ryan

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!

There isn't anything major to write about this week, so I'm just checking in to say hello and I hope that you are having a nice week, and tell you what I'm working on here. Time this week has been split mostly between working on the new PW website, working on an API project for a client, and researching and interviewing companies to replace our HVAC systems. That last one probably took the most time, as I didn't know much about HVAC before our maintenance person said it's time to replace the the heating and air conditioning systems. So I've been trying to learn all I can about HVAC in order to go about it in the most informed fashion possible. This is the sort of thing most might only do once or twice in a lifetime (it's a big expense). Usually I'm more DIY with this kind of stuff, and a lot of it is approachable. But when you get into the A/C side of things with refrigerants (R410A, R454B, R30), condensers, compressors, and coils, that's where my head spins, it's way beyond my DIY range. It really is a job for the professionals. So I'm going to leave that to the experts so I can focus on web development. On the PW website I've been working on the API reference this week, along with some final details on the modules directory. Next week I'm hoping to finish the API reference and start working on the homepage. Following that, I'll be writing a lot of new copy for the Features section (thanks for all your feedback there). Then we should be nearly finished. So it's still a few weeks out, but progress is good. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

@teppo Thanks and good ideas. CSS variables sound good to me too. But want to mention that this isn't a new admin theme, this is AdminThemeUikit with an improved look and feel. There isn't any change to the underlying markup or CSS structure. The AdminThemeUikit CSS is still present so folks can still use the original look too. Longer term maybe we'll do a whole new admin theme. This does actually feel like a new admin theme when you use it, even if it's technically not.

@wbmnfktr It's funny that you say that, because this is exactly what I told the designers the first time I saw what they did with the admin theme. I told them that what they did with ProcessWire feels like home. Not just home, but a nicer and more modern home. 🙂

Work continues on the new processwire.com website. I’ve nearly finished developing most of the modules directory this week and next week will be working on the development side of the API reference and sites directory. Some more good news to share is that when the new site launches, the new admin look and feel will launch as well. The website and admin share a similar design language in some areas, and I’m confident you will love them both. When we use screenshots of ProcessWire in the new site design, they will be from the new admin look and feel. It is still admin AdminThemeUikit, but with a new face that is beautiful, modern and professionally designed. I’ve been using for more than a week and it’s fantastic in my opinion. If for some reason you end up wanting to keep the current look of AdminThemeUikit (perhaps a client doesn’t like change), it will remain as an option too. If you are extending AdminThemeUikit or using the admin.less feature (developed by Bernhard) to custom style the admin, all of that will continue working too. What will likely be changing is that we’ll be moving the older AdminThemeDefault and AdminThemeReno out of the core and into the modules directory. I’d rather keep the core efforts focused with AdminThemeUikit, but continue to support the older admin themes as installable options. Prior to this, most of what you’d seen in ProcessWire’s core admin and website has been designed by me (excluding AdminThemeReno). And I haven’t worked full time as a designer since 2005 or so. If I ever had any site design skills, they are long gone. So PW has always had a “designed by a developer” look. Having professional designers take over the design of both the admin and the website just feels like a major upgrade to ProcessWire all around. More than I could have guessed. I look forward to when I can share the new site design, admin look and feel, and the designers with you. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Big thanks to everyone that shared your favorite ProcessWire features last week, it was very helpful for the new ‘features’ section of the website. Speaking of the website, I’ve been continuing to work on that this week, and was primarily focused on the modules directory. I’ve got plenty more to do there, but making good progress. The website is going to be the focus of the next few weeks, with some core updates along the way. This week the core updates were a few issue fixes on the dev branch, with more on the way next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

@wbmnfktr @Kiwi Chris @Mats @MrSnoozles @bernhard @teppo @Jan Romero @MarkE Wow, thanks for all of the feedback. This is really helpful and gives me a lot to work with! I'm currently compiling and combining all of those feedback into a separate document that will be used to build out the features section. @bernhard What's the source of the first two quotes in your message? Those are really good. I might like to use portions of those quotes directly if possible, so wanted to provide proper attribution. @MarkE May I use a quote from what you wrote? (this quote below):

A storm rolled through Saturday and somehow severed our fiber internet connection. So I was offline for half of the week. But that was fine because I didn’t need an internet connection in order to start developing the new PW site design. I’ve been busy primarily with the template files and CSS this week and am making good progress and having fun. One of the new additions to the site is one suggested by the designers, which is to have a features section and call attention to and provide more details about ProcessWire’s broad set of features. For each feature, we'll have a short title, a 1 sentence summary, and a body copy page of details (if they click to "learn more"). As I begin writing the content for this, I could use your help: What are the features of ProcessWire that you think deserve the most attention? (Especially when it comes to attracting new users). I’ll be writing text to describe a dozen or more features in detail, but wanted to make sure I’m focused on those that are most interesting to our current and future users. Thanks for your feedback, and have a great weekend!

