ryan

This week on the dev branch we've got a good mix of updates and issue resolutions, though not quite yet enough yet to bump the version number just yet. But here's a few highlights: There's a PR from Adrian committed which adds configurable columns for Selector fields. System update 20 was added which fixes the "created user" for several system pages. WireHttp was updated to support sending cookies in GET/POST requests powered by CURL. Lister was updated to recognize non-sortable fields, preventing unnecessary error messages. There were also 3 issue resolutions this week. We are getting down to the smaller stuff in terms of updates, which means it's about time to get that next master version out. I know I've been talking about it for awhile, but think we'll likely have one more dev branch version (3.0.199) and then it's looking like our 200th 3.x version will tentatively be the next master version (3.0.200). Thanks for reading, Happy Earth Day, and have a great weekend!

ProcessWire 3.0.198 contains a mixture of new features and issue resolutions. Below are details on a few of the new features: Support was added for runtime page cache groups. This enables pages to be cached as a group—and just as importantly—uncached as a group. While it can be used by anybody, it was added primarily to add efficiency to $pages->findMany(), so that it can cache supporting pages (like parents and page references). Previously, it would have to load a fresh copy of each supporting page used by findMany() results (for every returned page) since findMany() used no in-memory caching. If it did cache in memory, then you could potentially run out of memory on large result sets, so that strategy was avoided. Consider the case of iterating over all pages returned by findMany() and outputting their URLs... that triggers load of all parent pages for each page in the result set. And without a memory cache, it meant it would have to do it for each page in the results. Following this week's updates, now it can cache these supporting pages for each chunk of 250 pages, offering potentially significant performance improvement in many cases, without creating excess memory usage or memory leaks. When the chunk of 250 result pages is released from memory (to make room for the next chunk), all the supporting pages (parents, page references, etc.) are also released from memory, but not before. Now findMany() can offer both memory efficiency and great performance. For as long as I can remember, ProcessWire has had an apparently undocumented feature for dependent select fields that enables you to have two page reference fields using selects (single, multiple or AsmSelect) where the selected value in one select changes the selectable options in the other select (Ajax powered). Think of "categories" and "subcategories" selects, for example, where your selection for "categories" changes what options are selectable in "subcategories". Part of the reason it's undocumented is that it is one of those features that is a little bit fragile, and didn't work in some instances, such as within Repeater items. That changed this week, as the feature has been updated so that it can also work in Repeater items too. The $pages->findRaw() method was updated with a new "nulls" option (per Adrian's request in #1553). If you enable this new "nulls" option, it will add placeholders in the return value with null values for any fields you requested that were not present on each matching page. This reflects how PW's database works, in that if a field has no value, PW removes it from the database entirely. Without the nulls option (the existing behavior), it retains the more compact return values, which omit non present values completely. For example, consider the following: $items = $pages->findRaw("template=user, fields=email|first_name|last_name"); If a row in the result set had no "first_name" or "last_name" populated, then it would not appear in the that row of the return value at all... [ "email": "ryan@processwire.com" ] By specifying the "nulls" option, it will still include placeholders for field values not present in the database, and these will have a value of null: $items = $pages->findRaw("template=user, nulls=1, fields=email|first_name|last_name"); [ "email": "ryan@processwire.com", "first_name": null, "last_name": null ] By the way, if you don't specify which fields you want to get (which is the same as saying "get all") then adding the nulls option makes it provide placeholders for all fields used by the page's template. As you might expect, without the nulls option, it includes only populated fields. Also included in 3.0.198 are 7 issue fixes, most of which are visible in the dev branch commits log. That's all for this week. Thanks for reading this update and have a great weekend!

I figure this is an off topic board among friends here (like our pub, or a real one) and it’s okay to write with honesty and engage in spirited or sometimes heated conversation. So just want to be clear that I like and respect @MoritzLost and value his opinions, even if I don’t agree with all of them. We will all have a diversity of views and everyone should feel free to share them, and likewise others should feel free to question those or state their own, which is what I’m trying to do. But I’m glad MoritzLost shares his opinions here. Plus, a little controversy also helps to engage the community, and drags me out of the code for a bit, so I can’t fault anyone for that. Once I can state my thoughts, I carry no concerns, but thought I should defend the things that deserved defending, as I always should. As a caretaker of this project, part of my responsibility to add my honest point of view to a conversation like this, especially when something is posted where I don’t fully agree. I think many in our community know the subjectivity of statements here (whether OP’s, mine, or another’s), but an equal number may not, as this is a public board. So some counterpoint or back-and-forth is not only clarifying to the larger audience, but also useful, as we explore different facets of it all, and lead to the most important takeaways. I appreciate that MoritzLost continues to defend his point of view on parts, despite my own defense or heated questioning of those parts. It helps me to better understand and know which are the parts that he thinks are most important and deserve the attention. We obviously don’t have the resources to pursue everything Craft does, so narrowing in on the most important parts—the meat of it—is helpful here. I’m traveling right now so can’t participate as much as I’d like to at the moment but just didn’t want MoritzLost or anyone else to think I was angry or something. Likewise I didn’t want anyone else to think they had to moderate themselves either. When I’m among friends I feel comfortable to express and be honest, and so should you. If you get a heated reply from me it’s because I care about it and value your opinion. I’ll spend more time reading everything when I get back, but I can see already it’s a good and helpful discussion.

