Weekly update – 8 August 2025

[adrian]

Can I humbly make an overarching statement on my thoughts about website design. I think there are certain types of sites that should have artsy, flashy, animated content and large fonts - these can make the right impression and be part of the visual experience. But when it comes to technology, I think clean, simple, and free of distractions is needed. Take a look at how clean https://www.contentful.com/ is and compare with https://www.sanity.io/ which is mess of moving stuff that I just want to gloss over.

I also think you might have missed a key marketing point - "headless"

[ryan]

@adrian Featured is a sort where modules with the "featured" toggle display before those that don't have that setting. That's correct that there aren't a lot of paid modules in the directory at present. I need to add several of mine still too. 

[adrian]

3 minutes ago, ryan said:

Featured is a sort where modules with the "featured" toggle display before those that don't have that setting

Ok, but I think it needs an "All" button (as the default) and then "Featured" could be just the featured modules - otherwise I think it's quite confusing.

[ryan]

@adrian It's definitely subjective. I know nothing about those two CMSs, but my impression of them is the opposite. The Sanity one draws me in and makes me want to explore. The Contentful site is a fine site, but not compelling. I would bet Contentful has a higher bounce rate than Sanity, but who knows. 

[adrian]

5 minutes ago, ryan said:

It's definitely subjective.

You're right of course!

5 minutes ago, ryan said:

The Contentful site is a fine site, but not compelling. I would bet Contentful has a higher bounce rate than Sanity, but who knows. 

Contentful has been the leading commerical headless CMS for quite a long time, so they are doing something right. I was asked to build a site with it about 10 years ago - I declined because I loved working with PW and couldn't understand the reason to spend so much on a commercial service like Contentful, but they are definitely successful - there are some very big names on this list: https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Contentful

[DV-JF]

17 minutes ago, ryan said:

what device and browser are you seeing it on?

Firefox Ver. 141.0.3 (Build #2016106991), null
GV: 141.0.3-20250806102122
AS: 141.0.1
OS: Android 16
Device: Google Pixel 6a

Thank you for having a look at accessibilty.

 

[ryan]

@adrian To be fair both are very nice sites. I see so many sites, and I like to look through the lens of how memorable it is. Like whether there's anything strongly unique or surprising that makes me want to click further inside, and hooks into my memory so that I can recall it later. That's what I'm missing from the Contentful site, even if it is nicely designed. As a visual learner, I'm drawn in by bold visuals and anything that makes a site different from any others. That's also what I'd like to communicate about PW, as something different from the Contentfuls, Wordpressers, and Drupals of the world.  On the PW site, the large headline is unexpected/surprising, and whether one likes it or not, it's memorable, bold and stands out from the crowd. Likewise with the abstract animations, they communicate the concepts (to me and I'm sure others) in a way that text just doesn't. There's plenty to read for the book learners too. So whether one subjectively likes some of these things or not, I think it will prove to be memorable and engaging, and good for gaining new users. 

[bernhard]

3 hours ago, ryan said:

@adrian Featured is a sort where modules with the "featured" toggle display before those that don't have that setting. That's correct that there aren't a lot of paid modules in the directory at present. I need to add several of mine still too. 

@ryan any feedback on my related suggestion? https://processwire.com/talk/topic/31404-weekly-update-– 8-august-2025/?do=findComment&comment=249930

What I forgot to mention: For that to work and to make it secure we'd have two options:

1. Add a secret token to the users module directory profile that anybody can use to send update info to the modules directory
2. Use a push-pull concept. The user just triggers and endpoint on processwire.com (like processwire.com/update-module/?module-id=1234) and then PW calls a predefined endpoint to grab data from (eg baumrock.com/get-module-info/?pw-module-id=1234)
   This endpoint would have to be defined in the module's directory of the user so that anybody can use their own endpoint.

I'd prefer (1) as this would be a one-time setup on your end and anybody can just copy and paste that token and add it to the request payload for the trigger, eg:

{
  "token": "abcdefg",
  "module-id": "1234",
  "version": "1.2.3",
  "readme": "This is a calendar module for PW"
}

And I think (1) would even be easier to implement on your end as well 🙂 

[poljpocket]

13 hours ago, bernhard said:

I'd prefer (1)

I can second that. Easy to implement and very good for CI.

[Alexander]

Off-topic, https://www.softaculous.com/apps/cms/ProcessWire demo is not working. 

[adrian]

4 minutes ago, Alexander said:

Off-topic, https://www.softaculous.com/apps/cms/ProcessWire demo is not working. 

It works here (if you're patient enough), but as noted above it's a pretty useless demo because the admin is so bare - basically useless and a very poor advert for PW.