This week we’ve got 2 new versions out: 3.0.246 on the main/master branch, and 3.0.247 on the dev branch. Version 3.0.246 (main/master) contains several minor bug fixes that were discovered after 3.0.244. And 3.0.247 on the dev branch adds support for conditional hooks that can match method return values. The hooks documentation has been updated with a new section that covers all the details here. I’m going to slow a bit on core updates over the next few weeks so that I can dedicate more time to developing the new ProcessWire website. The designers have done a great job and now I need to focus on getting some parts of it developed and new text written, etc. I’ll keep you up-to-date as it moves forward. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week on the dev branch are 8 issue resolutions. The most significant one #2035 (found by @Jonathan Lahijani) is that when you trash a page with children, and then later restore it, the page gets restored correctly, but the children/descendants only partially get restored. By that I mean that the children would get moved out of the trash, but they'd continue to have trash status. So those pages could silently behave like they were in the trash, making them visible in the PageList but otherwise inaccessible. There wasn't really any way to fix it interactively, since you can't manually assign or un-assign trash status, at least not without using the API. While I suspect this bug has been around for a very long time, I couldn't find any installations where I had trashed and restored a nested structure of pages like this, but was able to reproduce it manually. Just in case any of your installations have pages like that, the PageList (as of this week's commits) now highlights them with both trash and warning icons. Fixing the issue is just a matter of editing the page and clicking Save. If you want to quickly check if you have any pages affected by the issue (in almost any PW version), you can paste in the following URL, assuming /processwire/ is the path to your admin: /processwire/page/search/for?status=trash&has_parent!=7&include=all While it might be rare to trash and restore a structure of pages, I want to make sure nobody is affected by it so I'll likely update the current main/master version within the next week, merging the current dev branch. Coming in ProcessWire 3.0.246 is support for another type of conditional hook which enables you to match the return value, or properties of the return value, for any hooked method. Currently conditional hooks let you match things from the object being hooked, or the arguments of the method being hooked, but it's not previously been possible to match the return value of of methods with conditional hooks. Next week it will be, which I think as a useful improvement to our hooks system. More on that next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

@David Karich In your Fieldtype::getDatabaseSchema() method, add this bit of code below, and that should prevent the field from being versioned. This 'all' property means that the schema defines the entire scope of the data, and that it doesn't extend beyond the database. The default value is true, so you want to force it to false. PagesVersions doesn't attempt to version things that it doesn't know about (indicated by the false value) unless your Fieldtype implements the FieldtypeDoesVersions interface, so this is a good way to prevent it from versioning your Fieldtype: $schema['xtra']['all'] = false;

I have to leave town later today for for my daughters gymnastics meet, so I'm getting the weekly post out early this week. I bumped the dev branch core version to 3.0.245 as well. While there isn't anything major in this particular core version, it does contain some updates to the ProcessPageList module that were needed to make in order to make it possible to build the new PageListFilter module (the one I mentioned last week). These updates focus on making some parts of the PageList more hookable. To go along with those core updates, I've released the PageListFilter module that I mentioned last week. This is an admin helper that enables you to filter pages in the page list with a click, such as first letter (A-Z, etc.). I've already found it quite handy on some of the ProcessWire installations I work with, I hope some of you find it useful too, please let me know what you think. Thanks and have a great rest of the week and weekend!