I agree it is unfair to make comparisons like this. I also don't think it's very nice to come to an open source project's support board and try to convince people to use a commercial CMS. Maybe the fact that a comparison can be made at all is a compliment. But Craft is a big commercial project with a sizable team and lots of resources and money behind it. ProcessWire is the opposite of that and the comparison seems inappropriate. But since you've stated this is a comparison, I'm not sure where the comparison is — you've focused exclusively on what you think Craft does better (by your own preference), but haven't made efforts to point out the areas where PW does better. So it comes across a little bit as an advertorial for large commercial CMS at the expense of a small open source project. Throughout you are stating a preference for something in Craft and claim a similar feature in ProcessWire is "not well thought out." This is wrong. A more honest statement would be that you and I clearly have different preferences, or maybe you don't fully understand something. But that does not mean that something that differs from your preferences or understanding is "not well thought out." I would never commit something to the core that hasn't been really well thought out, that's something I take really seriously. While much of Craft doesn't suit my own (and others) preferences, and may not be "well thought out" according to how I think things should work, I'm not going to join their forum and tell them it's not well thought out. That's because I respect them and trust that it's well thought out, according to their needs and preferences. So when you start telling someone that something they've put a lot of work into isn't well thought out, that's akin to saying that you do not respect them. I make no claims about being perfect at anything, and there is room for improvement in everything. What I take issue with here are the broad, subjective and largely false generalizations, and that's what I'm replying to. I'm also concerned that anywhere that you've quoted me, you've taken a statement by me out of context, extrapolating it as proof for an unrelated conclusion you've made. For example: In that link we are not talking about ProcessWire at all, and instead are talking about the processwire.com website in development, NOT the CMS. Why would you say I'm "opposed to the idea" of accessible development? This is something I'm interested in and passionate about. I don't understand why you are quoting me on one thing and saying another. In that link, I'm writing about a module called ProcessUser and something that is imposed upon it for a specific security purpose, unique to that particular module, and no other. But you have used my statement as proof that building custom features in ProcessWire isn't encouraged or supported. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have never had such a thought. My thoughts and intentions would be exactly the opposite. What you consider an advantage, I consider a major disadvantage. PW puts nothing between you and PHP, by design, that's a major advantage. I certainly would not be happy with Twig integration being a default. Clearly you like using Twig, which is fine for you to have that opinion, and I think it's perfectly fine for Twig to be an option. But I definitely wouldn't want to standardize upon it. Maybe it doesn't suit your preference, but I hope you can appreciate why we don't do things like that in PW. You are comparing two different kinds of caches. You are talking about a template engine cache. In PW there is no template engine, so likewise no template engine cache. Most of the time you would never need such a cache in PW at all. The $cache variable is something different, and while it can also cache markup, it is much more simple than you imply. PW's API is not string-based. You are writing about selectors (and specifically selector strings), not the "API". ProcessWire lets you specify selectors as strings or as arrays. Most prefer to use strings due to the simplicity of it. But this does not mean that arrays are not reliable. And if you use arrays, then there's no need to do value sanitization. But the majority of the time you are using selectors, you are not injecting user input into it either, so I would consider selector strings to be a major advantage for PW the vast majority of the time. And for times that it's not, you don't have to use it. The problem with chaining methods for this is that they are live code, you can't store them. Perhaps it has benefits in Craft, but they would not be appropriate for PW. In PW selectors can be specified as arrays or strings, and in cases where you want to separate the query property from the query value, then that's why we have the array option in PW. And yes, they are reliable, despite your claim that they are not. The same is true in PW. Fieldtypes build the query and sanitize/validate the value to be queried. The only thing PW asks you to do is IF you are using a selector "string" that ALSO happens to contain user input, then just sanitize that user input part with the selectorValue() method. If you are using an array, then such sanitization is already done for you. This has nothing to do with details of a fieldtype, which will do its own validation/sanitization. Saying "clunky" is a subjective and hardly fair statement to make. What might be clunky to you is optimal to others. You are writing specifically about the file translation system, so the whole purpose is to provide an interface to translate your site php files (primarily template files). The interface is geared to focus on that task only, and that's the point of it. I understand you value more layers between things (like with Twig), but I always prefer fewer layers, a more direct approach, so you'll see that throughout PW. If I'm using a file translation system, I want to know what file I'm working with and I want to be able to tell the translator what file to work with. That my preference, and I understand you have a different one. Of course you can, that's who it is for. Yes they are grouped by file, and that's how I prefer it, and I have never had a client have a problem with that. If you have some preference to keep translators/clients out of the admin, you can also ask them to translate from a spreadsheet (exported from PW) and PW will happily read that in and use it. None of those 3 statements is true. Translations may be stored in JSON files, but they can be exported/imported (all files at once) to/from CSV files. Translation files are not stored in "random" locations. They are stored with the language's files, which is a static location identified by its ID. Adding translations in the code editor is not impossible, because where else would you add new translations, if not in the code? If you need a new translation, go ahead and add your __('text') in your code, and it immediately becomes available as a translation. You are welcome to your opinion, but as someone that put a lot of thought and effort into field translations, it's hard for me to take your opinions seriously when you state things like this. Nothing about them is "tacked on" or "not well thought out", quite the opposite. So to me it seems like at worst, you don't understand what you are talking about, or at best (and most likely), you just have an alternate preference. This is fine, but I don't think that's obvious to everyone reading. So please don't make statements like "not well thought out" when you really mean that something doesn't suit your preference, or maybe you don't fully understand it. I appreciate examples but I'm not aware of any field where you need to "add the second language's field manually". This does not sound at all like PW multi-language fields. If you are talking about PW at all, perhaps you are talking about the "language alternate" fields option? If so, this is an option that is there to provide additional flexibility for specific cases, but it is almost never used in my experience. Please don't use it as a foundation for any comparison, as its borderline deprecated at this point and I don't expect