Ivan Gretsky

@ryan, this all is such an ordeal you have to go through! And I am sorry if some of my recent postings here were not really helping. Do know that you're not alone in this. A lot of people all around the world are thinking and caring about you and your family. Over the years I am here in the forums my family and my friends got to know about not only ProcessWire but you personally as well. Ryan is not a widely used name here in Russia, so they all know exactly who am I talking about when I call it. The kids know your avatar as they grew up seeing it on my screen like every day. So you are an important person in our lives. And of course we all wish you and your family the best. Just know that. It will work out somehow.

Still had 403 a couple of times today and right now too at https://processwire.com/talk/discover/7 (with or without ending slash).

I am sure Maxim is right that the conversation here is really not about technology. But it is about psychology I would say. It so happened that several times in my life I have been in and around small businesses that reached their limit and had to make the next step to grow. They all had really similar problems. The main one was the reluctance of the man in charge to give up some control for the growth. And there usually were challengers that tried to push the change. New government structure. New goals. They were ambitious enough to stake everything on advancing their ideas. And the man in charge has rarely explicitly stated that he disagrees. But he always restricted those challengers citing concern for clients, employees, and the like. Most of the time the challengers had to leave the organization at some point. And it usually took some extraordinary circumstances for their ideas to be realized (mostly without them being onboard anymore anyway). I was such a challenger a couple of times myself. I had been in a position of a man in charge and lost talented employees already. I now see it as a pattern. Right now I am in a kind of similar position with my son starting to confront me to get his freedom and grown-up status. This example is a little off track. But isn't PW Ryan's beloved creation and lifetime project? I can see how hard it is for me to let my son have his way. That must be the case with Ryan and PW too. I think that ProcessWire has been in such a crisis several times already. And it never have chosen to grow before. Several talented challengers brought their passion and ideas to the table and had to leave (or to agree to the way things are going as myself) as the course of development was not going to change. Last time the challenger was (is?) Bernhard. He had and still has silent support among some of the respected and known community members. Who choose not to go all the way as they have seen this type of conflict several times already. But they are somehow vocal and speak up. Not as loud as Bernhard, but they do. If it was all like before, Bernhard just leaves and everything comes back to slow peace again. But now it is different. Ryan himself is explicitly wanting change. Unfortunately, this happens due to traumatic events. But that is actually almost the only way the significant growth happens. It doesn't go smooth. This time just might be the great chance for ProcessWire. Despite the hardships and resentment. In fact, only because of them. But yes, we need all the understanding and forgiveness we can get to take this chance. But not only that. We need to start doing things differently (that is the core of any change). I can see this difference in hearing each other and working together. Easier said than done, right? But I have a plan: Form a group of proactive community members ready to work together, and dedicate time to developing PW under Ryan's leadership. Come up with a list of initial questions to discuss. Gather this group on video call with someone playing a moderator role. Work online and write down some initial plan with which we can all agree Work on that plan together with regular meetings. Inform everyone. My point is that those hard positions are not something to be afraid of. They are the basis of a possible growth. But you can't grow and stay small in the same time. I do believe that there is a bright future for ProcessWire. And I can see Ryan and all of us enjoy it.

I personally dislike this a lot. And I do not think that this would bring in more audience either. In my vision PW is an advanced alternative to free and open source things like WP, Drupal, Joomla! and past days Modx. For a wide international crowd that would probably be an argument against PW. It could be beneficial for sales in US and EU to some extent. But with this decision PW needs to be more geared towards some specific needs of the target audience, find its niche and listen to the feedback more. Which is not its inherent strong point as we can see from the discussion above. I do not think that there is a problem with the governance being authoritarian rather than meritocratic. For me the problem that does not allow PW to grow is sometimes the absence of governance at all) Some more clear leadership, publicity, explanation would already solve many problems. Each time @ryan himself answers here in the forum like he did above to @bernhard's post inspires me a lot and gives perspective. But that's rare. I know for sure many of the forum members know not what to expect or how to emphasize an idea or make a proposal or help when the eagerly want to. And if there were some kind of a team to PW having some shared view that could be solved easily. That's my feeling too. I like that PW can be used almost without any modules and it is it's strong point. I do not want it to become needing everyday security updates or not working without some expensive subscription or modules. In fact I would prefer less Pro modules (with AI we might soon end up with all of them having open source alternatives if not obsolete - see what @maximus is rolling out like every few days))) and more community support. Like a fund or foundation. Combining the 2 together I would pay a yearly subscription to be a part of the PW development council (just to sit and listen with a rare chance to say something)) Nowadays community, ideas, enthusiasm are once again in value and maybe now more than the skills or technology itself.

