ryan

Sorry I wasn't able to provide an update last week, and not really able to provide one this week. I'm all caught up in legal matters with my wife unfortunately, and it's consuming all my time. I still am getting various commits on the dev branch though, and hope to have a new dev version ready for you next week. Thanks and have a great weekend!

@BrendonKoz the current dev branch will become PW4, so a major version, probably around the end of the year.

I'll keep this update short because I'm currently in the airport and headed to Amsterdam. This week we've added official support for nginx and caddy to ProcessWire, among various other updates on the dev branch. I'll be in Amsterdam for a week. If any ProcessWire users are in the area and want to meet up for a coffee, beer, or a walk, please let me know. I'll be located near the Amsterdam Centraal station.

ProcessWire adds SQLite and PostgreSQL support. This week on the dev branch (3.0.274) you can now install and run ProcessWire on SQLite or PostgreSQL, in addition to MySQL. Read more in this blog post: https://processwire.com/blog/posts/sqlite-and-postgresql

I still like using Uikit if I'm otherwise going to be writing the CSS and markup by hand. Due more to comfort than anything else. But if I'm getting AI help (as I did here) then I thought going with plain CSS and CSS vars was preferable. Is it still useful to spend all sorts of time hand coding all the markup and CSS? Probably not. But I still think it's beneficial to have a shared/modular environment like the admin standardized on a framework like Uikit.

This week we have a new AI-based ProcessWire installer committed on the dev branch. Now when you install ProcessWire, you have a choice of “Standard installation” or “AI-Assisted installation”. If you chose the AI option, then the next screen prompts you for your AI model ID, endpoint URL and API key. When the installer finishes installing the ProcessWire core, you are brought to the AI Site Builder where it asks you some questions about what you’d like to build, and then it builds it for you. 🙂 When it finishes, you can see what it did, and continue asking it to make refinements until you are finished. I always thought we needed more site profiles for ProcessWire, but now we have essentially have an unlimited number of potential site profiles when you use the AI installation. Note that the AI installation option also automatically installs the AgentTools module as well. Example of site built by by the installer/site-builder -- it even wrote all the text and documentation!

The commits have continued at a fairly rapid pace again this week, which you can follow in the dev branch commit log. I’m not bumping the version number this week, but likely will next week. At this point, my goal is to clear out our processwire-issues repo, so that the majority of the issues in there are solved and those no longer applicable are closed. We still have around ~160 issues open, but since we’re now working on a lot of older issues, as we go through them, we’re also finding a lot are already solved. In an ideal world, we’d not have more than a dozen open issue reports any given time, so we may just get there!

Well the good news is that it's been a month since this started and I'm a lot better off than I was. I'm eating more, sleeping more, and can function well enough again, even if still sad. I'm mostly back to work. I'm pretty proud of 41 commits this week. Seems like good momentum, and feeling a lot of confidence and enthusiasm for ProcessWire's future. I really appreciate all of you and your support.

Well my personal life news has not been getting better. My Mom had a heart attack, which we believe to be from the stress of my wife leaving (she and my wife were very close). But thankfully, my Mom had good and quick medical attention and is now recovering. Despite the news, it was quite a good week for ProcessWire development, with perhaps the most commits we’ve ever had in a week: 41 of them. This week we solved a large number of core issue reports, including a lot of years-old ones. Lots of improvements have been added to the core as well, plus two PRs from Adrian. What I’ve found is that when it’s hard to focus due to so much change on one’s life, solving issue reports is the perfect diversion. Especially with a little AI assistance. So that’s what I did this week… fixing what can be fixed, taking the focus off of what can’t.

For me it's always been about the design. How it makes its way into the output is an implementation detail. A detail that can change and evolve. A detail that I don't think matters that much in the short term or most users. Though a detail that clearly matters to some more than me. If someone thinks a different implementation would be better, great, then do it. ProcessWire supports multiple ways to theme/style the admin and I think that's a benefit, not a drawback. My aim is for PW to be flexible. AI could probably convert one strategy to another in minutes. I've got enough on my plate and if someone wants to make such a significant contribution as Konkat did, I welcome it. The same has been true with many of bernhards contributions. Both have contributed some of my favorite recent additions to PW. We are all doing the best we can with the time and resources we have. When bernhard submitted his AdminStyle system, I liked what it added and didn't insist that it be implemented in a particular way. Likewise when Konkat submitted their design for the admin. Front end CSS is not one of my strengths. I welcome the help, and prefer to leave these implementation details to the experts. In this case we've got experts that disagree, and one that thinks that's worth abandoning a project for. I personally think bernhard should stick around, and we all should accept that the community isn't always going to agree on everything, but that it is part of collaboration.