many will ever use it. This conclusion is the opposite of the truth. The fact that PW doesn't impose a specific framework upon you means that all options are open. Anything is available to you. It is more open, not less open. It's you and PHP, and anything you can run in PHP you can run in PW. ProcessWire feature approach is built around constant improvement. It is driven by the community and the needs of clients. The development of PW has always followed this approach. I have a job working with clients just like most PW users and so I develop according to what's needed and when. Most of my income comes from client work. I work on the PW core for free, so development usually has to have some crossover with the other projects that I work on. Despite being open source and largely unfunded, the fact that PW and Craft can end up with apparently similar capabilities and feature sets—and the fact that they can be compared at all—I would consider to be a sign of efficiency and that we are doing something right. If you consider our approach "chaotic" then fine, but the accurate terms would be "flexible", "sustainable", "consistent" and "continuous". The approach been very successful for PW as a project. And PW is also one of the longest lasting projects in this area (open source or commercial), and will continue to be because it's not built around money. I don't add features without completely thinking them out. That's silly, why would we do that? I would never commit something to the core that has not been well thought out. I don't understand why you would say this unless you just don't understand it. Nothing committed in the core has been abandoned. Elsewhere, I've abandoned a ton of code, but most of it has never been seen by anyone. When I commit something to the core, I've spent a lot of time working on it and I'm also committing to supporting it, long term, for as long as there is value in it. That's another reason why I take a lot of time to think through anything that gets added. You are welcome to say that you have a different preference, and you can I clearly have different preferences, but please do not suggest something is not well thought out because that is not true. Well, I'm glad you think there are "hundreds" of features that look cool... though not well supported? I don't know what we're talking about. False. The only bugs that don't get fixed are those where they cannot be duplicated, or that don't have a clear solution and seem to be isolated to one person. And I don't know what you mean about "don't work well with each other and so on". ProcessWire's core focus is already a limited feature set, where much is left to modules. The aim is to have everything you might "need" and do it really well, but save things you might "want" for modules. This is one area where it certainly does help to have a big commercial company behind it, with full time documentation writers and such. While they do have a structure and hierarchy, I understand it may not be exactly the way everyone might want it. The site search engine is actually quite powerful and searches the API and all documentation pages, so I recommend that when you want to find something specific. This is fair, and it'll continue to be that way, the blog posts can do heavy lifting in between the time that features are added and documentation is updated (as does this forum). The blog posts do also end up as the linked documentation for features in some cases. I'm okay with it. I understand that if we were a big company it might be odd though. I don't put efforts towards pretending that PW is a big company, I work within the resources we have, putting most of it towards where it counts and less of it towards pleasing critics. The aim is that all versions are compatible, meaning you can safely upgrade from any older version to any newer version. I don't know of any other projects that do this as well as PW, so I would consider it a major benefit. If we get to the point where this is regularly not the case, then we likely would adopt semantic versioning. But the need isn't there at this point in time. Close, but not totally accurate. New versions are currently aimed at a group of new related features or a group of issue fixes. The version number goes into systems that prompt people to upgrade, at the time it is appropriate to do so. They are also for documentation purposes so that we can easily reference them in "since" statements. Lastly, it's useful to have version numbers to reference in blog and/or forum posts. Currently this system of version numbers is the most beneficial one for this project. This isn't what I'd consider a breaking change. This is something where it just asks you to install a module as part of an upgrade to the version, it doesn't break the API or the site, just locks down a specific admin feature for security until you install the appropriate module. And security always comes first in PW. But I don't think there are any actual breaking changes in PW. Again, if it became commonplace like it is in other projects, then we'd likely adopt the same version number approach they do. So perhaps that's something that will come in the future, but we're not at that point. I'm open to it at the appropriate time. A "template file" is a "file" for a "template". I don't know how to be any more clear than that. But yes there are instances where we're talking about template files that I might use the term "template" rather than "template file" since the context is established. I agree that terms like "template" and "file" are fairly generic, and it would be nice if templates were like cars where we could refer to the "car" but also have a label like "wheels" and know we are still referring to the bigger "car" above it. But "file" is a generic enough term that while accurate, needs context. I'll take it as a compliment that you consider RepeaterMatrix to be so valuable. The Pro modules were never intended to be "required" for any site. They are meant to be a luxury or a time saver, but there's nothing you can do with any Pro module that you can't do yourself by some other means. Though Pro modules might save you time in doing it. I've built example modules that show you how to do do just about anything that Pro modules can do, they just might require more of your effort. The original intention for Fieldtypes and Inputfields was that everyone would build their own according to their needs, but I don't know many that do that other than me. Have a look at FieldtypeEvents sometime to see how simple it is to do. I don't share your opinion on this. If you are of the mindset that the page tree reflects the front-end site 1-to-1 then you are in the mindset of a different system. I consider the tree to be essential, a major benefit, as you know everything has a place and hierarchy and you don't have to have various different kinds of navigations or buckets to find them. If you know one thing you know everything in PW. I've never been a fan of different bucket systems and the ambiguity that they introduce. ProcessWire was designed from the beginning to get away from what you are talking about, what I subjectively feel is a mess in other systems (again, my preference). PW aims to be simpler and more flexible than that, though pages can still be browsed as a tree or as buckets, even if the tree is the source. I don't agree with your premise, or the linked post. Having a link to someone else's opinion does not make it right, maybe just right for you personally, that's fine. I would agree that there are benefits to letting the page tree influence your navigation, but there aren't drawbacks to not using it that way either. It may have started that way. While I am currently the gatekeeper in terms of maintaining the core I consider ProcessWire to be a long term community developed project, and it becomes more that every year. Every open source project needs someone to start it, and someone to be a caretaker, ensuring the quality of it, and I see that as my role, which I take very seriously. But this is a team project and one that is much more sustainable long term than a commercial one.

