Symprowire - PHP MVC Framework for ProcessWire 3.x // w.i.p

[LuisM]

Update - 24.12.2021

After long days of reconsideration and experimenting I will deprecate the current state of Symprowire. 

I decided to get rid of my trys to integrate the whole Symfony experience as it grew pretty large pretty fast.

Whats left you may ask?

Well, the project is not dead. I am currently refactoring the whole setup to just use SymfonyHttpFoundation and Twig. I have a working proof right now, but have to polish some things first.

The whole setup will come as a simple composer package to get called via a controller.php template file. Much like WireFrame. As you can see in the picture we will use the normal ProcessWire Workflow and just use the normal PageRender process.

You as a Developer will get in control if to use the Setup for a particular Template or not. Looking forward to publish the proof. 

Cheers, 

Luis

 

Debug Dump WIP 25.12.2021

Symprowire is a PHP MVC Framework based and built on Symfony using ProcessWire 3.x as DBAL and Service-Provider

It acts as a Drop-In Replacement Module to handle the Request/Response outside the ProcessWire Admin. Even tough Symfony or any other mature MVC Framework could be intimidating at first, Symprowire tries to abstract Configuration and Symfony Internals away as much as possible to give you a quick start and lift the heavy work for you.

The main Goal is to give an easy path to follow an MVC Approach during development with ProcessWire and open up the available eco-system.

You can find the GitHub Repo and more Information here: https://github.com/Luis85/symprowire

 

[netcarver]

@LuisM Thank you for taking the time to look at this, try it out and post about it. Nice to see a techno-fusion. Reminds me a little of @hettiger's Larawire project too.

[LuisM]

@netcarver oh wow thanks for the Larawire mention. Didnt knew there where similar attempts but with Laravel.

Anyways, I have a slow day in the office and wanted to clean up a bit. So meet PoC v.0.1.0. I completly encapsulated Symfony now to dont mess with ProcessWires file/directory structure and keep things clean. 
I think, this should be a good base to develop this thing further. Am happy ?

[LuisM]

I just finished to clean up the repo and pushed Symprowire as stand-alone module to GIT. 

I marked the commit as RC-1 

The Framework should work right now like every other Symfony App handling wise, with the exception of twig templates bound to the processwire directory structure.
Next would be to integrate ProcessWire Services like logger, input et all as Symfony Services and autowire them into the Controller.

Stay tuned, oh and feel free to comment ?

[LuisM]

Release RC1 v0.2.0 -> https://github.com/Luis85/symprowire/releases/tag/v0.2.0-rc-1

• added Session Handshake to integrate PW Session into Symfony
• added $page, $pages, $input, $session, $modules, $users as member to AbstractController 
• added Symprowire autowire Services outside of userland into /lib/src and added own Namespace for the lib
• added Repositories (Pages, Modules, User) to the lib
• added UserRepository to HomeController::index() as Dependency Injection for Demonstration / as Example

[netcarver]

Looking forward to testing this if I ever get the time, @LuisM I've not used Symfony for a long time though.

[LuisM]

Looking forward to your experience @netcarver ?

What I actually dont like at all right now is how I hand over the Request handling.

My idea is, to use ProcessWire as a DBAL and load Pages via a Repository to centralize modification, loading of PageData and use the Admin to create a Structure, Content and handle Templates and let Symprowire use Entities as simple DTO to reflect ProcessWire Templates.

I think this will open up a clear Migrations path later on and will make Form creation easy with the symfony/forms component.

Right now I add a replace hook on TemplateFile render() and the used frontcontroller template will allow UrlSegments to be set.

I must admit, Routing is not something I have invested much tought into yet. Maybe you guys have some ideas what could work best here 

@teppo

@bernhard

@netcarver

[bernhard]

I've never used symfony (only the CLI component) so I have to admit that I don't understand what you are doing here, sorry ? 

[LuisM]

26 minutes ago, bernhard said:

I've never used symfony (only the CLI component) so I have to admit that I don't understand what you are doing here, sorry ? 

Oh hahaha, my question is more about, what would be the best method/hook to intercept ProcessWire rendering or routing to replace the Response completly.

[LuisM]

Release v0.3.0-rc1

- added Webpack Encore Support
- removed Symprowire Autload condition. Symprowire is now configured to server every request except admin
- implemented recommended template structure into lib/twig 
- added more context and information to the HomeController
- added $user and $session as Global Twig Variable // both as ProcessWire Objects
- implemented example Webpack Encore Application using stimulus.js served by lib/twig

[LuisM]

Working Full-Time on the Module for this week after getting it running its just good old Symfony Development to make the Glue hold tight on ProcessWire. 
I plan to build a Blog with Symprowire next to see if everything works as expected. 