@maximus I'm pretty sure it would be configurable in that way. They've always had a different look going on the IP.Board site than what we use here. And the templates, at least in 4.x, are HTML with placeholders, so it's quite configurable. Hopefully that remains the case with 5.x. My assumption is that it would look very similar to how it does now, just updated to be more consistent with the current website design. Headless Shopify.... I hadn't considered that! I'm going to give this a look, thanks!

I'm an ADHD guy myself too. Maybe that's why the three of us always seem to be on the same page. And maybe why I struggle in other areas. What do folks think about the Statamic pricing model? Free core. Paid Pro version with extra features, support, Pro modules included. And an enterprise option for large scale. Sounds like commercial marketplace is a common theme here. I've been researching various store solutions over the last week, but it seems like what we need is a totally custom job. I'm honestly not up-to-speed with how to handle all of the complexity behind the various tax systems of the world and payouts, etc. And it doesn't seem like there's an existing platform to build from for this. I did contact LemonSqueezy (part of Stripe) and they said that while they don't support what we need, I could always handle the payouts part myself. But it sounds like a partial solution. Does anyone know of anything out there that we could achieve this with? It seems like doing it custom might be a bigger investment than I could afford to make, right now at least. But it's hard to believe there isn't something existing that we could use or build from.

@bernhard Bernhard, let me clarify: Sometimes misaligned with regard to the core. If I added everything you sent me to add to the core, I wouldn’t be a good core maintainer. You also made several excellent core additions, and I don’t mean to discount any of those. For many things, I always suggested extending ProcessWire with modules. But you sent me plenty of stuff that that you wanted added to the core that I could not add. I appreciated the enthusiasm, but felt like you didn’t understand when I said “no”, so it made me concerned that you wouldn’t stick around, because I had to say no a lot of times. For me, it was a balance between trying to be a good core maintainer and trying to encourage your great work and enthusiasm. I did compromise and add things I didn’t necessarily want to, because I genuinely appreciated your collaboration. You did nothing wrong. I’m just explaining where I was coming from. My job is different from yours. As far as your modules go, I think you were perfectly aligned with the ProcessWire way. So I’d love to see you continue with that, but understand it couldn’t be monetized enough to be sustainable. My hope and expectation is that in the future it will be. My current situation has me operating with very little sleep, and I was pretty offended by some of your words. I apologize if my language comes across as harsh, I’m still mad at the world, but getting a little better every day.