I hope you all have had a great week. Last week was the blog post for our newest main/master version 3.0.244. This week I've been catching up with some other projects, so no new core updates to report. But one thing I've been working on (and am still working on) is a module that lets you provide filters in the admin page list. In my case, a client wants to be able to filter by the first letter of page titles, so they can quickly jump to all pages that start with the letter "C", for example. It figures out all the starting first-characters for page titles and builds a kind of pagination-style list for it, like seen in the screenshot below. Clicking any of the single character filters to just those pages by sending an Ajax request to the server, grabbing just the relevant pages and listing them. I think it's pretty useful in many cases. And I think there's potential for predefined filters to go beyond just letters. There's more to work out with this, but I hope to release it in the near future. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

@FS72 I just did a ProcessWire 2.2 to 3.0.244 upgrade. You are right that you have to use 2.7 as the "intermediate" version when upgrading to a 3.x version (per the README). This is because 2.7.2 was the version that was prepared for the major 3.x changes. So you'll want to upgrade to 2.7.2 first. Once upgraded to 2.7, then you can upgrade to any 3.x version. In my case, some of the user accounts wouldn't transition over because 2.2 was from 13 years ago and used a different password system, so that's something to keep in mind. I ended up creating an admin account and then installed the profile exporter module, then did a fresh install with the newly created profile. That way I was starting with a fresh install, despite the site being from 2012.

ProcessWire 3.0.244 is our newest main/master/stable version. It’s been more than a year in the making and is packed with tons of new features, issue fixes, optimizations and more. This post covers all the details— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.244/

Just a quick note to say that the new version blog post is coming tomorrow rather than today. Here in Atlanta, tomorrow it is supposed to rain, while today the weather is perfect. So I spent the day outside and am moving my work day to tomorrow instead.

I’m happy to report that today the dev branch has been merged to the main/master branch with our latest version: 3.0.244. This is after about a year on the dev branch. Relative to the previous main/master version (3.0.229) there’s a lot to cover. That’s what I’ll be working on this coming week, writing a new blog post outlining all that’s new and all that’s changed. Like with most ProcessWire versions, it should be an easy upgrade, swapping out the old /wire/ directory for the new one. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more details next week!

The plan was to merge dev to the main branch today, but I’m still working through a couple of GitHub issues that I’d like to resolve or finish the conversation before finalizing the 3.0.244 main version. One example is this issue report where it was pointed out that there are some issues with UTF-8 page names. ProcessWire uses PHP’s IDN functions to manage conversion to and from the non UTF-8 version of the URL. PHP 7.4 changed the default arguments of the idn_* functions to settings that made them not work 100% for page names in a few cases, which I didn’t realize before this week. But this is not an issue that I can just fix and be done with it… There may already be page names in any given installation that are affected by the post PHP 7.4 behavior. If I were to just fix the issue, then some affected pages might no longer match when accessed directly by URL. So this had to be a carefully considered fix. What I ended up doing is fix it for any new PW installations that occur after this weekend. PW keeps track of its installation date, so can do this by way of its $config->installedAfter(“2025-01-05”) function. Existing installations will keep the imperfect behavior. Presumably it doesn’t affect that many installations since it only came to light last week and PHP 7.4 was released roughly 5 years ago. Nevertheless, existing installations that want the “fixed” behavior can get it by specifying this in /site/config.php: $config->pageNameWhitelist = 'v3' . $config->pageNameWhitelist; That essentially says to use version 3 of the page name conversion. Version 2 will also work fine, but may be slightly slower since it uses a dedicated Punycode library. And version 1 is the one that worked correctly until PHP 7.4, and still works mosts most of the time, but can produce imperfect results in some cases. Installations prior to 5 Jan 2025 use v1 by default and installations after 5 Jan 2025 use v3 by default. Chances are few (if any) will want to specify the version manually like above, but the option is there, just in case. That’s one example of why I’m waiting another few days before the dev branch merge to main. Another is that Adrian mentioned double-clicking on the “Move to Trash” button [in the page editor] makes it permanently delete the page rather than trash it. While I can’t duplicate that, despite multiple attempts, I just want to make sure there’s not something that needs fixing there. But unless any major new issues turn up, by this time next week we’ll merge to main and bump the version to 3.0.244. Thanks and Happy New Year!

@artfulrobot I'm not really sure why it breaks the ability to type, it might be something with my JS that needs adjustment. But placing the icon before the label may still be an issue, so maybe an option to place it after would help for those cases. I also like what you mentioned about select and unselected optgroups, and am going to add this option. We'll lose the ability to use optgroups for their original purpose, but that seems like an acceptable tradeoff if that option is enabled. I might also add an option for separate selected and unselected selects (2 side-by-side selects), which would leave the original optgroup ability. The biggest issue I get when dealing with anything select related is how to keep it functional in iOS, since iOS Safari seems to be pretty inconsistent in how it recognizes changes to options are runtime. Android/Chrome seems to work more consistently.