I added a small Project over at Github to keep you informed. Will continue to post release notes. For now, I edited the 1st Post as this would be my Base to develop the Blog.

[teppo]

On 7/13/2021 at 4:23 PM, LuisM said:

Right now I add a replace hook on TemplateFile render() and the used frontcontroller template will allow UrlSegments to be set.

I must admit, Routing is not something I have invested much tought into yet. Maybe you guys have some ideas what could work best here 

I can't say that I have a strong opinion here either. Also not sure if I grasp the whole context — when you say "routing" and mention URL segments, does that mean that you create routes automatically based on page structure (I assume so but...) or that there's a separate routing setup for front-end and page structure is only reflected in the data? Or do you mean something different with this? ?

This may or may not be related, but one thing to consider is whether you want Symprowire to be "all in", or rather something that can be used only for some parts of the site. Couple of examples from other MVC(ish) solutions:

• Template Engine Factory hooks before Page::render and replaces the response, but also provides hookable method (TemplateEngineFactory::shouldRenderPage) for preventing it from rendering the page, in which case the site will fall back to the regular rendering flow (whatever that happens to be).
• Wireframe takes an entirely different approach: instead of a hook ("enabled by default") you need to point templates that you want to render via it to the front controller file via Alternate Template Filename setting (more details in the docs). Essentially it's disabled by default.

Wireframe is my pet project and something we've used for our production sites for a while now, so that's what I'm mostly familiar with. I intentionally decided not to use hooks, since I felt it was best to let the developer decide if they want to use Wireframe for everything, just a small part of the site, or something in between. In fact it's possible to skip the MVC structure entirely, and just use Wireframe for its partials and/or components ?‍♂️

Template Engine Factory may be a bit closer to Symprowire feature wise, although Symprowire clearly has a much larger scope (and is more opinionated). So not sure if any of what I've said here applies as-is ?

[LuisM]

Thank you Teppo for that detailed answer. Really appriciate it. 

1 hour ago, teppo said:

I can't say that I have a strong opinion here either. Also not sure if I grasp the whole context — when you say "routing" and mention URL segments, does that mean that you create routes automatically based on page structure (I assume so but...) or that there's a separate routing setup for front-end and page structure is only reflected in the data? Or do you mean something different with this? ?

My first take was similiar to Wireframe. Adding a Template as alternate Template file and replace the render accordingly. But it didnt felt quite right, taking the tools Symfony provides into consideration. I now let Symprowire act as a drop-in solution to replace ProcessWire rendering completly. 

What this basically means is, ProcessWire will no longer be in charge about anything URL or rendering related. 
As of now Symprowire will intercept the Request and manage routing decoupled from ProcessWire. So ProcessWire will step back and act as a Data/Service Provider for Symprowire.

What I actually did here is separating into more or less 3 layers. 

• ProcessWire as Data and Server Provider 
• Symprowire as Businesslogic Backend MVC style powered by a Symfony Architecture
• a separated Frontendlayer served by Twig Templates

ProcessWire Admin will be used as Data Editor / Content Management System and Symprowire will consume this data and do stuff with it before handing over to Twig.this

1 hour ago, teppo said:

... or that there's a separate routing setup for front-end and page structure is only reflected in the data ...

This would describe it best I guess.

 

1 hour ago, teppo said:

Wireframe is my pet project and something we've used for our production sites for a while now, so that's what I'm mostly familiar with.

I actually use Wireframe as Output Framework in the Project im working on ?

Quote

 I intentionally decided not to use hooks, since I felt it was best to let the developer decide if they want to use Wireframe for everything, just a small part of the site, or something in between. In fact it's possible to skip the MVC structure entirely, and just use Wireframe for its partials and/or components ?‍♂️

I am still not sure if this should be a possibility or an option in Symprowire. Its tempting to let the Developer decide, but on the other hand I mainly create Symprowire to give a somewhat strict structure and to have Phpunit tests in the not so far future. Which would be hard to integrate if just parts could be tested. Decisions decision decision... ? 

 Another reason I am into this is the clear and concise way Symfony handles the Request/Response, it just makes so much sense for me to combine this both worlds. Take the very very strong parts CMS/CMF wise from ProcessWire and combine it with Symfony. I dunno ? just feels to be like this 

 

1 hour ago, teppo said:

Template Engine Factory may be a bit closer to Symprowire feature wise, although Symprowire clearly has a much larger scope (and is more opinionated). So not sure if any of what I've said here applies as-is ?

Dont worry, I knew you would give great insights the moment I tagged you ? 
Have to dig into TemplateEngineFacotry code now ?

