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ProcessWire Commerce: Help Needed


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ProcessWire Commerce will be here later today. As mentioned in earlier discussions, my hope is that this will very much become a community project. ProcessWire Commerce is a mature project that powers hundreds of shops, big and small. There still some work needed to make it better. This is where you can chime in, to the extent you can.

Please note: I don't have it all figured out yet. With your help, we can figure it out together, including the contribution process.

Below are the things that currently need to be worked on.

Documentation:

  • Frontend documentation - for frontend developers:  End-to-end how to work with ProcessWire Commerce in the frontend to build a shop. 
  • Backend documentation - for shop editors. How to use the GUI to configure, build, run and manage a shop.
  • API documentation - for documenting how ProcessWire Commerce is built, developing for it and contributing.

Still considering if/how to how to host documentation. Suggestions welcome.

Fix Bugs

Tutorials

  • Help write ProcessWire Commerce tutorials for different audiences.
  • Help create demos.

Ecosystem

  • Help grow the project.
  • Star it on GitHub.
  • Create add-ons.
  • Build migration tools.
  • Create a logo for ProcessWire Commerce.
  • Help write unit tests (???)

Site Profiles

  • Help develop an official, multi-lingual, modern site profile/theme to be used to showcase ProcessWire Commerce.
  • Contribute site profiles or themes.

 

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22 hours ago, kongondo said:

Still considering if/how to how to host documentation. Suggestions welcome.

First of all, thank you for all your heroic efforts! And I am not exaggerating.

Please consider https://www.bookstackapp.com/

Free, open source, and contributors do not have to set up anything. I've used it, it's great, stable, and its developer is actively working on it, improving it regularly.

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I can confirm what szabesz is saying. I using it on a private project with near 100 members. It is comparing with other documentation tool for cooperative writing, easy and also for not techies usable.

One of the best parts is... you can export pages or books (structure collection of pages) in pdf and co. And that also via an API. Meaning, I can serve some handbooks via a Website Frontend as PDF, and it is the actual updateded document on that topic possible. (Maybe in the case here, not so useful, but as an example...)

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Thanks both! I did try bookstackapp a little while back but got stuck on something. I cannot remember whether the issue was ddev or Laravel. I did not try it on my server. How's your setup?

Thanks.

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I use the Docker image from solidnerd (https://github.com/solidnerd/docker-bookstack) witch Docker Compose. Where I stumped was, that you have to set some settings as environment variable not in a .env-file, but give it docker on runtime.

My hole setup is on a v-server with portainer and the nginx proxy manager. Bookstack (+MySQL) and NPM share the same network, what makes the configuration on the NPM side easier.

Setup as a "stack":

image.png.fde91a551af27ed7bef42e0107c2ce12.png

 

The config with the setup of the environments variables:

image.thumb.png.d13d3a112b934b3dc046bf7b0fe7a119.png

image.png.fb7c0f998aef935db00ba8eda1b99f26.png

 

Created containers from the stacks above:

image.png.bfadba459d0f9343a21d9401501084e9.png

 

The in before created network "proxyable":

image.png.d7650d8ab8c2c7435abcc582fa788cac.png

 

Hope the little inside example help.

 

Updating is super easy. You update the image and then let the container rebuild on the latest. 

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2 hours ago, kongondo said:

Thanks both! I did try bookstackapp a little while back but got stuck on something. I cannot remember whether the issue was ddev or Laravel. I did not try it on my server. How's your setup?

 

I installed it on MAMP Pro and also on its own cPanel account, as it does not support shared hosting. I also tested the Docker option back then and it worked as well, but I am not fluent with Docker so I abandoned that project for a while. But I might get back to it as the idea was to run it it on a QNAP NAS. And it worked but I did not find the time to finish the task to setup automatic backup for it.

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Unrelated but how can something not work on shared hosting? Especially something open source in 2025. 

Is there some over thinking here when something like Google Docs would be just fine?

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Hi there! Unrelated to the documentation, but I wondered how we would report bugs/suggest fixes, I've noticed a couple things while manually adding orders. Maybe another thread? Looking forward!

Edited by marie.mdna
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On 6/18/2025 at 12:55 PM, szabesz said:

First of all, thank you for all your heroic efforts! And I am not exaggerating.

Please consider https://www.bookstackapp.com/

Free, open source, and contributors do not have to set up anything. I've used it, it's great, stable, and its developer is actively working on it, improving it regularly.

I am using Bookstack too for some docs. But I really do not think it should be used for community maintained docs for an open source project. Those should be open for commits from everyone. I think that VitePress or Docusaurus or Mkdocs or even some php static site generator. The docs are markdown in the repo and contributing is just a PR.

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8 hours ago, marie.mdna said:

Hi there! Unrelated to the documentation, but I wondered how we would report bugs/suggest fixes, I've noticed a couple things while manually adding orders. Maybe another thread? Looking forward!

Thanks for the reminder! I have edited the first post here as well as the announcement one. I'd also noted there the issue with manual orders. 

Please file bugs here:

https://github.com/kongondo/ProcessWireCommerce/issues

Thank you.

