Jonathan Lahijani

As of about 5 years ago, I strongly prefer to use DigitalOcean to host my ProcessWire websites. By that, I mean I usually start with a clean Ubuntu droplet (not their pre-configured LAMP droplet) and then build the LAMP stack manually by running installing and configuring the necessary software. I can get a server going in about 5-10 minutes doing it "by hand" (i.e., not running an automated setup script). With this approach, I get a server that runs what I want without any bloat (bloat being Cpanel and all the beginner / GUI type-stuff you get with a typical host provider). I am comfortable with command line (not an expert by any means) but know how to figure out issues as they arise, such as installing any necessary or missing Apache modules and edge-case things like that. I don't consider myself a hosting expert either by any means, so in the back of my mind I often wonder if I have any glaring holes in my setup. For example, is using the default port of 22 really that bad if there's already login throttling? So far, I've never had an issue and I believe the defaults these days cover you pretty well. Ubuntu by default automatically installs updates and reminds you to reboot the server when necessary. Is Ubuntu LTS a "bad" distro to use for web servers for any reason compared to others? With that being said, I wanted to get some thoughts here from those who host themselves and any thoughts on DIY servers. Also, Apache, MySQL and PHP all have alternatives: Apache --> Nginx/Caddy MySQL --> MariaDB PHP --> HHVM (is this still a thing?) My belief when it comes to these alternatives is that while they might be "superior" and might provide some benefit, it seems the default software (Apache/MySQL/PHP) eventually catch up to the point where the alternative doesn't really make much of a difference, or at least in my use cases it won't. I prefer to stick with the defaults because it just works and ProcessWire is specifically tested with this stack. -- I guess this is a way of me saying that web tech changes quite rapidly, but playing this catch-up game of using the new, hot thing or getting anxiety because I feel like I'm not keeping up with it --VERSUS-- the reality (in my case) of it totally not making a difference when it comes to the bottom line has made me feel that the default / out-of-the-box way is totally fine. -- Note: I might consider using this in the future for automated LAMP setup: https://github.com/teddysun/lamp

Sustainable web design... Perhaps it will become a movement.

JIT for Tailwind was just announced. It's looks really great. I'm still on the sidelines with Tailwind, but I do see myself using it in the near future. @kongondo when HeadlessUI has components in Alpine that are fully fleshed out, that's when I think I'll make the switch. While the Creative Tim components look good, I'd rather wait for something that's from the Tailwind creators and more comprehensive.

I have a couple sites where the forms are using Google Recaptcha v2, however some automated form spam is still occurring. I know the latest version of Recaptcha is v3 which is supposed to be more effective, but is anyone here using Recaptcha v2 getting spam as well?

I like the idea of editing in a modal (full screen to where it almost feels like its own page), or perhaps a dedicated edit page outside of PW's page editor. I think having it inline as shown in the screenshot looks bad, not to mention the lack of page width. If going the modal route, the "esc" key should not close the modal, but maybe a close button that the user has to click. Also, I would imagine the icons are copyright YOOtheme, but this library is available for commercial use for free and a quick look seems to show they have similar icons: https://github.com/vaadin/vaadin-icons

WOW! This is incredible! I think this idea really has legs and you've proven it can be done in a ProcessWire way. I would like to contribute in any way I can... ideas, styling, testing, financial. I would 100% use this on multiple projects if it could be developed further. I hope you are able to see this project through as well as Padloper. Please let me know how I can help.

I bought a generic sounding ".run" domain name and have my client sites as subdomains of it. .run sounds very developer-y.

What @szabesz said is what I'm thinking as well. There is an ick-factor among developers and page building tools because it crosses the line of keeping content separate from the structural display of that content, but it's incredibly useful for landing page type pages and the marketing people who often manage them. @ryan What approach did you take in building the ProcessWire.com Home page? Entirely hardcoded? Matrix for each main section (overkill since that hero is only used once)? If I wanted to add more text beneath the two buttons in the hero, how would I do it?

Can you elaborate on what you mean by more semantic oriented?

They are not synonyms and their loose definitions are sure to cause confusion. Here are my definitions: Site Builder (aka Full Site Editing / FSE): a no-code type tool that allows you to create a website, including global portions like header and footer. Good for basic websites and non-technical people. See brizy.cloud as an example. Layout Tool: something that allows you to create a section/container/grid/cell structure for a specific page in a visual, no-code way. Components: simple things like Headline, Text, Image to complex things like Table, Definition List, Video, Slideshow, Slider (ie, things that are basically repeating content). YOOtheme Pro: a mega-theme that turns a WordPress website into a Site Builder. YOOtheme Pro's Page Builder: it's the part of YOOtheme Pro that you encounter to build a page in WordPress, as shown in the video. It's a combination of what I'm calling Layout Tool + Components.

"Is there demand for that?" -- I would say this is a resounding yes. There are dozens of page builders out there, and many tied to WordPress: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/wordpress-page-builder Block Editor (Gutenberg) is more of an advanced version of TinyMCE/CKEditor, but it's quickly becoming more of a "page builder" in the next year or two.

Hotwire is an alternative approach to building an SPA without having to do the whole API-first approach, whereby a frontend in React would consume some JSON API. Instead you just build a site the classic, server rendered way, sprinkle in Hotwire, and it makes it work like an SPA. Behind the scenes, it's working with actual HTML instead of JSON, which is the key difference. It was born out of Hey.com, the new email service from the creators of Basecamp. I strongly recommend listening to this podcast episode with DHH. He and Adam Wathan (creator of Tailwind) get deep into it: https://fullstackradio.com/151 As they say in the episode, it fits my mental model. I don't think ProcessWire from the admin side of things needs to be an SPA. However Hotwire could be used on the frontend if a developer decided.

I often develop ProcessWire websites for large companies and organizations, where there are 20+ employees. In these scenarios, my point of contact is almost always someone with a marketing or managerial role. Here are the actual positions I just pulled from the email signatures of my go-to contacts of several of my clients... notice the similarities: SVP Marketing Marketing & Business Development Marketing Associate Director of Marketing Director of Marketing (again) Assistant Marketing Manager Marketing & Communications Coordinator Production Artist Office Manager These marketers are the ones who manage the day-to-day content needs of the site. They are not coders, but are generally technically savvy. They like ProcessWire, or at least the way I set it up. They oftentimes need to throw a page together that's not strictly defined by a template. They need some flexibility to express themselves. While this can be done with Matrix in its current state (say you made 20 different sections that they can choose from), it requires a lot of planning beforehand and can't handle edge-cases without developer involvement.

In this video, I demonstrate YOOtheme Pro's Builder (WordPress) and talk about its approach and benefits. I then demonstrate 3 different builder concepts in ProcessWire using Repeater/RepeaterMatrix, two of which are modeled after YOOtheme Pro's builder and their limitations along with some suggestions. ( @ryan ) (note: there are many more considerations when it comes to a page builder, but if there were some sort of css-framework agnostic layout tool, that would solve the biggest page builder problem) Please share your thoughts.

The decimal fieldtype is available and works well (I use it for an ecommerce site with large numbers, no problems): However it would be nice if this was in the core: https://github.com/processwire/processwire-requests/issues/126 FieldTypeTable supports decimals by the way.