A few weeks ago I told you about a new module I was working on that automatically saves front-end form submissions and can send email reminders for the user to finish their form. The module is called FormAutoSaver. This week I finished up that module and have released it both in the ProDevTools board and the FormBuilder board, and it's available for download now. Note that it is first release/beta test version right now. This module can be used with or without FormBuilder. Though when used with FormBuilder it is more of a turn-key setup that can be done in the admin. I've put together a dedicated FormAutoSaver documentation and information page on the site, so rather than repeating a lot of information here I'll point you to that, if you are interested in it. I also wanted to mention that a new version of FormBuilder has also been released this week (v52). There aren't any major feature additions to write about here, but there are several small improvements and bug fixes. By the way, I've added FormAutoSaver to one FormBuilder form on this site: the site submission form. There's not much to see, since it silently works in the background. But if you want to try it out, fill-in some or all of the form (making sure to fill in your email address), but don't submit the form. Feel free to leave the form or even switch devices. You should get a reminder email in 5-10 minutes with a link to finish your form. While you are there, please submit recent sites you've built in ProcessWire, we love seeing your work! My kids are starting spring break from school next week, so I'll be mostly offline and likely won't have any updates next week, but will be back to core updates after that and hopefully getting ready for a release candidate of our next master version shortly after. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

ProcessWire 3.0.197 resolves 9 issue reports and adds 3 feature requests. For details in resolved issues and feature requests, be sure to see the commit log. I'll cover a couple of my favorite feature requests that have been added this week: New $files->getCSV() method This comes by way of feature request #400 via @bernhard to add something to abstract away the redundant details of reading a CSV file into one simple method call. This simplifies the reading of a CSV file by abstracting file-open, get-header, get-rows and file-close operations into a single method call, where all those operations are handled internally. All you have to do is keep calling the $files->getCSV($filename) method until it returns false. This method will also skip over blank rows by default, unlike PHP’s fgetcsv() which will return a 1-column row with null value. Here's how you use it: Let's say we have this CSV file (first row is the header): Food,Type,Color Apple,Fruit,Red Banana,Fruit,Yellow Spinach,Vegetable,Green Here's how you'd use the new method: while($row = $files->getCSV('/path/to/foods.csv')) { echo "Food: $row[Food] "; echo "Type: $row[Type] "; echo "Color: $row[Color] "; } There are also several $options supported, see the $files->getCSV() documentation page for more. There's also a new $files->getAllCSV() method that does the same thing but returns all the rows in the CSV file in one call. Improvement to InputfieldPageListSelectMultiple Next was feature request #339 that requested adding the enhancement developed by @Robin S (via the PageListSelectMultipleQuickly module) into the core. This enhancement keeps the selectable page list open for multiple selections rather than closing it for each selection. It also better indicates when an item is selected. While I ended up writing it in a different way than Robin S.'s module, the end result is nearly identical to Robin S.'s short GIF screencast below: Also added this week is a new "visibility" option for Inputfields: Open + Locked (not editable), along with some small hook documentation improvements in the Pages class. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week's commits are primarily focused on resolving reported issues (via GitHub issue reports). While that doesn't make for exciting reading here, it's an important part of working towards our next master version. Though I am working on various other projects including client websites running in ProcessWire, ongoing updates to Pro modules and development of other ProcessWire modules. One module I've been working on this week (and last week) enables you to export translations for multi-language fields into JSON or CSV files. These files can be read into other translation systems, edited, and then imported back into ProcessWire. So if you need all the content for a site translated from one language into another, it provides a very convenient means of doing so. More details on that one soon. That's all for today but stay tuned and thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.

