ryan

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!

@Peter Knight Are you still getting 403s? I thought I'd fixed it. At least I haven't had any in awhile. If you all are still seeing them, let me know and I'll dig in further to figure out what's up.

Thanks for all the support! I actually started feeling quite a bit better over the weekend. My wife moved out of our house, and into her new apartment, and rather than hitting me hard, it actually made me feel a little better. This situation was so much pain over the last couple of weeks that I reached a point of associating that pain with her, which made me see her differently, rather than my idealized version of her. At least for the last couple of days, I feel better without her here, and a sense of nothing, no feeling at all about the situation... neither bad nor good. Though there is some sense of relief that the worst seems to have past, my appetite has returned, and I'm left with a lot of ambition and real enthusiasm for growing ProcessWire. @Peter Knight Thank you! Great suggestions. I'm such a marketing neophyte, I wouldn't even know how to start. But it sounds like you are on to some really good things here. Something that I can say is that ProcessWire does quite well from the SEO side, thanks to all the content we have here. Though we aren't targeting any specific search terms well, at least from the homepage, I think people are searching for different terms than what we mention. Though I don't know for sure what people are searching for. Any ideas? We probably do need to better target ProcessWire as an AI friendly CMS, but I don't know what searches folks use there. I could be wrong, but currently think being open source is key. I don't think we can really complete with the commercial options (at least on marketing) unless we have an actual business with employees and multiple developers. I think we're better off being the best "open source" option, something that people can use for free. But I can see having a site-licensed "ProcessWire Pro" version that has a broader inclusion of modules (Pro modules), and support built right into the admin. Would this be the sort of thing where there's a set donation amount and by maintaining that amount they get their logo and link in a public-radio style "Made possible with support by..." section on the homepage, footer throughout the site, or similar? I'd be open to it. @maximus So many great ideas! I'm interested in learning more about the "optional standard contract" you mention? Sounds great! Thank you. I think it would be ideal if our Demo page was more of a "Demos" page with multiple examples people could dig into. So there would be an upgraded Skyscrapers example, but there would be others, like what you've mentioned. I'd like to preferably get the store out of IP.Board and into a dedicated service that can handle all the tax rules for different locations around the world. This has been one of the main things holding me back from setting up a ProcessWire store with support for other authors. Between sales, taxes and payouts to authors, it's fairly complicated. If there's an existing service we could use that already has this ability, I think it would be worth spending money on. I do still like the forums, so would use webhooks to handle the management of user roles and access in the forums. I can get a board setup for that here. Or maybe something like a Slack channel would be even better? Thank you, that sounds great!

When I say I have to find ways to grow and make ProcessWIre more sustainable, that doesn't mean changing the model of ProcessWire itself, as an open source project. The ProcessWire core is not a business. Instead what I think is needed: 1. Take all necessary steps grow ProcessWire's user base. • The Skyscrapers demo site is ancient--it needs to be updated or replaced. I think it's so old right now that it turns people away. I have started working on this already. But I think we need more demos too. Is anyone willing to create demo sites that we can link to from ProcessWire.com? Ideally ones that people could see how it works both on the front-end and the back-end. I remember that @bernhard had done a great job of this to showcase some of the modules that he has built, and I think we need more of that kind of thing. • The current blank site profile is great for most of us here, but for new users, it's just not enough to show what ProcessWire can do. We need more compelling site profile options available from the install screen. I'd like a lot more site profile options available. I'd like our installer to be able to pull a list directly from ProcessWire.com and download the site profile as part of the installation. Would anyone be interested in building more starter site profiles for ProcessWire? We need to find the right balance between functionality and keeping the template files simple enough to be easily understandable. Though with so many now using AI, maybe being compelling and showing a lot of functionality carries more weight than having the simplest possible template files. • Much of the recent changes in ProcessWire have been aimed at increasing AI accessibility and discoverability. ProcessWire has 16 years worth of content on the internet, making it especially well known by many LLMs. I think we need to keep directing towards ProcessWire as the ideal CMS to use with AI. We've been building in API.md documenting into all key classes and modules in ProcessWire, we've now got a built-in test suite, and the API has been evolving quite a bit towards making it even simpler for AI agents (and humans) to work with. I think we need to keep this going, but I'd also be interested in any other ideas that you have in this area? • We need a stronger social media presence. We need a lot of help here. For example, there regularly CMS and framework discussions on Reddit's r/webdev and other boards, plus the "looking for alternatives to WordPress" type of threads that appear on Reddit and around the internet. Maybe more needs toe done from the processwire twitter. Can anyone help with the social media side of ProcessWire? • Recent contributions from Konkat for our site and admin theme have helped out a lot recently. I think we'll soon be in in good spot to re-launch ProcessWire with version 4. • Ideally the forums and store should be updated for the new/current PW site design. • What other steps should we take? 2. Improve and expand the services available for ProcessWire that produce income I don't make enough from Pro modules to survive without also doing a lot client work. Compared to client work, they don't add financial stability, though I enjoy the work and think they are useful services. But I need to either: 1) reduce focus on them (perhaps avoiding building new ones) and focus more on client work; or 2) Expand the commercial support and service options (like Pro modules) for ProcessWire. My preference is of course to put my efforts towards expanding Pro stuff if at all possible, sticking to the original mission, but I'm looking for feedback. Pro modules will continue either way though. • If we're successful with #1 above, then this could solve itself over the long term. But I need to make steps for the short term too. • Another thought is to have a new option, a "ProcessWire Pro" yearly plan that includes all of the Pro modules plus commercial support, consulting, proactive monitoring, and more? Not to replace the current Pro modules options, but as an additional option for those that want to use ProcessWire AND have guaranteed support and services (like Pro modules) included. I'm leaning in this direction. What do you think? • What else?