It sounds like you gave up, and I'm not giving up. For me this has always been a long term project, and now it's ready to scale up. But it's a long term project for me either way. I don't think ProcessWire was a good fit for you, and I felt like you were regularly proposing stuff that wasn't a good fit for ProcessWire. So I always felt like you and I were not in alignment, and I totally understand why you'd want to move on to something else. But there were exceptions, like the work you did with the Uikit admin, and of course I know that your RockMigrations is very well liked in the community, among other great modules you've built. I always had to look at the core from the bigger picture, and I hope you can understand that. I have to maintain this project long term, so have to look at feature additions through the lens of whether it benefits the project in that long term, and whether you were someone that would stick around long enough to continue maintaining what you were proposing. You were always a bit too aggressive in pushing me to do this or that, and so I sensed that you were not someone that was a good fit, which made me cautious about your proposals. Just being honest. But I also like that you challenge me, and I think you and I would be great friends in person. Just to be clear, I have not suggested that ProcessWire should "become the best free open-source CMS". I think it already is the best free open source CMS, but for our target audience. I don't believe there is a best free open source CMS for everyone, as it depends entirely on one's needs. Now I have suggested that ProcessWire is on track to be the most AI-friendly open source CMS, and might already be. That's correct. Also correct, growth is now important. See above for what changed. Kind of growth: increase user base. Why? See above. Yes to all, and you also got the order right. They are not such different goals. More users is the starting point, and each leads to the other. I'm not convinced by that either, and I'm not sure where you got it. I know you are just joining the conversation here, but that's what all of this is about. There's also a whole new board setup for ProcessWire 4.x where the discussion will be ongoing. But my opinion is that ProcessWire has already grown into what it was meant to, it's achieved its original goal. I think a strong AI focus in ProcessWire is the next path. If we simply grew the user base then the "who pays for it" would take care of itself with the existing model of Pro modules. But I do want to diversify the sources of income for ProcessWire, so that's one of the reasons for the discussion as well. That's always a good question to keep asking. ProcessWire has been for web developers and the clients they serve, looking for something better and more flexible than the WordPresses of the world. Going forward I think that audience might broaden into a less technical crowed, especially as AI increasingly does front-end development The reasons to choose ProcessWire over the alternatives I think are obvious to everyone here. But not obvious to people who don't yet know it, so that's where marketing help is needed. I disagree. With a larger user base, I think it is a great foundation for a larger commercial ecosystem. I can understand, there might be some of that. Though the only thing lacking on the Pro module side was just enough scale. ProcessWire users have been very supportive of Pro modules. If we had enough scale, I'm confident it would have been a strong revenue source for your modules as well. The need to grow: my wife left, her job brought significant financial stability, which I'm losing. So I want to grow ProcessWire to make it big enough to sustain itself. Whether it ultimately does or not, it's still my lifetime project. But the more ProcessWire grows, the more resources I can dedicate to it. So the goal is to grow ProcessWire to the point where I can dedicate most of my resources to it, and not have to worry about the financial side. I understand that you weren't able to monetize ProcessWire in the way you wanted, but taking shots at the project isn't right. And kicking a guy while he's down also isn't right. I can tell you that there's never been a better time to invest in ProcessWire. Maybe not for you personally. But suggesting that to a broader audience is really short sighted. Prior to this month, we were at the beginning of our biggest growth period in the last 10 years, with a lot of great momentum. I'm still recovering from my wife leaving, but that's temporary. I need some time to readjust to my new personal situation, but we'll soon be returning to that momentum and growth. From my side, the Pro module ecosystem has been successful enough to prove it's worth, and all it needs is a larger user base. That's why I want to increase the user base, as well as diversify the Pro options (such as a ProcessWire Pro subscription). I think this is the case for you, because you regularly would submit stuff to me that you wanted "included in the core". And like I explained earlier, I don't add stuff just because a particular person wants it added. I look at the bigger picture, how many it benefits (also including whether I'd use it), whether the person is someone that is in alignment with the project, and whether it's something that I can feasibly maintain long term if the person doesn't stick around. AI is making it a lot easer to improve and maintain code, so some of this will be changing, but I still am very cautious about bloating the core. ProcessWire is primarily a system for executing modules, and ideally that's where people build new things into ProcessWire. I don't follow you on this at all. The Konkat admin addition is great from my perspective, and has been a very successful addition. I get that you don't like that it didn't use your AdminStyle framework. I would have liked it to use that as well, or even to be a separate module. But the reality is it doesn't matter to most ProcessWire users what module or CSS it extends or whether it uses LESS, SCSS or plain CSS. Konkat produced something that works, and works really well, and they are here to support it for the long term. @diogo was one of ProcessWire's first users. It's one of my favorite updates over the last year. Longer term, I'd like to have AI convert it to be it's own thing that doesn't extend the original Uikit admin, and perhaps uses your AdminStyle setup, for easier long term maintenance. But these are technical details that make no difference to the end users of the theme. I understand that in the first iterations on the dev branch, there were some output issues with your modules, because you used Uikit classes that went beyond what the core uses. And we concluded you were right that it should support the overall Uikit framework rather than just what the core uses. So Diogo went and worked very hard to build in full Uikit support, largely for you, since you were the only one that needed it at the time. But I never saw you acknowledge those efforts. Your concerns seemed to that the theme wasn't built according to your plans. If your expectation is to control the direction that ProcessWire implements one feature or another, that's not realistic. They will most certainly help. The "who" is already clear, the scale just needs to increase. That is not the model and you know it. It's a community project that I lead, and am trying my best to keep true to the original vision. Scaling up doesn't mean breaking ProcessWire's original purpose or bloating the core. What exactly would you suggest should be "stated clearly"? Likewise, I wish you well in your new projects, and hope you'll re-discover ProcessWire at some point, as I think the best is yet to come.

I've not been able to get my focus back just yet, but I am building momentum on a couple of cool things. I could have covered a lot of issue reports this week, but instead decided to build a module that would let AI agents pull issue reports, checkout a new worktree of the core, and submit patches for issues. Each issue resolution stored in a ProcessWire page, waiting for review. Basically, I'm looking to automate the issue resolution process so that I can have a group of round-robin agents working on them at any time of the day, and then I can come in and review them with an overseeing AgentTools agent and tell it to either "apply and reply" or "send back for a different solution". This should enable us to cover issue reports much more quickly, and in much greater quantity. At this point the module is mostly built, but I still have a lot of testing to do. I'm also working here on the business side of ProcessWire. I've been looking at different store solutions, and currently leaning towards staying with IP.Board, but with the newer revamped 5.x version, and with a completely external payment processor that handles the various tax considerations. This better opens the door to supporting 3rd party modules, since we have code-level access to IP.Board, and ProcessWire collaboration, while I've yet to find any external service that would do what we need. That's all for this week, but hopefully back next week with core updates to report. Have a great weekend!