Pete

Having worked with probably a hundred of them by now (looking after PCs in a company where processing data fast is key) they used to be a bit bad a few years back but are now very reliable indeed and less than 50p per gig in some cases. I would say that a backup is essential (when has it not been?). The earlier ones didn't used to have SMART support so when they died there was no warning and no real chance of recovery, but nowadays they do attempt to tell you when something is wrong. That said, they're not like mechanical drives - when they die it is usually permanent and instant whereas mechanical drives at least have a chance of wearing out over a longer period and giving you some warning. That said, I have only experienced this with older drives - newer drives are giving a long life expectancy so far and decent warranties. I have also experienced sudden fatalities with mechanical drives so I don't think there is any more risk in either type nowadays. ~550mbps is about the fastest you will get read/write and you need it plugged in on a SATA III port for max speed - most motherboards in the last 4 years will have this type of port. May I take this opportunity to point you all to what will be the best backup tool for Windows: http://go.veeam.com/endpoint - it is also free. I've used it for VMs and it is simple, effective and this new edition for endpoints (PCs) will be free. I cannot rate VEEAM highly enough and even in BETA stage this software works fine. Prices seem to have dropped even from a few months back too - these are the ones I use and this is sooooo cheap for an SSD: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-500GB-2-5-inch-Basic-Solid/dp/B00E3W19MO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1419937998&sr=8-2&keywords=samsung+evo+840

I use Windows 8 and simply have it boot to desktop. If you don't mind spending a few dollars (and I mean only a few) get Start8 installed and you essentially have Windows 7 interface again. Windows 8 is faster for me and as much as I dislike metro I love the speed. Windows 10 is a partial acknowledgement of the mistake of Metro and gives you back a start menu and boot to desktop. I also expect it to be faster again. I think I'm spoiled a bit by relatively recent hardware (about 18 months old) but 7 seconds into Windows from a cold boot isn't possible with 7 with the same hardware and I value those seconds (they obviously carry over into quick apps as well so therefore increased productivity). Actually, hijacking the the thread a little, an SSD is probably the best purchase you can make. Things will run up to ten times faster on hardware up to a few years old and you will find mechanical drives tiresome from then on They're also pretty cheap nowadays too. EDIT: split some more discussion about SSDs into a different topic here for those that are interested: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/8662-may-i-recommend-ssds/?view=getnewpost

Hi there Updates are handled through a module called SystemUpdater in /wire/core/modules/SystemUpdater/ . This folder also holds all the update files that exist so far. The module has an entry in the modules table in the database that stores the system version so yes, those updates will be reapplied to the database every time you re-import the old database and upgrade.

The links are of mixed usefulness actually - the majority of the Wordpress ones are for plugins so not the fault of the Wordpress core or a useful comment on it's suitability as a system - just a highlight of buggy third-party modules (same with Joomla too). It would be better split out into core bugs (far fewer) and then alphabetic by plugin really so you can see it more clearly. They're actually pretty skewed results as Wordpress clearly has more plugins than any other system (1,425 in their plugin directory just for the search term "gallery") so has the most security issues listed as a result. So I don't think it's fair to blame those numbers on the systems in question. Feel free to blame it on not assessing the plugins/modules and use it as a case when telling customers "yes, you could use Wordpress, but are you sure the plugins you are going to use are safe?". It's a bit of a minefield to say the least. The reason zero security vulnerabilities have been reported in ProcessWire is because, at the moment, I am not aware of anyone finding any (anyone else?). There is nothing that ryan etc are hiding - it is just incredibly stable and the way the API abstracts things away from SQL queries removes one of the biggest pitfalls - no chance of SQL injections! The only things I have seen "fixed" over the years are a few bugs (not security related) and areas where performance has be increased. I would definitely agree that anyone finding a vulnerability should report it - probably via the contact page is fine - so that there is time to fix it and issue a patch. I'm sure we would welcome that as well as them appearing on Secunia, but I don't think there are zero reported security issues on Secunia because nobody is bothering to report them - simply that nobody has found any yet to my knowledge. I am equally happy if someone finds a security issue or two and reports it in a responsible manner, but I'm being a "glass half full" guy rather than assuming a lack of transparency. Could it be that ProcessWire is just incredibly well-written? I'd like to think so, but I am sure time will tell either way Certainly if the quality of modules continues and they go through a proper approval process then we can avoid some of those high numbers on the links above, but we will never get to those high numbers I think - I can't imagine a time when we would ever have 1,425 gallery modules even if ProcessWire grew to be more popular than Wordpress - there really must only be so many ways you can put together a gallery so there will never be as many modules (of any type) and therefore no real chance of having that high number of vulnerabilities. At least I hope not

