Jonathan Lahijani

Looks neat and has JS components which is promising, but needs more variables as the document states and more JS components (no tabs, no accordion, etc.). I'll be following this. UIkit is tough to beat however.

ProcessWire's database structure is unusual when first looking at it... Alien in fact. I had a similar reaction in the beginning. But then as you use the system, especially if coming from other content management systems, you'll see that it's very well thought out, flexible and performant. If you compare it to WordPress which has a more traditional structure combined with the post meta table, you'll see where WordPress' approach breaks down. Menus in WP get shoved into the post and post meta table in a really hacky way... Not good. Woocommerce from what I understand now uses their own table structures as opposed to the default WP ones. Slow Woocommerce sites were a big problem. Regardless of the system, editing data directly in MySQL is a bad idea. If I had a potential client that insisted on this, it would be a huge red flag. If they want to get hands on and edit data programmatically, I'd recommend learning the basics of manipulating pages via the API which may satisfy their need.

I could give you a hand as to how the script works and overall execution, but I can't provide the script. It's honestly nothing complex though... it just grabs the feed and does the processing the site needs to get the data into the site as pages (or deletes old listing pages based on other criteria). Given your experience with ProcessWire, it's nothing too out of the ordinary.

The site hasn't been on ProcessWire for some time, but payment processing was all done "offline". The advertising packages were just pages that had associated prices. I believe I have a page structure called "Advertising Subscriptions" that had a single-select user field, a single-select advertising package field, and a start and end date. This is the PW equivalent of join table (is that the right word?).

An example of how I'm using this in my super module would be like this... My module has different sections (repeatermatrix), and each of those sections contain different blocks like gallery, body copy, etc (typical page-builder stuff). Section A has "body copy" + "gallery" Section B has "headline" + "gallery" A big part of my super module is programmatic control for developers (at the expense of 100% flexibility like with page layout builders... Elementor, Gutenberg, YooTheme Pro). Therefore, a developer would be able to "hook" into any sections that were applied to a page via regions. The gallery block would be peppered with different region IDs like this: <div pw-id="block-gallery" pw-id="section-a-block-gallery">...</div> This essentially provides a developer the ability to run region actions on galleries on the site, --or-- all galleries that were within the context of Section A.

With markup regions, you can assign an HTML-based ID (which gets rendered in final output) or PW's specific 'pw-id' attribute (which does not get rendered in final output) to your tag. For example: <div pw-id='foo'>...</div> Tip #1: Markup Regions do NOT need to be unique! In HTML, IDs should be unique to the page (otherwise it's considered invalid html). However when defining markup regions in PW using the above region method, it does NOT actually have to be unique. The cool part about this is if you apply actions to regions (append/prepend/replace/etc) with that pw-id, it will apply the action to all of them. This is incredibly good. Tip #2: You can assign multiple regions to a tag and run actions on any of of them! I just discovered that you can assign multiple IDs to a region like this: <div pw-id='foo' pw-id='bar'>...</div> If you run an action on the first, the second, or both, it will work! This is also incredibly neat and opens up a lot of possibilities. None of this is mentioned in the documentation on Markup Regions: https://processwire.com/docs/front-end/output/markup-regions/ Enjoy.

What are the general thoughts around a module that creates its own fields, templates and/or pages that the module depends on? For example, let's say an ecommerce module is developed and it needs a coupon feature like other ecommerce systems (each coupon has a code, fixed vs. percent discount, products it applies to, etc.). Is it more 'proper' for the module to create the necessary fields/templates/pages in the page tree, or is this something that should be done in a module config? Where is the line drawn? SnipWire for instance stores its tax settings in module config and it looks like some non-trivial work went into getting that to work nicely, when the fields/templates/pages approach could have been used. With the fields/templates/pages approach, I feel you have a lot of flexibility and it's nice to be able to query the data with $pages. But on the flip-side, you then have to potentially inundate a ProcessWire setup with your own set of fields/templates/pages and conflicts can occur (although this can be worked around which I have successfully done). Then there's the scenario of what you do if the module were to be uninstalled: do you removed the custom fields/templates/pages that the module relies on or should the user do that manually? (or should there be a separate uninstallation / cleanup module?)