[MrSnoozles]

On 8/12/2025 at 7:10 PM, adrian said:

I also think you might have missed a key marketing point - "headless"

Agreed. I'm missing headless too. Because it's a buzzword that's trending and PW for sure can be used headlessly. We used the really excellent GraphQL plugin from @dadish to use PW as an API for an entire mobile app.

Edited August 14 by MrSnoozles

[diogo]

Thanks you for your opinions and suggestions, they are very welcome!

We can always count on this community for engagement 👍

One aspect that we discussed, and that I don't think Ryan mentioned, is that Jan and I had several clients express concern about the tool after visiting the previous website. PW has some recognition among developers, but zero recognition among non technical potential clients, who we need to accept PW as our CMS suggestion. That's also one of the reasons of having "CMS" and not "CMS/CMF" front and center.

Design decisions will never please everyone, we were aware of that and decided to go bold anyway. Hopefully it will prove to have been the right decision 🙂

On 8/12/2025 at 7:10 PM, adrian said:

I also think you might have missed a key marketing point - "headless"

That could be a fun animation to make 😆
Seriously, though, I think we discussed this at a certain point. Not sure why we dropped it, maybe because being headless in PW is a possibility and not a feature, while all the other things on the homepage are inherent to PW. The GraphQL plugin could certainly be on the modules area in the homepage, though.

[matjazp]

I'm using a keyboard and can't access menu items. I can, for an example, tab to "The CMS", Enter (or Space) opens a menu, but how to go to (focus on) "Features"? 

[szabesz]

Hi, I do not know it this has been reported or not, but there is at lease one "This video is private": https://processwire.com/docs/multi-language-support/multi-language-fields/
see:

Spoiler

 

[szabesz]

On 8/12/2025 at 7:10 PM, adrian said:

Can I humbly make an overarching statement on my thoughts about website design. I think there are certain types of sites that should have artsy, flashy, animated content and large fonts - these can make the right impression and be part of the visual experience. But when it comes to technology, I think clean, simple, and free of distractions is needed. Take a look at how clean https://www.contentful.com/ is and compare with https://www.sanity.io/ which is mess of moving stuff that I just want to gloss over.

I second that. While I completely appreciate all the work that has been put into the redesign, but I think the "brand spirit" is off. I feel like I've arrived at a typographer's portfolio site. To me, the new design conveys no message other than bold typography. All the messages are explicitly spelled out in writing, which is fine, but aside from that, we have plain, rounded boxes, practically no colors, no images and that is all there is to it.

Edited August 14 by szabesz
typo

[markus-th]

3 hours ago, diogo said:

One aspect that we discussed, and that I don't think Ryan mentioned, is that Jan and I had several clients express concern about the tool after visiting the previous website. PW has some recognition among developers, but zero recognition among non technical potential clients, who we need to accept PW as our CMS suggestion. That's also one of the reasons of having "CMS" and not "CMS/CMF" front and center.

I'm confused. Isn't ProcessWire primarily the tool we want to convince more developers to use in order to gain a larger user base?

So this page should primarily be used to convince developers of the advantages with examples (sorry to say that) instead of animations that have nothing to do with ProcessWire.

To convince customers of the system, it would be better to provide a good demo that shows how simple ProcessWire is to user. However, this could also be done here, among other places: https://www.softaculous.com/apps/cms/ProcessWire 

[diogo]

@markus-th In my view there's no reason to be confused, there's a disagreement on the strategy, that's all. Your position doesn't confuse me, I understand it perfectly, I just don't necessarily agree that it's the best path.

Also notice that I carefully worded that sentence to convey that this is only one of the aspects that we discussed. It doesn't mean that it was the most important one and it doesn't mean we discarded other targets. We still think the site will convince developers to go deeper and discover PW. What we did, in that aspect, is not much different from what greatly successful tools aimed at developers are doing. From the top of my mind, see Next, Astro and Svelte

[BrendonKoz]

I'm glad to see that print stylesheets were not completely forgotten about, but testing may have been missed after a basic style was applied. 🙂 There are quite a few elements that simply don't need to be printed, and page margins are far too minimal for the default browser configurations of printing (there is overflow from the browser default configurations of headers and footers). At the very least, increasing the @page margin from 0.5cm would make a world of difference. Ironically, the first page's header spacing seems OK, but I haven't identified why. Thankfully it shouldn't require much fiddling to make a huge difference to the print styles!

Things that could immediately be hidden in print media:

• #content-secondary
• #breadcrumbs (optionally; some may find this is useful in prints)
• #topnav
• footer
• #site-search-q

The comment form is part of the body of the blog/news posts, but is unnecessary for printing. Comments themselves may be useful, but the style of them is a bit jarringly large. The "Post a comment" header and the related form aren't in their own section/div, so it can't be (easily) targeted as a whole.