 

 

[LuisM]

Bump up to v0.5.0 

I added a tutorial for a simple Symprowire Blog Application.
You can find the tutorial here: https://github.com/Luis85/symprowire/wiki/Symprowire-Blog-Tutorial

To keep up with development and organize the project I added a GitHub Project and corresponding Issue Management. You can find it here: https://github.com/Luis85/symprowire/projects/1

[LuisM]

Bump up to v0.6.0

Breaking Changes

• renamed AbstractRepository to AbstractPagesRepository
• added new ProcessWireService / ProcessWireServiceInterface as wrapper to access ProcessWire in a centralized way and to reduce wire() function calls.
• replaced all wire() function calls with using ProcessWireService

[MrSnoozles]

@LuisM This is really sweet. ProcessWire is awesome but for bigger projects, that go beyond a simple website, managing business logic and templates can get messy really quickly. I really like your attempt on integration with Symfony. I thought about a couple experiments to "professionalize" ProcessWire development too, e.g.

• having the PW core and PW admin be independent packages
• being able to load these packages through composer
• having proper namespacing with autoloading
• being able to use bundles for easier separation of business logic
• going headless first (PW is so close to being there although not focusing on it at all)

 

One question: How would you manage to stay compatible with future PW version? Would that be possible without additional work in the future?

[LuisM]

@MrSnoozles thanks for your kind words.

Yeah my main intent is to handle ProcessWire in a sane way with current "best-practices" in PHP Userland.

Which includes things like

• Composer all the way
• Dependency Injection 
• Migrations!!!
• Separation of concerns (hello Twig for example)
• proper Headless Content distribution

On 9/28/2021 at 3:53 PM, MrSnoozles said:

• having the PW core and PW admin be independent packages
• being able to load these packages through composer
• having proper namespacing with autoloading
• being able to use bundles for easier separation of business logic
• going headless first (PW is so close to being there although not focusing on it at all)

Nice, I had the exact same thoughts so far ?

I really like ProcessWire and it is my first go to whenever I need a MVP or an Prototype. But in the long run, or whenever I have more than 1 Developer working on the code the nightmare begins, atleast for me.

On 9/28/2021 at 3:53 PM, MrSnoozles said:

One question: How would you manage to stay compatible with future PW version? Would that be possible without additional work in the future?

I really dont know ?

The main problem is the way ProcessWire is organized, as it was never intended to be used as Dependency in another Project. So yeah, right now, whenever @ryan is in production mode and pushes new Versions I have to manually update the codebase. 

The thing is, I started to develop Symprowire because I had a Prototype in ProcessWire which acted as a Proof of Concept for some client presentations. To develop the concept and bring it to production ProcessWire just wasnt enough, I learned it the hard way ? *cough* migrations *cough cough*

So in the course of 1 1/2 year I ported the PoC to Laravel with the intent to use Laravel Spark as our Product is a SaaS with fully fledged Multi-tenancy. Unfortunatly Laravel Spark wasnt that good of a solution back in the days as it was too opinionated and the general direction Laravel as a Framework is developed... mhhh I would say is not my cup of tea. 

So I started to port over to Symfony as we worked with Symfony some years ago to develop a Marketplace supporting 72 Languages and had ~ 350 active sellers from the beginning. I would say it was a fairly big project and I felt confident to work with the Framework, but I missed ProcessWire's CMS/CMF possibilites which ultimatly brings us to Symprowire.

As of today, we ditched ProcessWire completly from our Product and went full ham with Symfony as we are using

• symfony/notifier for async notifications 
• symfony/messenger for RabbitMQ 
• api platform for our headless needs
• and all the bits and pieces symfony brings

To give you an idea, I just published a basic Fullstack Template covering all our needs. You can find it here: https://github.com/Luis85/symfony-full-skeleton

Right now, I really dont know how to develop Symprowire or in which direction I would like to go with the Project. 
I have a lot of Ideas but every idea would be a complete refactor. I thought something like, yeah just copy the Data Modell ProcessWire uses and port it to Symfony to make a new CMS based on Symfony with the spirit of ProcessWire. I really dont know right now ? What I know is, I want to contribute to ProcessWire.

 

[LuisM]

Project Update 24.12.2021 - Edited start post.

[bernhard]

Sorry, I still don't get what you guys are trying to do here. What problem are you solving? Don't get me wrong - I don't want to discredit your work just trying to understand, maybe learn or maybe help ?

On 9/28/2021 at 3:53 PM, MrSnoozles said:

This is really sweet. ProcessWire is awesome but for bigger projects, that go beyond a simple website, managing business logic and templates can get messy really quickly. I really like your attempt on integration with Symfony. I thought about a couple experiments to "professionalize" ProcessWire development too, e.g.

