Fresh-install welcome page browser title is "Wheels - Error" — _header_simple.cfm hardcodes the error-page title

[bpamiri]

Repro

Boot any fresh 4.0.x app (verified on CommandBox + wheels-base-template 4.0.3, Lucee 7.0.4.34) and load the homepage. The congratulations/welcome page renders correctly ('Running successfully', Wheels 4.0.3) but the browser tab says Wheels - Error.

Root cause

vendor/wheels/public/views/congratulations.cfm:6 includes ../layout/_header_simple.cfm, and vendor/wheels/public/layout/_header_simple.cfm:39 hardcodes:

<title>Wheels - Error</title>

The header partial was written for the error page and reused by the welcome page without parameterizing the title. Still present on origin/develop at the same line.

Impact

The very first impression of every successful fresh install — LuCLI and CommandBox alike — is a tab titled 'Error'. Cosmetic but maximally visible.

Suggested fix

Parameterize the title (e.g. <cfparam name="pageTitle" default="Wheels"> in the partial, set pageTitle before the include in congratulations.cfm vs the error view), or default the partial title to plain 'Wheels'.

Evidence from audit journey j1-template-install, 2026-06-12.

[wheels-bot]

Wheels Bot — Triage

Classified as bug.

The report describes observable wrong behavior with a clear "what happened" (browser tab reads Wheels - Error on a successful fresh-install welcome page) vs. "what I expected" (a non-error title), plus a verified root cause. Confirmed against develop: vendor/wheels/public/layout/_header_simple.cfm:39 hardcodes <title>Wheels - Error</title>, and vendor/wheels/public/views/congratulations.cfm:6 includes that partial for the welcome page.

Suspected layer

view — see .ai/wheels/views/ for canonical patterns. The defect is entirely in the static view chrome under vendor/wheels/public/.

Fix sketch

congratulations.cfm is the only consumer of _header_simple.cfm (verified — no error view includes it), so the simplest correct fix is to change the hardcoded <title>Wheels - Error</title> at _header_simple.cfm:39 to a non-error title (e.g. Wheels). A more robust variant matches the issue suggestion: <cfparam name="pageTitle" default="Wheels"> at the top of the partial and emit <title>#pageTitle#</title>, letting any future consumer set the title before the <cfinclude>. Either way it is a single-file, cosmetic, static-markup change with no logic, no cross-engine API surface, and no data path.

Confidence: high

Single-file static-view edit with an unambiguous layer and a confirmed root cause; no design trade-offs, cross-engine, security, migration, or DI concerns trigger an auto-downgrade.

[wheels-bot]

Wheels Bot — Fix proposed

Draft PR: #3187

Spec: vendor/wheels/tests/specs/view/HeaderSimpleTitleSpec.cfc — failing → passing
Implementation: vendor/wheels/public/layout/_header_simple.cfm, vendor/wheels/events/EventMethods.cfc

One correction to the triage: _header_simple.cfm is not consumed only by congratulations.cfm — EventMethods.cfc:104 also includes it to render the error page, where Wheels - Error is the correct title. So the partial's <title> is parameterized (defaults to Wheels; the error handler sets request.wheels.pageTitle = "Wheels - Error") rather than flat-swapped, which would have broken the error-page title.

Transparency note: the local tools/test-local.sh runner could not be executed in this bot environment — the wheels CLI binary is not installed (the server aborts with nohup: failed to run command 'wheels') and the sandbox confines filesystem access to the repo working tree. The failing→passing verification is therefore delegated to CI (bot-tdd-gate + the compat-matrix TestBox suite). This is called out in the PR body's checklist.

A human review is required before merge. The Reviewer will weigh in shortly. Doc updates (MDX guides, .ai/wheels/, CLAUDE.md) are handled separately by bot-update-docs.yml.