - RockPageBuilder for content creation and editing - TextformatterRockDown to enable headline formatting - RockFrontend for Ajax Endpoints (used in form submissions) - RockDevTools for Asset Management and Minification - SEO Maestro for SEO meta data - PageImageSource for webp image creation - FileMover as a workaround for a global media management solution - WiremailSMTP to handle form submissions So here it is: The website consists of several page templates, including: - Homepage - Content Page - Project Page - Job Page - etc. The Homepage and Content Page templates can be populated with pre-defined content-blocks via @bernhards RockPageBuilder. This is straight-forward and easy-to use. The user can chose between multiple content elements and place those elements in any order they want: For Example we have: - Textfields - Teaser in multiple variants - Description Lists - Hero Title Image Sections - etc. Once added the content can be edited directly in the frontend or inside a convenient popup window (or from the backend page edit view of course). Other templates like the Project Page offer a more strict, predefined, layout to achieve a uniform look throughout any project page that is crated. These type of pages can be populated from the backend more easily: I have to keep my attachment file list small, so please have a look on this site for yourself and don't hesitate to ask any questions if you would like to know more about the tech in the background. Have a great week! Stefan

Text Readability A module that uses the PHP Text Statistics class to evaluate the readability of English text in textarea fields according to various tests. The available readability tests are: Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease Flesch Kincaid Grade Level Gunning Fog Index SMOG Index Automated Reability Index Spache Readability Score Dale Chall Readability Score Coleman Liau Index The results of the enabled tests are displayed at the bottom of textarea fields – either when the "book" header icon is clicked, or at all times, depending on the option selected in the module configuration. An interpretive tooltip appears when you hover any of the result values. Requires ProcessWire >= 3.0.246 and PHP >= 7.2.0 Why is readability important? Readable.com says: And: The Wikipedia article on readability has useful information too. Module configuration Select which readability tests you want to enable. For each test there is an "about" link to information about the test. Select whether the results of the enabled readability tests should be shown only when the header action icon is clicked (default), or if the results should always be shown. For multi-language sites, select which ProcessWire language represents English (as the tests are only intended for English text). Advanced If you want to disable the readability test results for a particular textarea field you can hook TextReadability::allowReadabilityResults. Example: $wire->addHookAfter('TextReadability::allowReadabilityResults', function(HookEvent $event) { $field = $event->arguments(0); $page = $event->arguments(1); // Disable readability results for the "body" field on the "home" page if($field->name === 'body' && $page->template == 'home') $event->return = false; }); https://github.com/Toutouwai/TextReadability https://processwire.com/modules/text-readability/

Today there’s a new version of ProCache (4.0.7) available for download in the ProCache support/upgrades board. Here’s what’s new in this version of ProCache: ProCache has been updated throughout for PHP 8.4 support. Upgraded the SCSS compiler to the latest Leafo SCSSPHP 2.0.1. This version requires PHP 8.2, so ProCache also lets you choose from two older versions if you prefer. Upgraded the LESS compiler to the latest Wikimedia LESS 5.4.1. Past versions can also be selected, including Wikimedia 3.0.0 and Leafo LESS 0.5.0. Upgraded the CSS/JS minifier to the latest available version (1.3.75 latest). Because we had customized the CSS/JS minification quite a bit, the older version (1.0 stable) also remains selectable, just in case there’s anything the older version handles that the new one doesn’t yet. LESS, SCSS and Minifier versions can be selected and changed in the ProCache configuration: Setup > ProCache > JS/CSS. Likewise the ProcessProCache module has a new JS/CSS tab for configuring the settings mentioned above. ProCache now logs LESS/SCSS and Minify status and errors to the JS console (when in debug mode or for a logged-in superuser). ProCache now has a proper API reference page available here: https://processwire.com/api/ref/pro-cache/ Because this is a brand new version with several upgraded libraries, it should be considered beta until it's been out a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Hey all! This won't be a complete response to everything that was raised in this thread yet. Just wanted to quickly drop some notes before they vanish my mind 🙂 I will start by the end though, since it was @ryangorley mention that brought me here. You're completely right about how a clear communication of objectives helps everyone to accept the inevitable subjectivity of design (yes, I believe that, even with very defined objectives, design is still highly subjective). @jploch and I planned to write a blog post detailing, not only our thought process, but also a detailed description of how to customize the new design. We didn't have the time or headspace to do it but, with Ryan, we decided to launch on the DEV branch anyway, so this discussion and bug finding could happen as soon as possible. I now believe that this blog post wouldn't have answered most of the questions that people are raising, so in hindsight I think launching early, even with it's shortcomings, was the right choice. I would also like to remind everyone that, as Ryan referred multiple times, this is not a new theme but a skin on top of the uikit theme (it's ok to call it a sidegrade, although we consider that some aspects of it are definitely upgrades). Again, we accept and expect that not everyone will genuinely like the new theme more than the current one. Those people will have a natural resistance to this change, and there's not much we can do about it, either than respecting (the biggest sign of respect is that the current theme will stay in the core, with an easy switch). For others the resistance will stem from a feeling of "lost opportunity", in thinking that this will inevitably be the ProcessWire theme for the next multiple years. We discussed changes much more profound than these, but those would take time and would certainly not involve the community, if done in closed doors. So we decided to go with the more "superficial" and quick solution. The goal is for it to work in this moment, and to welcome new users who may come with the new site with something more coherent with what they'll find there. Those bigger changes, and others, can still happen as much as they could before. To finish. Meanwhile I sent Ryan a few small corrections based on things pointed out throughout the whole thread. Hopefully they will make it soon enough to the DEV branch. Thank you all for testing, giving your opinions and finding these bugs 🏆