@Pete, this seems to be an ongoing issue affecting many of us. I am so used to look through the recently updated list that I actually do not even know how do I navigate the other way. And I get 403 almost every time I hit https://processwire.com/talk/discover/7/ We need to do something about it ASAP!

Those are backups created automatically by UI module installer/upgrader, you are right. You can safely remove them. Ignore them in .gitignore if you use git.

Thanks for this useful post 🙏! I think this kind of tutorials are very important. To make it even more practical, could you somehow share a step by step workflow? Not what to do, but exactly how you think it should be done. What tools, what commands, where to look for what. Maybe I'm asking for too much. It's better to ask than not) What migration strategy, module, tool do you use? Could you elaborate on this a bit?

Let everything work out for the best. We're here with you.

🐞Bug report confirmed (from my side)))

Yerd looks like really cool! It is written in Rust, so has all the hype needed! The Windows version is planned for end of August as I can see from their roadmap. So have to wait a bit to try as Windows is still my primary workhorse. The other thing is it doesn't seem to have Apache. So it might be not so easy to use it with ProcessWire. Flyenv is in TypeScript, so less hype here. But it has an MCP for AI. Not sure it is needed on that level. But still trendy. End it offers support for not only PHP but some other languages and runtimes. And it has Apache. So must be suitable for ProcessWire. I have started to use mise for CLI tooling and as a simple task runner. I have found some cool CLI tools using it. End it is able to easily install many of those new shiny AI agent tools in the project scope. But I do not think it can handle environment for a PHP project like ProcessWire. At least I do not know how to do it. Really cool topic by the way! So many tools emerge nowadays! So many new possibilities that seemed hard and almost impossible for a solo dev or small team just a few years ago.

Wow, @maximus! This is a great idea for a module! I can see it is on LQRS' 404 too. Going to try this! A few little glitches I've spotted on LQRS: The module fires on every search request and outputs the generated content at the top. Even when there are results. That might be distracting users from real pages. LLM hallucinates links to non-existing pages when I ask for them directions based on my request. Might tell it to only give existing links.

Just tried Kimi K3 with Kilo via Openrouter on a rather small task. But with a lot of custom code and hooks to find and read. It dug deep, tested well, used agent tools like it should and wrote in align with all the rules I gave it. But spent a lot of time. A good one but might be an overkill for easy stuff.

Wow! Excited to be on the same continent with you! Welcome and have fun!) What should one do to get this level of promotion 😆 ?!

Thanks @gebeer! Love is something that unites people. There are different kinds of love and love to a PW module is certainly a valid one. Any kind of love is IMHO an expression of openness to something outside yourself. Willingness to accept and even incorporate something seemingly foreign. Another human being. Another style of writing code. Another vision of the future. Another business model. Another opinion. My relationships with RockMigrations is too of hard road to love. I didn't accept its bloated nature and desire to bring the whole Rock infrastructure with it)) But I learned the way to ignore and work around those. And even built a complex PW scaffolding script using this super module. And I have met its author, a passionate man and developer. I am writing this knowing that Bernhard has almost quit the PW community. I know what brought him to this decision. And that was kind of a lack of love. So I think this post is a great one and I totally agree with it 100%. And I wish that everyone here, including @ryan, @bernhard, @Pete (and actually everyone) would consider finding time, energy... humility and open mindedness to give ProcessWire and its daughter RockMigrations a bit more family love. A love that would raise them both to a greater future. A love that no AI could ever give. A love that is the core of this community which has so much unrealized potential. Peace ☮️

IMHO the categories do not mean much nowadays. At least for an experienced forum user. I never go to categories list first but always start with recently updated topics. Most of the time I do not even know the category the post is in. And when I need to find something I search. I go to the category list when I want to get help on modules, especially Ryan's pro modules. The other case is when I create a new post. And that is when it gets confusing. I can never decide where to put it. I can see not difference between Getting started, General support, API and templates and even Modules/Plugins as any of my questions usually relates to all of them somehow. Not to say there is not such thing as "plugin" in PW. It all might seem quite different for a newcomer though. And if we know for sure that affects the community friendliness we should change that. But I actually do not know how. Just maybe some overenthusiastic forum member can push the changes. Or AI will help) Anyway, anything concerning the forums mechanics should at least mention @Pete))) P.S. I am pretty sure forum engines have some cool features nowadays, like tagging and more. And even though the forum as a communication format seem to vanish, we still can try to use more of those new features here. As we, old school nerds are still using 'em)