Check this out: https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.137/#on-demand-mirroring-of-remote-web-server-files-to-your-dev-environment

Looks great! Cool background on the modals as well. I love seeing PW sites with a vast amount of nested pages with relationships between them as it really shows the power of the system. I cringe when in WordPress land people say "I need a catalog, not an ecommerce site, so let me bring in Woocommerce for that." 🤦‍♂️ Total overkill and loss of flexibility. ProcessWire's got that handled as this site demonstrates, and Snipcart finishes it off. It seems like is this was on a different ecommerce platform previously? If so, what lead to it being re-developed? Any other background you can share?

In terms of making the core smaller, can the old admin system (ie, the contents of /wire/templates-admin/ I believe it is) be done away with? The admin that looks like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eq-9GQCT0lw/maxresdefault.jpg

In PW's htaccess file, you can have a custom 404 page like this: # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # 2. ErrorDocument settings: Have ProcessWire handle 404s # # For options and optimizations (O) see: # https://processwire.com/blog/posts/optimizing-404s-in-processwire/ # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #ErrorDocument 404 /index.php ErrorDocument 404 /my-404-page.html It doesn't seem to be working... meaning it still brings up PW's 404 page rather than that static file. I disabled ProCache and its htaccess settings, Jumplinks, Page Path History, etc. and no luck. I tried on both my dev and live server and no luck either. The .htaccess version is the latest one (3.0.1). I'm using Apache 2.4.x. Can anyone replicate this issue? edit: I also tried it on another separate site/installation and same issue.

With respect, it's replies like these when people post their sites in the showcase that somewhat annoy me and I think would either be better handled through a private message or just left alone. With a site as complex as the one Ryan posted, how could you possibly know what's best? Sites like these take thousands of hours and go through many iterations. There's a lot of group-think with any "best practice" but in my belief and experience, especially with ecommerce sites, visitors usually don't care. Here's 2 examples: A friend of mine started a Shopify website, which is probably the biggest Shopify website in the world (not an exaggeration). For the first 3 years, his website was nothing "special" and could probably be designed by anyone here in their sleep. A basic logo, simple lines, decent pictures of products. Knee-jerk snarky-developer reaction would be "omg, your website sucks lol bye". But, customers don't care. They want a good deal and he provided that and had great timing. Needless to say, he's probably a billionaire at this point. With one of my own ecommerce websites, I'm not using whatever the latest cutting edge web development practices are (React / all that JS stuff / AJAX everywhere / crazy system infrastructure / etc.). Customers don't care (customers in this case being Fortune 100 companies, even Fortune 1 companies... 😉 ). They are looking for something specific and will find what they need. Snarky developer reaction: lol bro you should be using technology 'x', a read about it in a blog this week. Do the end customers care? No, they are people looking to buy a product on our website, not judging the behind-the-scenes code. It's easy to fall into this trap of taking whatever latest article you read and thinking you must apply it or you are falling behind / going to lose customers / are a bad developer / whatever. I went through years of this until the above to examples opened my eyes a lot. I would recommend focusing on your customers and what's working for you... not what trends are.