@cpx3 It sounds like the session is locked in the database. Try again from an incognito window or another browser. Or if you are running localhost like on WAMP/MAMP or something, you might try to reboot the database, which should also clear it.

@bernhard I don't have numbers, but it would be interesting to benchmark sometime. I do know that I've tried to optimize the hook calls as much as possible, so I expect they should be fast. I would guess that you'd have to get the combined effect of many calls before you start seeing the difference. But it does still take significant code to make hooks happen, as the method call has to pass through a PHP __call() which then checks of there are any hook methods available to call, then it triggers any found before hook methods, calls the the original hooked method, gets the return value, then triggers any found after hooks, gets the return value again, then returns control to the original __call(), which then provides the return value to the caller. It's the minimum needed, but it's still a lot of steps. In the case of the admin theme, all the parts of it get added via include() calls to the different layout files, and that's very fast. I wanted to keep that benefit for cases where people didn't need to override anything or, didn't have hooks. That way it's still just a simple fast include(), except when you wanted to hook into it or use customize different files. It may not be something you can feel in any one request, but it would be something you could measure the combined effect of over several requests. I figure it's my responsibility to make sure PW uses as little CPU (translating to as little energy) as possible for anything it does, at least the things where I know how to. Something like the admin theme gets used by everyone that uses PW, and so little things can add up to big things when spread out over the scale of all installations. But how much difference it makes, I don't know for certain. So part if it is also about having fun and trying to be useful. @cpx3 What version did you upgrade from? Enable debug mode ($config->debug=true; in /site/config.php) and also check the log files that netcarver mentioned above. That should hopefully point to whatever the issue might be in this case. Please let us know.

