Jonathan Lahijani

There may be a time where you need to create a page reference field using the Select inputfield and it's selecting repeater pages. Let's say I have a repeater field called "order_line_items" and I want to create a page reference field called "order_line_item" that allows me to select a repeater item (which is a page) of the "order_line_items" repeater field. Repeater pages are a bit different from regular pages in that their "parent" is a container admin page associated with the page in which it exists (dig into /admin/repeaters/order_line_items/ in your page tree to see what I mean). So when you are configuring your page reference field, you can't really choose a Parent. However when configuring your field, your instinct would be to choose the Template of "repeater_order_line_items". Then because you need extra precision in what pages are actually available for selection (rather than all of them across all pages), your instinct will be to implement custom PHP code: $wire->addHookAfter('InputfieldPage::getSelectablePages', function($event) { if($event->object->hasField == 'order_line_item') { $event->return = $event->pages->find('your selector here'); } }); The problem with that approach is that even though you have defined the custom PHP code and the select field correctly shows the selectable repeater pages in the select field, behind-the-scenes, ProcessWire has still loaded EVERY SINGLE REPEATER that has the "repeater_order_line_items" template (you can see this is TracyDebugger's pages loaded list)! Your site will definitely be slower as a result, dramatically so if you have thousands or tens of thousands of repeater pages of that template. I hit this issue years ago (2018) and I thought it was a bug. I discussed it with Ryan and it's technically not a bug, but kind of the way ProcessWire works, which is beyond this tutorial. While you can circumvent this using the PageAutocomplete field, I don't like the ergonomics of that field in certain situations. I want the good-old select field. The solution to this is to NOT select anything for the "Template" when configuring your field. So in my example, I chose "repeater_order_line_items", but instead, it should be left blank. Now the field will just rely on the code portion and all the unnecessary page loads will be eliminated.

I saw it on HN last week and it caught my eye as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285876 I will be playing around with it at some point as I love the hypermedia approach of doing things (big HTMX fan). I like that it can do what they call "patch modes" (what other libraries call "islands"?). HTMX can do that too, but it's feels off with the "OOB" approach. That has always bothered me, but I think they are addressing that in HTMX v4. I've played with Alpine-Ajax and Datastar as well, but muJS seems like it best aligns with the way I think.

I spent a few hours this morning making an MCP module for ProcessWire similar to Laravel Boost. I'm going to call it Octopus. In just 2-3 hours with Opus 4.5, I'm already what feels like being done with 90% of it. I'm going to finish the remaining 90% (heh) as I work on various projects to actually test it. I will have to figure out the best way on how to provide ProcessWire documentation to the MCP (hence why I'm on this thread), but even without it, Opus 4.5 is insanely good in following ProcessWire conventions, even with little context! The hype is real. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. Screenshot attached.

@BrendonKoz The problem with that option in the screenshot is that while it ungroups the taskbar items, it keeps the "text" part of it, which I don't want because it's not necessary for me and I like to have a lot of windows open so I want to conserve horizontal space. Windows 10 used to have that option, but they removed it in Windows 11. That's why you have to use this Windhawk mod I mentioned in the readme: https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-grouping A registry setting alone won't fix it unfortunately. Come on Microsoft!

While my plan is to switch to Linux one day (probably Omarchy), I'm still putting that (and tiling window managers) off for a bit. Let it cook a little more. In Windows 11, I like my taskbar, but one nagging thing is that it's hard to differentiate the icons of many Code/Codium instances given that I don't group them. I use both programs actually: Code for actual coding and Codium as my Markdown note taking tool (I prefer to not use Obsidian and the million other markdown editors; Code/Codium for Markdown is fantastic since you get all the developer ergonomics) With the help of AI, I developed a program with dotnet that makes it easy to add custom icon overlays effectively differentiating the program instances. This saves a lot of headache of knowing which icon corresponds to which project with a quick glance. Feel free to use it! https://github.com/jlahijani/TaskbarIconOverlay

Totally valid. However to address this they added an option in 3.2.0 so that when updating, you don't get bleeding edge packages, but instead it's lagged by 1 month: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v3.2.0 So that's comforting. Similarly, I use ProcessWire bleeding edge / dev branch, but if there have been changes in a particular week that I sense as more in-depth, especially those that touch selectors and database stuff, I usually wait another week or two to avoid potential subtle issues that are difficult to catch. I'd imagine I would use the same judgement with Omarchy.