@MarkE I don't think I've got any control over what text Softaculous uses, but I'll try to see if I can get them to change it. @bernhard Great, thanks for pointing me to it. I'll follow the thread and also pass along to the people working on it.

This week the dev branch version has been bumped up to 3.0.243. Relative to the previous, this has 30 commits, including a lot of minor issue fixes. The plan is to release the next main/master version of ProcessWire on or before New Years day. We’re down to very few new issues being reported, and even fewer resulting in code changes on the dev branch, which is a good sign the new version is ready, or very close to it. This week while working on a site I realized that the $config->maxUrlSegments setting was not working, and I don’t think it has since the PagesRequest and PagePathFinder classes were introduced into the core. So I fixed that, while also updating some of the logic around it, and adding a new $config->longUrlResponse setting that lets you specify how it should respond when it gets too many URL segments, too long of a URL, too much path depth, etc. Next week I’ll be working on updating materials related to the new version (README file, etc.) and keeping an eye out for any newly other reported issues. Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays!

There have been a few small bug fixes made to the core this week on the dev branch. I think we’re really close on the new version and hope to have that ready around the upcoming holidays. The module I mentioned last week (InputfieldSmallSelectMultiple) also got a new version this week with support for optgroups, support for “1 of 3 selected” type labels (Adrian’s suggestion) and a couple small fixes. Some fun news: The ProcessWire site is currently going through a redesign. This time there are a couple of professional designers and long time ProcessWire users collaborating on the design. I won’t mention who’s working on this just yet, as I’ve not asked them if I could, so want to respect their privacy. But I’ve been able to see some of the work in progress, and it’s really fantastic, a major upgrade for the look of the site. Along with this will be some visual improvements to the admin theme as well, which will accompany or come after the site redesign. There’s no launch date for the site redesign just yet, I wanted to let you know it was in progress and looking great, something to look forward to for sure. Thanks and have a great weekend!

@adrian Good idea, I will add that option.

This week I got wrapped up in unexpected client work, but it did lead to development of a new Inputfield module, which I think I’ll be using a lot, and hoping some others might find it useful too. It’s called Small Select Multiple, and the purpose of it is to provide a multi-selection input that is as simple as a single-selection input, and that didn't introduce new UI elements, sticking just to native browser controls. It came about because a client has a large front-end form that has a lot of multi-selection inputs, which we handled with checkboxes. It started to become too much for users, so we tried changing to AsmSelect. That helped a lot, but it still became overwhelming once a lot of options were selected. We needed something that looked simple from the start, and stayed simple even after a lot of selections had been made. The Small Select Multiple input seems to do the trick. You can use this input type with Options fields or Page fields, or anywhere else you might us ProcessWire’s SelectMultiple, Checkboxes, or AsmSelect input types. Like the other Inputfield types, it’s not always going to be the right fit, and has it’s own unique set of benefits and drawbacks, but for the times where it suits the need, I hope you find it useful. Rather than writing more about it, I’ll link you to the module page for it. There’s more details and screenshots there. While you are in the modules directory, see the 3 other new modules posted this week too, they look great. Core updates coming next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

@adrian I'm okay with it, but still not really getting it. Null is directly stated as an allowed option by the presence of "= null" in (array $value = null). Or at least that's what I always thought were were doing. If we didn't allow null, we wouldn't declare it as null. I guess what the PHP error states is implicit seems explicit to me. I would think where the "?" might make more sense [to me] is if the function declaration were without a default assignment like (?array $value) as an equivalent of (array|null $value) for PHP versions prior to the union type support. That would give us a new enforced limit that we couldn't easily enforce before, at least for PHP versions 7.1 to 8.3. Is there something that "?" adds that "= null" doesn't already? Some new ability or enforced limitation that we couldn't easily achieve without it? Even after reading all I can about it, I can't seem to identify what it is. My best guess is it comes from a desire to change the meaning of the language construct to only "optional argument" out of someone's idea of how things should be, maybe influence from another language. Kiwi mentioned C# above, maybe that's where it comes from. I much prefer that as well. Though the "|null" still seems redundant here, but cleaner and with less head scratching, no complaints. It's too bad they didn't just go directly to this in PHP 7.1 as "?" seems like a kludge.