New blog: Interview with Maxim Semenov + weekly update

[ryan]

I'm finally back from traveling and excited to get back to work! Over the last couple of weeks I've been to Amsterdam, Oslo, Copenhagen, Aarhus (Denmark), Stockholm, and Visby in Gotland Sweden. All really beautiful places. My family is from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, so it was nice to see where my roots came from. I really would have liked to visit Germany, Finland and more places too, but we were on a ship so we went where the ship went. One of my favorite parts was traveling on the water between the Baltic Sea and Stockholm, it's just really beautiful. The ARUS Art Museum in Aarhus was amazing, esspecially James Turrell's As Seen Below, the rainbow panorama, and so much more. The Vasa museum in Stockholm was incredible, seeing a capsized ship from 1628 that had been fully preserved in the cold waters. Vigeland sculpture park in Oslo was jaw dropping, as was the opera house. Hiking along the cliffs and shores of Gotland, as well as exploring the medieval town of Visby was another favorite. This was not my first time in Amsterdam, but it remains one of my favorite cities due to it being the most bike centric city I've seen. I only wish that I could have spent more time in each of the cities and towns we visited, so look forward to returning to them all someday. 

This week our big news is a brand new Interview with module author Maxim Semenov. Surely you've seen how he has new modules released almost every week (sometimes multiple modules). Even today, @maximus has published two new modules in the directory! This development pace is incredible, and it's made me want to interview him for a long time.

I want some of whatever magic elixir Maxim is drinking, because I'd love to be able to work at that kind of pace, and with that level of energy and creativity. So I had a lot of questions for him, which you can read in this week's post, linked above. Turns out he's driving a FedEx truck and drinking Innis & Gunn beer while wrangling AI agents with his iPhone. I don't know about you, but I'll be scouting for some Innis and Gunn beer this weekend, and will report back if it works. 🙂 

I've not been back in town long enough to have any major new ProcessWire updates to report just yet, though I did manage to cover some issue reports on the North Sea one day, and I've been working on some security upgrades for our installer. Almost all existing CMSs (even including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and yes ProcessWire too) have a security oversight where if you upload an uninstalled copy of the CMS to a web accessible location, whoever accesses it first can own it. That's not usually a problem, as you typically load the installer in your browser shortly after you upload/download it to an http accessible location. But not always. What about those instances where you place a copy of a CMS somewhere and forget, or get distracted, and a bot or someone else manages to access it before you? Later today I'm pushing an updated installer to our dev branch that requires an activation key before it will let you complete the installation. You have to prove that you have file system access by copying a cryptographically secure activation key out of the /site/config.php file and placing it into a field in the installer. This ensures that no random bot or visitor could take over an uninstalled copy of ProcessWire. I understand it's a little bit of extra hassle, so if your DB host isn't external to your installation, then it won't require an activation key. Meaning, this won't add an extra step for your localhost development installations. But it will provide more installation security than any other CMS that I'm aware of. Stay tuned, lots more to come in the weeks ahead!

[maximus]

Thank you, Ryan, for the interview! This feels like an important step forward in my career, and I really appreciate the opportunity.

I also have a couple of major workflow-focused modules coming next week.

Stay tuned!

[jacmaes]

It was a truly enjoyable and inspiring read. The sharp questions prompted insightful answers. It was great to see two ProcessWire heroes conversing.