I've settled on Omarchy! I spent a couple days getting used to Hyprland and tweaking it to my needs. It's a bit of a mind shift not having a taskbar/dock anymore, but I made it nice and easy to switch workspaces very quickly and do some basic window manipulations. It's nice having a Windows VM set up as well (I need Photoshop for work since I work with printing companies; CMYK support is a must). It's time to say goodbye to Windows!

@ryan I'd be interested to hear how you work on a project with multiple developers and manage keeping each developer's development instance in-sync. For example, are you using a migrations module like RockMigrations or writing migrations in a module specific to the site that adds/updates fields/templates/pages/settings when the module is updated using a version compare? Or are you doing something completely different? I'd be interested to hear how you handle this given that ProcessWire stores much of its configuration in the database.

Let's say you have a repeater field. ProcessWire renders it in the default ProcessWire way in the page editor, which is fine, however there are times where you may want to render a particular repeater field in a more streamlined way, like a table, while maintaining the ability for the user to make changes to field values of the respective repeater items. The problem with this however if that you must be very careful because if you do not represent a field of that repeater (and represent it correctly with the correct form "name"), then ProcessWire will wipe out the data because it expects it to exist when saving!!! This includes the "native" fields for a repeater item (which are "loaded", "sort" and "publish"). THOSE MUST ALSO BE REPRESENTED! For fields in your repeater that are hidden however, they do not need to be represented, so you can ignore rendering those. You have to be very careful here because you may one day decide to add a new field to a repeater and keep it as "Open", and forget this requirement and not add it to the your custom renderer. Then if you wrote data to the field in some way, and then a user went to edit a page that contains that repeater field and they save, your data will get wiped out!

With anything new that gets designed (a website, operating system, interface), there's always that initial cringe feeling because it's no longer familiar and comfortable, but after a couple weeks, that goes away. I'm developing a new site and using the new Konkat admin theme, which at first felt totally wrong, but now it feels just right (with 1-2 CSS tweaks, like to make repeaters jump out more). My brain is very picky about adjusting to new fonts... Inter in this case. I like the font a lot, but I just need to adjust to it, get used to the curves. Same thing with new versions of Windows when they change the default font. It's kind of like when Facebook went through a few major design changes at during the 5-10 mark and everyone would complain, then everyone got used to it. Anyway, great work. It's grown on me.

Tip: In Symfony Console, if you run code and an Exception or WireException occurs, ProcessWire will not be able to log it (and also send an adminEmail). There were cases where I was calling an undefined method on a page object and not knowing about it erroring. I used AI to work through this and ultimately it said I have to basically manage this myself because Symfony Console will catch things if I don't and never hit ProcessWire. Therefore, you may want to do something like this in your handle method: public function handle() { try { nonExistentFunction(); // purposely cause an error } catch (\Throwable $e) { // log the error $this->wire()->log->save('errors', $e->getMessage()); // consider adding additional code here to send an email notification using WireMail // ... // Re-throw so it still displays in console throw $e; } return self::SUCCESS; } I wonder if there's a more efficient way to do this? It took me too long to figure out what was happening in the first place so I haven't spent time optimizing the approach (if it's even possible).

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Thinking about it further, I could probably go with a hybrid approach too. On my new Linux machine, I could set up a LAMP stack directly and run the projects that don't need the level of isolation DDEV provides (which is mostly all my projects) and only use DDEV for projects that would benefit from it (mainly this webapp I've been working on for the last couple years). The main point is that I want everything on one powerful development machine. My old Dell workstation is showing its age when running that webapp, although in production is pretty fast. Thanks for the insights and suggestions!

Oftentimes it's 3-5 projects at a time, with other projects being dormant or semi-dormant for a while. However there are times when I want to apply some setting across all of my sites, even the dormant ones. For example, a few years ago I decided to use SessionHandlerDB instead of the default, file-based session approach. I did this manually across all 50 sites (I suppose I could have scripted this). No need to boot up each development site with my current approach since it's all on a single LAMP server. But with Docker/DDEV, I'll have to spin up DDEV for each project then make the change, then shut it down. A little extra friction, but thinking about it as I write this, I don't think it's as bad as it sounds and I can probably automate it to some extent. How do you personally handle situations like that? If I get a Framework Desktop, I would get it with 128GB memory. It's very powerful.