I've been using Mandrill for a year now for various projects and can't rate them highly enough. They're great for sending emails using the SMTP classes built for ProcessWire. For example, on several occasions I've had IPs blocked by Hotmail because someone who subscribed to something marked an email as spam (yes, users do silly things like forget what they signed up to or don;t just use the unsubscribe links) and Mandrill saves you a lot of hassle by a) not letting you send to those users again if the email bounced or was marked as spam and b) ensuring your IP isn't blocked to the rest of Hotmail (or whichever other service this might happen with - isn't Hotmail Outlook.com now anyway?). It also has some great webhooks so you can write some code to let you know which customers aren't interested within your own application. So yeah, great service that does a lot for you, lets you have sub-accounts for each client and all round protects your deliverability on business-critical applications.

I dunno, I like the idea of me being the weakest link in my work

I think at the moment ryan approves all modules before they appear in the list so I assume he is looking at the code before approving them. The problem is, as a play on what Joss says above, you can do just as much damage without modules on your own. You can open up security vulnerabilities in any CMS with a little effort (I believe both MODx and WP allow you to write pure PHP in templates/snippets as well as PW of course), so even leaving modules aside it's possible to create your own issues in very few lines of code and be totally oblivious to the dangers. My point is, modules or not, a lack of knowledge is the enemy here. Not everyone has the knowledge necessary (myself included) to understand the more complex modules out there so the recommendation that I would love to give of "don't use a module if you've not investigated its code" doesn't even work for me I guess the best thing moving forward is to have a few more people checking out the modules submitted to the Modules page and recommend that nobody downloads modules that haven't been posted there. That might seem harsh as I know there are many good modules only on Github, but if nothing else it will encourage people to submit their modules to the directory - let's face it, it doesn't take much time at all.

I'm not sure all the custom PW integration would work with an older version to be honest. How much older are you trying to go?

This might help, but does come with some restrictions: http://modules.processwire.com/modules/service-pages/

Oh wow, the examples on the link look nice - good work!

Horst - I'm experiencing this at the moment and have found the solution. I think the line in your module here is problematic: $a = wire('modules')->get('ProcessCropImage')->getModuleInfo(); That line will run fine when you are logged into ProcessWire, but I think it somehow loads into memory the actual page using the ProcessCropImage process module which is only accessible by admins so doesn't work when viewing as a guest (that's the only crazy theory I have for now ). It's a tricky issue to track down, but basically replacing that whole block of code with this stops it from happening (essentially turning thumbnail boost off!): // check if we can be used to boost the thumbnail module, - is it installed? if(true === ($this->thumbnailBoost = (bool)wire('modules')->isInstalled('ProcessCropImage'))) { // now check that at least the minimum version number of ProcessCropImage is installed: $needed = '1.0.2'; //$a = wire('modules')->get('ProcessCropImage')->getModuleInfo(); //$actual = preg_replace('/(\d)(?=\d)/', '$1.', str_pad("{$a['version']}", 3, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT)); //$this->thumbnailBoost = version_compare($actual, $needed, '<') ? false : true; $this->thumbnailBoost = false; }

Possible bug? If I use it on a normal PageImage and use the targetFilename option, it creates a new file whenever the code is run, appending _1, _2 etc to the end of the targetFilename. If I run the same code without the targetFilename option it creates the file once and doesn't overwrite or create duplicates. Basically I want to name my file in a specific way, but I don't want to create it each time or create duplicates - to achieve this I have to use the if (file_exists... code from my example in the previous post but I'm not sure I should need to?

Hi horst - great module (I'm a bit late to the party ). Here's an example using Apeisa's Thumbnails module - I had trouble with this because the thumbnail URL is relative to the homepage and therefore doesn't contain the whole server path to load the thumbnail with. // First we get the thumbnail - replace thumbname with your thumbnail name as set in the Thumbnails module $relativePath = $page->images->first()->getThumb('thumbname'); // Then we add the root path (note: will not work in a subdirectory - not sure about localhost either - you may have to hardcode this bit unless someone has an idea? $fullPath = $config->paths->root . $relativePath; // Now do your nice manipulations if the image doesn't already exist (we only want to convert it once) if (!file_exists($fullPath)) { $modules->get('PageImageManipulator')->imLoad($fullPath, array('outputFormat'=>'jpg', 'targetFilename' => '$page->images->path . 'test.jpg'))->save(); } echo "<img src='" . $page->images->url . "test.jpg' /> This was typed in the browser and my actual code is for a different scenario so this may require some modification! EDIT: Of course, once you've generated the file once then you will want to check for that rather than keep recreating the file - modified my example to show this. EDIT2: It would probably be a good idea if you are using this example to have a module that clears any existing test.jpg files on page save (or image changes but not sure how) for the relevant templates so that if someone changes the image the PIM runs again when the image is next viewed on the site.