ProcessWire 3.0.196 contains 10 minor issue fixes, but the biggest additions this week are 6 pull requests submitted from @bernhard. This most notable PR is an upgrade to AdminThemeUikit that enables greater customization of the theme's markup. If you recall, Bernhard also provided a PR last year that enables customization of the admin theme's CSS/LESS, so now he's now completed the circle and provided us with a direction for customizing the markup as well. This newest addition lets you provide your own custom render files for different parts of the admin theme by placing them in /site/templates/AdminThemeUikit/. Third party modules can also define custom render files. Furthermore, this addition adds a new hook that enables you (or your modules) to hook into and modify just about any part of the admin theme rendering. Rather than going into all the details and repeating all of the instructions here, see the new AdminThemeUikit README file "Customizing Markup" section which describes all of the different things you can modify and how to do so. You can also find all of the render files in the core AdminThemeUikit directory — any .php files beginning with an underscore are custom render files that can be overridden. While not as broad in scope, there were other useful PRs added this week as well, so be sure to see the dev branch commit log if you are interested in seeing what else was added. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

As we continue to work towards the next master version, this week I've been working on fixing reported issues. A new $sanitizer->words() method was also added which reduces a string to contain just words without punctuation and such. It was added in part to work on an issue reported with the tags feature in the field editor, but should be handy for other cases as well. As part of that update, the existing $sanitizer->word() (singular) method was re-written to support the features needed for the new words() plural method. This week I've also been working on a pull request from Bernhard that enables greater customization of AdminThemeUikit by way of custom render files and hooks. I'm bringing in that PR and it has a lot of good ideas that have inspired some related updates to it. I've got a bit more work and testing to do before committing, but that part should be ready early next week, along with more core updates. Thanks for reading and have a good weekend!

The term "hint" is a good here, but it's more than that. The purpose of any site profile (no matter how minimal) is to be a functional starting point. The blank profile is now the only core profile so most people will start with it. The /site/classes/ directory is important and is likely forgotten by all but the most experienced users, if it is not present. I think it belongs in the most minimal starting point. You have to have at least one file in a directory in order for it to remain through git, site profile and installation. Being the blank profile, the class itself is blank, a placeholder, like the directory itself. It exists to explain what the directory is for and the format files must use within it. It's a readme that exemplifies what it describes. Any site profile must be functional and it's worth noting that all site profiles, no matter how minimal, all have a "home" template (and an "admin" template). So a home.php template file and a HomePage.php class file are part of that minimal but functional starting point, even if blank.

ProcessWire 3.0.195 contains a few fixes and optimizations relative to the previous version. While there aren't major additions, if you are running a previous version of the dev branch it's a worthwhile upgrade. Version 3.0.194 added the lazy loading fields, templates and fieldgroups, but there were still a few cases where PW would load them all. This version corrects those few cases. So if you considered 3.0.194 to be a nice upgrade, 3.0.195 is an even better version of it. There are also some useful bug fixes in this version. One notable bug fix (found by Adrian) was that the $pages->findMany() method was lagging due to some changes a couple versions back (limited to dev branch). That's been fixed so now findMany() is fast again. Also a notable addition: the included site profile (site-blank) now includes a /site/classes/ directory with an example HomePage.php file/class that serves as both a placeholder (to ensure the directory exists in Git) as well as an example custom class for the “home” template. I thought this was a good idea because many might not even know about the custom page classes feature without that obvious pointer to the feature. More core updates and additions next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

@sz-ligatur It depends on the PW version. fopen used to be the default, but it's more and more common for allow_url_fopen to be disabled, so I've switched the default to CURL (when available) on the dev branch. In any case, with CURL, the flag that you set raw data with also makes it use POST, so I'm not sure how you send raw data (other than a file resource) with CURL using PUT, so you probably should make use use fopen for that case. You can force it to use fopen by specifying ['use' => 'fopen'] for the $options argument to WireHttp::send().

This week I've bumped the dev branch version to 3.0.194. Relative to last week, there are a few commits fixing minor issues. Last week we covered some fairly major updates and I've not come across any concerning side effects, so figured it's a good day to bump the version. Next week my kids are out of school for winter break so I'll be around but I don't expect I'll have much in terms of updates to report next week, but definitely will the following week. Thanks and have a great weekend!