@maximus Thank you, I love what you are building and all of your great ideas. We are so lucky to have you here. I also really appreciate what you said about PW != WP and the difference is a strength, I totally agree. Thank you for your offer to help too, looking forward to future collaboration!

Thanks for all the support, I appreciate it. @cb2004 I'm so sorry to hear you've had to deal with a similar situation. I'd be great to talk with you sometime this week, if you are available?

I mentioned last week that I was dealing with an unexpected family situation. I wanted to give a little more context, as I don’t want you to think the worst. Though for me, it feels like the worst. My wife and I are going through an unexpected divorce/separation after the best 25 years of marriage I can imagine. She informed me of this for our 25th anniversary, after coming back from our Scandinavia trip, and I didn’t see it coming. Going from the happiest part of my life to the lowest in a week was tough. My life partner, best friend and the person I love most in this world is leaving, and it has shaken me to my core. I thought I had the best marriage in the world and was so looking forward to growing old with my wife. But now it’s like I don't know her, she's a different person. Thankfully my kids and cats aren’t going anywhere, so it won’t be too lonely around here. It has understandably taken a lot of my attention and energy over the last two weeks. It’s hard to eat or sleep when you are in hell. But I managed to get a little sleep last night, and woke up today feeling slightly better. I sat at the computer for the first time in awhile, got some issue reports covered, and it feels like it’ll keep getting better from here. I'm still moving slowly, but it feels like some momentum started today, and my hope is that things will be fully back on track in the next couple of weeks. Our household’s financial stability also made it possible for me to spend a lot of time on open source work without ProcessWire itself needing to carry the full financial load. I was always satisfied for ProcessWire to remain a relatively small open source project and community. Now I need it to grow and flourish in order to survive. If you’ve been waiting for ProcessWire to grow, I think this change will be healthy for the project. But I'll need your help, ideas and collaboration. For the moment, I’m still taking things one day at a time, so development and communication may remain slower than usual for a little while, but the engine is at least started again. I appreciate everyone’s patience, understanding and continued support more than I can say. But also know that amid my bad family news, there will be bright spots for all of us in ProcessWire. That I'm sure of. Thank you for your support and for sticking around. So many of you have shown up for me with kindness and encouragement when I’ve needed it most. You are such good friends to me, and I’m deeply thankful to have you here.

Just a brief update this week. I'm going through an unexpected and very difficult situation in my personal/family life right now, and it has temporarily taken most of my attention away from work and ProcessWire. I'm doing okay and getting the support I need, but I expect things may be a little quieter than usual from me for a short while. I just need to give myself some room while I work through what's happening and get back onto more solid ground. I'd hoped to be back to full steam ahead after the long trip I just returned from, but sometimes things happen outside of our control. I'm very much hoping to be focused on ProcessWire next week, but am taking it one day at a time. Thank you for your patience and understanding, and I hope you all have a good weekend.