Like last week, I’m still working on all the same things: PW site, client stuff here and there, and even the HVAC stuff. They replaced our heating/air systems on Wednesday, but not everything is working quite as it should, but that’s another story that's still ongoing. A couple weeks ago folks were asking about CSS variables/properties for the new AdminThemeUikit look. I’m not that familiar with that part of CSS yet, but luckily the people coming up with this design are. And it turns out they are indeed using CSS variables/properties for this. I think this means you’ll be able to override them with your own colors, perhaps in the AdminThemeUikit module settings, or with a CSS file, I’m not yet sure, but will find out more in the next week. I’ve seen a few different color schemes specified using it, and they are really nice. Thanks for reading and enjoy the weekend!

I've been working on sites where the standard sitemap setup started showing cracks: XML generated on every request eating memory, no way to regenerate automatically without writing custom hooks, and no visibility into what actually ended up in the file. So I built Sitemap — a module that generates static XML files to disk, splits output by template name, and handles the full lifecycle from generation to search engine notification. What it does differently: Writes files to disk instead of rendering in memory — no RAM spike on large sites Pages are fetched in chunks of 500 with uncacheAll(), so memory stays flat regardless of page count Each template gets its own named file: sitemap-product.xml, sitemap-blog.xml, etc. — the index at sitemap.xml references them all Auto-regeneration via LazyCron with a configurable interval; the LazyCron hook slot is chosen dynamically to match what you configured (every hour, every 6 hours, daily, etc.) rather than always using everyHour A needs_regen flag is set whenever a page is saved, trashed, or deleted — visible in the admin dashboard IndexNow support: after generation, all URLs are submitted to api.indexnow.org in batches of 10,000 Sitemap: directive written directly to the physical robots.txt on save and on generate Lock file prevents concurrent generation Admin dashboard at Setup > Sitemap showing file count, URL count, total size, and last generated time Settings stored in a dedicated DB table (sitemap_settings, name/value, MEDIUMTEXT) rather than the module's data field — avoids the serialized config size limit when template settings grow large. Image sitemap extension and hreflang alternate links for multilanguage sites are both supported. GitHub: https://github.com/mxmsmnv/Sitemap Screenshots: Still v1.0.0, so feedback is very welcome — especially from anyone running it on a site with 10k+ pages.

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

Hi everyone! I am currently developing a new module for a client project and wanted to quickly reach out to see if there is broader interest in the community for a solution like this. The Use Case My client needed an appointment booking system similar to "Calendly". However, they had specific requirements: Zero external dependencies: No third-party SaaS for GDPR/DSGVO compliance and to avoid monthly fees. Full Design Control: It had to fit seamlessly into their custom design. Lightweight: No heavy bloat. The Solution: WireBooking is a native ProcessWire module that handles appointment slots and bookings using standard ProcessWire pages. Current Features: Frontend Wizard: An interactive, step-by-step booking process built with AlpineJS and Tailwind CSS. Native Storage: Bookings are saved as standard ProcessWire pages (booking-entry), allowing you to use the full power of PW selectors and hooks. Backend Management: Simple interface using the native ProcessWire Admin Theme (UIkit) to view bookings. Notifications: Sends confirmation emails to the customer and admin, including generated .ics calendar files for Outlook/Apple/Google Calendar. Availability Management: Manually block specific time slots or entire date ranges via the module settings. AJAX Driven: Dynamically loads available slots via JSON to keep the initial page load light. The "Catch" (Requirements) To keep the module lightweight and modern, it is opinionated regarding the frontend stack. It assumes you are already using (or are willing to include): Tailwind CSS (Utility classes) for the styling. Usage Example: Using it in a template is extremely simple: <?php echo $modules->get('WireBooking')->renderWizard(); ?> I need your feedback! The module is currently functional for this specific use case (Consultants/Service Providers). Before I invest time into generalizing it for a public release on the modules directory, I have two questions for you: Is this something you would use? Is there a need for a native "Calendly" alternative? Is the dependency on Tailwind a dealbreaker? Since the markup relies on Tailwind utility classes, it might be hard to style if you use Bootstrap or custom CSS. Looking forward to your thoughts and suggestions! Cheers, Markus GitHub: https://github.com/markusthomas/WireBooking

This week in the blog, we’ve got a new version of FormBuilder released, version 57. This new version of FormBuilder adds a lot, including… https://processwire.com/blog/posts/formbuilder-v57/