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18 hours ago, cb2004 said:

Is there some over thinking here

This, plus the 'curse' of ProcessWire got me thinking. I love ProcessWire. I could spin up my own BookStack using ProcessWire. And so I started, but wait... @Ivan Gretsky has a better idea, I think.

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3 hours ago, Ivan Gretsky said:

But I really do not think it should be used for community maintained docs for an open source project. Those should be open for commits from everyone.

Yes! This would be great! I like the idea....but...

4 hours ago, Ivan Gretsky said:

I think that VitePress or Docusaurus or Mkdocs

I've got Node fatigue 😁 and I really don't like writing Markdown... So what now? If only there was a way I could work comfortably in ProcessWire and export to Markdown, or better to GitHub...

4 hours ago, Ivan Gretsky said:

Yes! This is it. OK, I really don't want to use Laravel blade or Twig. Just give me plain PHP. Wait,

https://www.atasasmaz.com/p/atas-php-ssg

https://github.com/atas/ssg

Yes!  Now I can have my cake and eat it too! 😄. I'll have a play and see if I can use this in ProcessWire, maybe as a library or a module. This, I think, offers the best of several words!

4 hours ago, Ivan Gretsky said:

The docs are markdown in the repo and contributing is just a PR.

Living the dream! Everyone can generate their Markdown as they please! 😄

Thanks for the idea. I'll have a play. We'll also need to come up with a templating structure of some sort for the docs, to guide contributors.

Thanks!

 

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24 minutes ago, Jan Romero said:

Doesn’t GitHub have a built-in wiki feature? I don’t come across GitHub wikis much, but apparently you can open them up to anyone with an account, and mix and match text formats: https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-project-with-wikis/adding-or-editing-wiki-pages

Yes it does and I even enabled it on ProcessWire Commerce repository. Definitely worth considering, thanks.

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On 6/21/2025 at 2:20 AM, kongondo said:

Yes! This would be great! I like the idea....but...

I've got Node fatigue 😁 and I really don't like writing Markdown... So what now? If only there was a way I could work comfortably in ProcessWire and export to Markdown, or better to GitHub...

Yes! This is it. OK, I really don't want to use Laravel blade or Twig. Just give me plain PHP. Wait,

https://www.atasasmaz.com/p/atas-php-ssg

https://github.com/atas/ssg

Yes!  Now I can have my cake and eat it too! 😄. I'll have a play and see if I can use this in ProcessWire, maybe as a library or a module. This, I think, offers the best of several words!

Living the dream! Everyone can generate their Markdown as they please! 😄

Thanks for the idea. I'll have a play. We'll also need to come up with a templating structure of some sort for the docs, to guide contributors.

Thanks!

 

Just going to be brutally honest, this seems crazy to me.

Markdown and its variants are standard for documentation, and open source docs are a solved problem.

In 30 minutes you could have https://vitepress.dev set up and deployed to GitHub pages. In a few hours you could have your entire existing docs migrated and ready for contributions.

You can rest easy knowing VitePress is backed and maintained by a massive, well funded open source team and is tailor made to solve every problem / requirement of static user contributed open source documentation. Why reinvent the wheel?

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Posted (edited)
19 hours ago, Mikie said:

Markdown and its variants are standard for documentation, and open source docs are a solved problem.

Yes, that's true. I have nothing against Markdown. I just don't like writing Markdown. It is not a pleasant editing experience. I don't mind using Markdown for short content such as READMEs.

19 hours ago, Mikie said:

VitePress is backed and maintained by a massive, well funded open source team and is tailor made to solve every problem / requirement of static user contributed open source documentation. Why reinvent the wheel?

Been there, done that. The existing Padloper docs are running on VitePress 😀. The editing experience sucks, especially working with tables and images (editing).

https://docs.kongondo.com/

Not to digress much, but I have done the whole NodeJS/npm dance. I have (private) repos with various variants of Padloper written in Vue, Vuetify, Nuxt, Primefaces. I ended up back at using ProcessWire with a sprinkling of htmx and Alpine JS (thanks to two buddies here in the forums). I still use Node JS, now and then.

Long story short, all I want is a Markdown generator. if I can edit docs using ProcessWire or a WYSIWYG then export that to Markdown and have that trigger a CICD pointing at GitHub pages, that's the ticket for me. This scenario doesn't stop anyone who doesn't mind editing Markdown to do so. We'll meet at Markdown, so to speak 😀. The main (only?) reason to use Markdown is to make contributing easier. An additional advantage for a generating from ProcessWire pages is I would have the documentation saved in a DB as well. 

 

Edited by kongondo
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  • 3 weeks later...
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, bernhard said:

I have just indexed PWCommerce as Deepwiki: https://deepwiki.com/kongondo/ProcessWireCommerce

 

Wow. Thanks! I am very ignorant about AI and tools out there (a story for another day/forum). I've never heard of Deepwiki. It does look useful, thanks! 😃.

Edit: I've split @marie.mdna's question into a new topic. I think your post is relevant in both threads. I'll leave it here for now.

 

Edited by kongondo
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