@ErikMH Thanks for the additional info. I'm not yet sure what the issue could be, as I also use custom page classes here, but I I think by getting yours working we might find closer where to look. And I think to do that, some additional checks are needed in your code, which I'll try to describe below. The error message you've got appearing (that there is no getTitle method on NullPage) is a valid error message, as it is true that NullPage has no getTitle() method. NullPage is a valid return value from any Page method that can return a Page object. So we know at least that there is a line of code somewhere that is calling a getTitle() method before checking if it has a Page that would have that method. You can check for a NullPage by: if($p instanceof NullPage) { ... } or more commonly you can do: if(!$p->id) { ... }. That works because NullPage objects have an id of 0. In the debug backtrace we can see that home.php line 95 calls IssuePage::getEntry(). And then IssuePage.php line 43 is likely making a call that is returning a NullPage. I would add a NullPage check before calling getEntry() (home.php line 95) and then another on IssuePage line 43. That should prevent the error from occurring, and is something you'd want to have whether you were seeing this error in the first place or not. And by identifying specifically what change seems to fix the issue, that should point us in the direction of what method call might be returning something potentially incorrect (since you indicated it worked in earlier versions but not in the current). Once you identify the culprit, it would be helpful for us to know what that condition is where it's coming across the unexpected NullPage. So let's say $p is the page you are calling something on (like your getTitle), you might do something like this: $title = ''; if($p->id) { if(method_exists($p, 'getTitle')) { $title = $p->getTitle(); } else { bd("Page $p has no getTitle method (called from page $this)"); } } else { bd("Unexpected NullPage received in page $this"); }

@ErikMH The line producing the error you mentioned is making a $parent->getTitle(); call. What is getTitle() ? That's not a PW Page method, so I'm wondering if that's a method you've added in your custom page class? If so, and you called this on the page representing your homepage. The value of $page->parent would correctly be a NullPage, as you are seeing there. So even if we track down an issue causing this particular instance, I'm thinking you'll want to update your code to account for the possibility that a getTitle() method may or may not be present. Maybe this? $parent = $this->parent(); if($parent->id && method_exists($parent, 'getTitle')) { $theHTML = '...'; }

@flydev ?? Thanks, I appreciate that. I will look into this.

@kongondo It could but I would guess your bottleneck is quantity of pages, not fields or templates (?). So unless you literally mean hundreds-of-repeater-fields, for your case I think you'd want to enable the ajax loading features of the repeater (if not already) as that would make a big difference. It was a one-off thing that I used and deleted. Writing in the browser so it may need adjustment, but here's something similar (though a bit simpler than what I used): $fieldtype = $modules->get('FieldtypeText'); $title = $fields->get('title'); for($n = 0; $n < 1000; $n++) { $field = new Field(); $field->type = $fieldtype; $field->name = "test_$n"; $field->label = "Test field $n"; $fields->save($field); $fieldgroup = new Fieldgroup(); $fieldgroup->name = "test-$n"; $fieldgroup->add($title); $fieldgroup->add($field); $fieldgroups->save($fieldgroup); $template = new Template(); $template->name = "test-$n"; $template->label = "Test template $n"; $template->fieldgroup = $fieldgroup; $templates->save($template); } @ErikMH I'm not aware of any recent changes that would affect pages in that manner. But for your code, I would drop the $me = wire($this); there is no $me, there is only $this. ? And rather than referring to $me->parent; refer to $this->parent(); with the parenthesis, so that it is a method call rather than a direct access property. Since you are "inside" of the Page class here, the interface is a little lower level than if you are outside of it. Usually it doesn't matter but in this case of things like "parent" I think it might be safer to method calls rather than properties, because these things are dynamically loaded and so accessing the method ensures that happens.

This week we have some great performance and scalability improvements in the core that enable lazy-loading of fields, templates and fieldgroups, thanks to @thetuningspoon — https://processwire.com/blog/posts/field-and-template-scalability-improvements/

@Denis Schultz FormBuilder already has something like this feature in that it supports partial entries. But this FormAutoSaver does go quite a bit further in that it auto-saves as you type and it emails reminders to the user. FormBuilder auto-saves on paginations instead. Maybe it should be released in the FormBuilder board too. It's kind of a developer tool in that it takes a little code to implement into a form (while FormBuilder does not), so I was thinking ProDevTools was a good fit. But I'll either add a similar capability in FormBuilder or make this module available for FormBuilder users. For FormBuilder, I'll want to figure out how to make it an automatic option you can enable rather than one that you have to insert additional code for.

This week's commits include fixes for 8 reported issues and a couple new $sanitizer methods for entity encoding values in arrays. I mentioned earlier that I'd like to try and get a new master version out early this year and that's still the case. I've been successfully migrating some of the production sites that I work on to the dev branch, and so far, so good. Please let me know how it works for you. We're on track for a new master version hopefully soon. A couple weeks ago I mentioned a module I was working on for automatically saving front-end forms in progress. For the moment, it's it's called FormAutoSaver, but maybe I'll come up with a better name (or not). It emails the person filling out the form with one or two reminders with links to finish it if they leave it before submitting it. The emails are template-file based so fully under your control, and the delay in sending 1-2 reminders is also fully configurable, whether hours or days. This module is essentially finished and now I'm just writing the documentation. I already have it in use on 1 site and it's made a helpful difference, not just in getting people to finish their forms, but also in helping us to analyze where people tend to get stuck and stop filling out the form. It also comes with an admin tool that lets you browse the forms in progress and see where they are at. Whether you want to increase the completion rate of of any particular form(s), or you want to identify bottlenecks, I think you'll find tool helpful. You don't have to design your form for it, as it will work with any existing form. I expect to have this posted into the ProDevTools board as soon as next week. Thanks for reading this short update and have a great weekend!