Overall body text size could probably be reduced for print (save on paper), but that's more preferential, as it also might just be easier to read at a larger size when printed - a JS text size adjustment would be the only way to allow the visitor to choose that, and I'm thinking that's unnecessary.

The ProcessWire logo has what appears to be an underscore between the iconic P and the logotype/wordmark.

This whole part of the API wouldn't need to be printed as its an interactive interface only.

Windows 11 Pro 24H2, Firefox Developer Edition (v142.0b9)

[jploch]

Thank you for your feedback! And thanks to @ryan for the technical implementation. I am currently on vacation and am only now able to respond here. 

I understand that it takes some time to get used to change, especially when you are attached to something. And there will always be different evaluations and opinions about design. However, it is important to me to say that there are reasons for our design decisions and that they were not made arbitrarily.

Due to time constraints, I will only be able to address a few points here.

The overarching theme of the design is “friendly flexibility.” All design decisions were made to emphasize this theme and find a consistent visual language. With the new design, we want to appear less technical and also include user groups other than developers, such as designers, marketers, and editors/content creators. At the same time, we want to differentiate ourselves from other comparable CMS products and highlight PW's uniqueness. The morphing animations are intended to communicate the versatility and flexibility of PW and engage users. For example, we used many adjectives on the old site (flexible, stable, secure, open, free, powerful, etc.) and our idea was to communicate this directly in the first headline. The font (“Apfel Grotesk”) we used has many curves and a friendly character, which is especially noticeable when used in larger headlines. The colors used have been part of PW's branding from the beginning, so we thought it would be good to continue using them. By mixing these colors, we want to communicate versatility again and move away from the rather technical and dominant blue of the old site. We also greatly reduced the amount of text per scroll on the homepage, because we felt the old site was lacking visual hierarchy and felt to crowded. We have a much more guided flow on the homepage now that makes users actually read the text and it's easier to scan the content.

We have also improved the visibility of features and modules and adjusted the navigation structure. I can provide more details on this when I have more time. I hope it adds some context to our decisions.

[lokomotivan]

13 hours ago, jploch said:

With the new design, we want to appear less technical and also include user groups other than developers, such as designers, marketers, and editors/content creators.

I understand the logic here, but in my opinion that's wrong target audience. How will less technical user build website with processwire as there is no themes and "plug-and-play" plugins?
If im a marketeer, or content-editor, why and how would i choose processwire, because there is a text "flexible, stable..."? Or because processwire has great API, and technically built really well, how would i know if im non-technical, how would i evaluate the CMS, based on a big headline? If you are really so confident about target audience, at least there is a need for some really good demo. 

I believe we need more developers pushing clients to use processwire,  not vise versa.

[7Studio]

I understand the design decisions behind this change, but please consider restoring the showcase section on the home page (even a simplified one).

Regardless of the target audience, in my opinion, this is one of the most important sections. Words are important, but for a new visitor, they're just words (any other solution will try to describe its advantages). Visitors need examples to illustrate these words, and in my opinion, the admin panel screenshots at the top aren't sufficient.

The showcase provides first rough examples of what can be built and what the user can achieve before they decide to invest their time — for example, downloading and installing ProcessWire. They can also encourage users to dive deeper, reading more, looking for features, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

[taotoo]

On 8/11/2025 at 10:26 PM, ryan said:

@taotoo Thanks, fixed the animation in Firefox. It turns out Firefox needs the SVG filter to be visible, so had to remove the "hidden" attribute and move it off screen with absolute position. I don't know what's up with the MS Edge appearance (I don't have that environment to test in) but if you find what it is, please let me know. 

On Windows 11, Chrome/Firefox/Edge all looking good to me now - consistent animations and the aliasing has gone too.

[ryan]

ProcessWire has always communicated well to developers and they typically aren't the ones that need to be convinced. We always connect with the developers. But the decision makers are more often the clients, designers, marketers, etc. They are the ones that we hope to increase visibility to. 

Several updates to the new site this week, various minor optimizations and improvements. The biggest additions were made in the API reference, which now covers a lot more methods and has some navigation improvements as well. 

[szabesz]

8 hours ago, ryan said:

But the decision makers are more often the clients, designers, marketers, etc. They are the ones that we hope to increase visibility to. 

I think both developers and clients should be the target audience and I cannot see why it would not be possible to target both. Anyway, in my opinion, the new design "targets typographers". To me, it looks like solution to a school assignment for students studying typography.

BTW, I found an error in the following href:

Spoiler