I've had this problem some years ago (hook hell in site/ready.php etc). But I don't have it any more. Are you writing custom modules? Are you using custom page classes? Are you using RockMigrations?

Maybe all you need is just other workflows? But maybe I'm missing something, that's why I'm asking which problems you are solving. Maybe you can tell me some examples and maybe we can compare different strategies to solve them (with or without PW)...

The thing is... when I found PW several years ago I quickly found several things that I thought weren't possible. @gebeer was kind and patient enough to show me how all these concerns could easily be overcome in PW and I'm still having this experience from time to time... 

On the other hand I agree that some parts are still missing for a more professional setup. RockMigrations for example are great, but would likely be even greater if something like that was in the core with proper docs and without some deprecated methods ? Personally my only real issue at the moment is with how PW handles multiple languages. The recent updates that allow us to ship translations with modules were a first step in the right direction but it still sucks IMHO as there are still so many manual steps (sometimes even clicks and copy&paste actions) involved that are hard to automate...

But i haven't had the problem of a poorly organized project in a long time. ? 

[LuisM]

On 12/25/2021 at 12:57 PM, bernhard said:

Sorry, I still don't get what you guys are trying to do here. What problem are you solving? Don't get me wrong - I don't want to discredit your work just trying to understand, maybe learn or maybe help ?

….

There are a few things I want to solve, atleast for me, with Symprowire.

- poluted global state 

- dependency injection

- clean separation of concerns

- Raw PHP in Template Files

- no standards in templating

- testable code

Due to the way ProcessWire handles his templating the global state could get pretty poluted with vars floating around and on top you will most likely add business logic to your template. I prefer a more concise and separated aproach.

As a developer I do want to use libraries from the Userland with composer to manage my dependencies and not have to wrap them into a module with the added overhead.

I need a Dependency Injection Container to have a nice and manageable way to use my Objects.

I want to use twig as template language to benefit from template inheritance, autoescaping and all the other goodies it ships.

I need proper Event Dispatching and Handling  driven by Types as Subscribers.

I want to be able to test my codebase.

Symprowire will be niche and way too much for a light, few pages webpage, but it will give you a well structured way for accessing and rendering your data outside of the admin.

Symprowire is more like an application framework but could replace the ProcessWire renderer easily and is flexible enough to just serve your templates.

In fact, I pushed the new concept to the repo so you may have a look at the codebase.

As of now, Symprowire will add ~ 7-12ms to your Request after resolving to a Controller action and gives you a proper Controller Resolver, Event Handling, Twig, Dependency Injection.

Im looking forward to release 1.0 ?

 

[LuisM]

Nothing to add... let the pictures speak for themself (hint: we are testable)

----

[LuisM]

its coming together nicely ? The Framework itself is running without ProcessWire and is capable to get a ProcessWire instance injected as a Service. Which is HUGE!

What does this mean? Once I manage to resolve ProcessWire related config inside the Kernel we can then use Symprowire to build a Testsuite for the ProcessWire Core itself!!!

 

I also managed to abstract the whole Setup away into an easy to use API for the Developer. The future Symprowire Template file will look like this

<?php namespace ProcessWire;

use Symprowire\Symprowire;


/**
 * This is the Symprowire FrontController
 * -----------------------------------------
 * 
 * We require the composer autoloader
 * Add some parameters to Symprowire
 * Execute the App with the current ProcessWire instance
 * If ProcessWire is running in debug and TracyDebugger is installed we will dump the whole executed Kernel to Tracy
 * and echo a HTML string back to ProcessWire
 *
 */

require_once($this->config->paths->site . 'vendor/autoload.php');

$params = [
    'renderer' => 'twig',
];

$symprowire = new Symprowire($params);
$symprowire->execute($this->wire);

if($this->modules->isInstalled('TracyDebugger') && $this->config->debug) {
    bd($symprowire, 'Symprowire / Executed Kernel', [4]);
}

echo $symprowire->render();

 

[LuisM]

Oh BABY... I am nearly done with wiring it all together ?

Routing is based on the Template which will ultimatly resolve to a Controller based on the Template Name.

[LuisM]

I wish everyone a good start into the new Year. To round up this year I released v0.10.0.

The library is runnable as intended in a ProcessWire Environment and fully testable in Standalone mode for developing. 

Symprowire Release v0.10.0 - Backpain

I will publish a demo implementation next year. Hope it will be of use for some of you guys. 
 

[szabesz]

51 minutes ago, LuisM said:

I wish everyone a good start into the new Year.

Thank you! All the same to you and to all of us!

52 minutes ago, LuisM said:

I will publish a demo implementation next year.

It will be nice to take a closer look for sure, thank you in advance.