Please let us know what you find Osorio

Joss is taking about specifically tailored sites where the customer's solution would be different each time, different templates and field names etc so the instructions would be different. I usually have a base document and change screenshots and field names to suit the project but I like the idea of having it in the admin.

I've only just switched to PHPStorm from DreamWeaver - I don't think I could handle more than one change a decade

It's going to be hard to work it out as it's not clear what the cause of the problem is, but you can rule out send and receive issues using something free like www.uptimerobot.com to ping your SMTP, POP3 and IMAP ports to see if they're responding correctly. As a special bonus, not only is it a free service, but you can use it to check how often your website goes down (server blips you might not be aware of when you're asleep ).

That's why I used the 60 minute free trial and whenever something I changed didn't work, I shut it down immediately so it wasn't using any more minutes

Yup - the guys at Basecamp had an interesting thing in one of their books about doing customised work early on and eventually switching to the same features for everyone. They said it hurt some relationships with earlier clients, but if you are expecting any decent numbers of signups to the SaaS offering then you will tear your hair out doing lots of custom work when you could be focusing on building features for all of your clients. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have some sort of feedback system to gauge what's constantly being asked for - that's a good idea - but work out how popular you think it will be and make your decision from there. You can do Option 1 but use symlinks (I think it's symlinks?) to only ever have one /core/ folder. I'm not sure, but you may even be able to do something with modules that you always want to have available in the /site/ folder too, but it's too early in the morning for my brain to be able to work out the mechanics of it Needless to say there will be some way of having their own assets folder but just one copy of everything else. EDIT: In fact I think this is what you meant with option 1 already as you only mentioned separate database and assets folder.

Yup, except the one I linked to is a real machine you can remote into through your browser. Both are valuable, but I couldn't check the javascript click issue on browsershots.org

I'm a PC guy and don't own a Mac so testing for tedious JS issues on a Mac that aren't visible on the same browsers on the PC would have been difficult if it wasn't for a free trial of this: http://crossbrowsertesting.com The issue was a weird date bug when changing months in a calendar - on Windows my code changed the month name in a <span> just fine based on the current month showing in the calendar. On Mac for some reason, when you went to the next month the same month name showed, but it then worked fine after that. I suspect something wasn't playing with the calendar plugin I was using, but it's all sorted now. Just being able to try lots of different things to see what worked on Mac saved me about 30-40 emails to someone whilst tweaking things saying "can you check now?"

Thumbnails AdminThemeReno (unless that doesn't count ) AdminTemplateColumns (shameless plug, but I do use it a lot to arrange fields more neatly in the edit screen) ProCache Minify (because I just haven't got around to checking out All In One Minify yet ) Those are the most commonly used for me, though that doesn't mean they're necessarily the most common ones I've been using recently - different projects mean different modules, but the top 4 there at least are my go-to modules for the majority of sites. EDIT: And may I say, what a good idea for a topic!

For the first part, how many pages are you importing with the ImportPagesCSV? Sounds like a lot if you are importing data to multiple locations in the tree so if it is something quite complex then you may be better off using the PW API and some custom PHP using a function like http://php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php to read through the CSV file and getting the API to do the importing. Some useful topics that may help: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/352-creating-pages-via-api/ https://processwire.com/talk/topic/1153-adding-images-to-a-page-via-the-api/ For the second question - going back to the Children tab after creating one child page, check out the excellent Admin Save Actions module by Nik and you can select what happens after you save a page. Very useful if you are doing a lot of new pages/edits.

I meant that during installation my module could add code to the config.php file similar to the topic you linked to to do something there before PW's session starts.

Thanks, I was afraid that would be the case. Ideally I would like this to be a module that could be released in future, so edits to the config file are out for this, however I think I may have some other options. EDIT: unless of course my module installation just appends some code automatically to the config file - that could also work