I use the tools that ProcessWire comes with. I spent a lot of time making them simple and easy to use, and that's what I like to use. Just as an example, let's say that I've got a website and a client wants to add a full featured blog to it. I'll develop it on my local copy of the site and it might involve creating several fields, templates and template files. I'll take a day or two to develop it and when it comes time to migrate the finished work to the live server, that's the fun part, but there's not much to it: Create or export/import the new fields on the live site first, then do the same for the new templates. Copy the new or updated template files (and related CSS/JS assets) into place. Create or export/import the pages needed by the blog, and it's done. A blog is just an example but it's the same as any other update. It's a painless process that always goes quickly and smoothly. This part of it takes maybe 5 to 10 minutes and is one of my favorite parts of the project, like driving a new car and then seeing it for the first time in your driveway. I like to oversee this part of any project and have no need to optimize it further so guess I'm not the target market for add on migration tools. That's correct, it would be fairly straightforward.

ProcessWire 3.0.193 resolves 6 issues, makes improvements to the template and module editors, adds new hooks, adds improvements the $pages->find() findRaw method, and more. We covered some of these updates in last week's post, so we'll focus on what's new this week. First off we have a new advanced mode feature that lets you edit the raw configuration data for a module. This can be useful for various reasons, especially for module developers. If you have $config->advanced = true; in your /site/config.php file, you'll see a new option on your module information screen that enables you to directly edit the raw JSON configuration data for the module. There's also an option that lets you view the raw JSON module information data. Unlike the configuration data, this isn't editable. That's because it comes from the module directly (overtime you do a Modules > Refresh) or is generated at runtime, so there's little point in editing it here. In my case, I've found these new tools helpful for clearing out old and/or irrelevant configuration data during module development. In some cases, having the ability to edit this data may help to identify or fix issues that previously would have been difficult to do without using the API. If there's interest, I may move this into a dedicated (non-core) module that also lets you directly edit field and template configuration data too. But for now the feature is in the core, but just requires advanced mode before it appears. A few new hooks were added this week: Fieldgroups::fieldRemoved($fieldgroup, $field) Called after a field has been removed from a fieldgroup/template. Fieldgroups::fieldAdded($fieldgroup, $field) Called after a new field has been added to a fieldgroup/template. Fieldgroups::renameReady($template, $oldName, $newName) Called before a fieldgroup is about to be renamed. Fieldgroups::renamed($template, $oldName, $newName) Called after a fieldgroup has been renamed. Templates::renameReady($template, $oldName, $newName) Called before a template is about to be renamed. Templates::renamed($template, $oldName, $newName) Called after a template has been renamed. Fields::renameReady($field, $oldName, $newName) Called before a field is about to be renamed. Fields::renamed($field, $oldName, $newName) Called after a field has been renamed. These accompany the existing addReady(), added(), deleteReady(), deleted(), cloneReady(), cloned(), saveReady() and saved() hooks available for fields, templates and fieldgroups. Last week a couple people asked about versioning and migration of stuff in PW (like fields, templates, modules, etc.) and if there were any plans to provide additional tools for that. For the projects I work on at least, this part of the development process consumes so little time that it doesn't warrant developing more stuff for it. But I understand others might find it useful, so for those that would, I'd rather keep the core lean and instead leave that to tools/modules built by experts like Bernhard and others around here. I think it's important that whoever develops and maintains such features also be the same one(s) that would use them. But if any kind of core updates would be helpful to developers looking to implement more features here, I'm on board. Whether that means adding more hooks to specific events (see above as examples), maintaining field/template/module data in files in addition to the current DB tables, or anything else that helps such modules, this is all possible and likely simple for us to support in the core. So just let me know what I can do to help. While not full-featured migration tools, we do have useful field, template and page export/import tools in the core already, and those will of course continue to be maintained and improved, and may be expanded to include modules too. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

@bilioso You don't want the scheme in the httpHosts array, so you just want [ 'localhost', 'mysite.org' ]; or [ 'localhost', 'mysite.org', 'www.mysite.org' ];