@jonatan I appreciate your excitement. As I may have mentioned before, the biggest feature of this module is around making a good page building experience for non-technical people and making it easy to setup as a developer. "Page builders" in my opinion lie on a spectrum: On the right end you have things like Webflow which is 100% visual and infinitely flexible (let's put aside the fact that it's also a CMS and remotely hosted). It's an amazing tool, even though I don't use it because it's not how I develop. It's a great system, but requires design skill and you have to make sure you are consistent across the board, stick to a style guide, etc. On the left end you have what I will call section builders. Perfect examples include RepeaterMatrix and ACF Flexible Content field for WordPress. I made a video comparing the two in my WP vs. PW series. This approach was probably the go-to approach from... 2010 to 2015? It's much less "flexible" in that at it's simplest form, a section like "image left, text right" will always be as such and unless there are other sections to choose from, you are stuck with it. In the middle-right you have things like Gutenberg, Elementor, Brizy, etc. This is where most of the development action is, thanks to reactive JS frameworks (same with Webflow). In the middle-left there are tools like N1ED, Froala Blocks and others. The way I see it, ProcessWire is a tool geared for developers, and developers can customize it perfectly for their clients. A big part of this is a good page building experience and (a) after having built dozens of websites with RepeaterMatrix and (b) experimenting with different approaches and (c) trying to respect ProcessWire's way of doing things, I have concluded that the section builder / repeater matrix approach is the way to go. It just needs to be improved a bit. (also, I'm lazy and would never be able to program a visual page builder like the fancy ones out there because my JS skills are embarrassing) First, why do I say it's the way to go? Because it's regular ProcessWire, you can do multi-lingual, while not a big deal for me, PW seems to be a favorite for multi-lingual websites. So that's important. Because they are normal template files, a matrix-type that has been used multiple times can easily be modified by editing the template file (requires the developer obviously). Because it's regular ProcessWire, you can SWITCH from one matrix-type to another and retain your data. This is pretty important. Because they are normal template files, you can technically load them directly on other pages that don't even utilize repeater matrix and just inject your own content. YOU CAN DO DYNAMIC CONTENT!!! Well other page builders are doing this more and more, but with ProcessWire, you can do it much better (I'll elaborate on this another day and how my module will do it). I just don't trust non-technical people to create a good looking page from a bunch of sections by dragging and dropping and having too much flexibility. Fonts being mis-matched, colors all over the place, responsive thrown off. This is why I don't like page builders like Gutenberg, Elementor and the like. They look very sexy in the beginning and might be OK for people with web page creation experience, but it gives too much flexibility and web pages are complicated when you consider responsive design, image sizes, etc. I can use my CSS framework of choice (UIkit of course) instead of whatever internal CSS framework each of those builders relies on. So, what problems do section builders currently have (like RepeaterMatrix)? You cannot "preview" a section in a slick way before you add it. Sure, the matrix-type might be named "text left, image right" among a sea of 20+ other matrix types, but this won't stand out, especially in that smashed together list of matrix-types that you get with RepeaterMatrix. Non-technical people are VISUAL, so getting a preview of what they are about to insert goes a long way. My module has solved that problem as I posted in that above video (it's changed a bit from that video in a much better way). You don't page the benefit of instant feedback of what a section (and overall page) looks like as you populate the content. Again, this goes back to the visual nature of people and the soaring popularity of page builders like the ones I mentioned. Given ProcessWire's strict separation between frontend and backend this also gets complicated because ProcessWire's philosophy is about keeping the two separate. However, the true way around this is to use something like ProDraft's Live Preview feature. At this moment in time, it doesn't autosave + live preview changes to repeater/repeatermatrix items, but I've asked Ryan if he could add this (post is here; not viewable if you haven't purchased ProDrafts). He said it's possible and hopefully one day it will be there. When it does get developed, this in my opinion solves the visual feedback aspect of section builders. As a developer, it's annoying to have to continually re-setup repeater matrix for every site. It's not easy to share the template files across various sites which would be ideal. Also, you have to code your own matrix templates and add all the fields accordingly. As a content editor, you want flexibility in the types of layouts... what if you want your "text left, image right" instead of "image right, text left"? Because you can't physically drag-and-drop those elements, then we are forced in having more section templates that address the most common cases. Therefore my module solves this problem by providing 200+ section templates out of the box (and growing). It also provides an alternative (more visual) interface by which you can register those templates into the repeatermatrix section builder fields all from the admin (none are registered in a fresh installation... you choose what you want, so this avoid bloat). And it feels very to the ProcessWire admin interface (a pet-peeve of mine are plugins in WordPress that have their own garrish, bloaty graphics... example: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/). The important point here is this: content editors / non-technical people / whatever you want to call them therefore no longer have to worry about dragging-and-dropping layouts, potentially messing things up. My belief is if you provide them with a good set of options, they will find what they need, choose the matrix type and then just focus on the content. ProcessWire's backend is all about having a good content entry experience and the ideas I've played around with have evolved around that concept. We want non-technical people to focus on their content and we as developers should not have to worry if they uploaded a 20mb image, because the matrix template will take care of that. Give me a couple weeks and I'll make a video.

I'm trying to intercept a 404 error page and have it render another page based on some general logic: The following is in /site/init.php: $this->addHookBefore('ProcessPageView::pageNotFound', function($event) { $url = $event->arguments('url'); // ensure trailing slashes if($url[-1] !== "/") $this->session->redirect(substr(wire("config")->urls->root, 0, -1).$url."/"); $p = wire('pages')->get("/sites/".wire('config')->site.$url); if($p->id) { $event->replace = true; $event->return = $p->render(); } else { $event->replace = false; } }); Given my setup, $p->render() will cause an error related to it not finding a custom function I have defined in my /site/templates/_init.php: Call to undefined function myWeirdFunction() How do I properly render the file and make sure the chain of included files is correct? This is always a little confusing to me.

My module is going through quite a bit of evolution, almost on a daily basis, as I build more sites with it. It will probably be ready sometime this summer, including documentation and a website. It's quite complex, but very thorough. I've built about 10 sites with it so far, with each site providing various insights and feature ideas that make it into the module.