ProcessWire weekly #1

Official news channels

Just to make things very clear from the beginning, this is in no way an official ProcessWire news source. I'm just posting things that I consider worth some extra exposure. For official news check out these:

• The news stream at processwire.com
• Tweets from @processwire at Twitter
• The newsletters (subscription form is in the footer area of processwire.com)

... and don't forget to register on the forums, that's where most of the interesting stuff really happens!

Module highlights

First of all, here's a screencast showcasing upcoming ProcessWire module called Lister, built by none other than Ryan himself. Lister makes creating custom admin views with really flexible filters a breeze:

Lister isn't available for public quite yet, but super slick Selector Inputfield used in the video has been made available as new core module. It's not in stable branch quite yet, but for the slightly adventurous types ProcessWire's dev branch features this.. and quite a few other goodies too.

Another module you may want to take a look at is called Version Control, developed by yours truly. It brings in version control for page content and supports most core and 3rd party fields right out of the box – including those handling files:

The addition of WireMail interface has resulted in two new modules, Wire Mail SMTP by Horst and Swift Mailer by yours truly. If you ever need to use external mail server (such as Google's free service) or otherwise affect how mails are sent, take a look at these.

All in all there are tons of new and interesting modules around, but we'll have to move on for now – more interesting modules next time!

ProFields

Almost all ProcessWire modules are free as in freedom and beer, but commercial modules exist too. ProFields is a bundle of new commercial modules and an addition to ones we've already got for sale in the ProcessWire store.

Profields are essentially advanced inputfields and/or fieldtypes that make certain tasks easier and enable you to build even cleaner and more flexible UI's with little effort.

Check out screencasts introducing Multiplier and Textareas:

ProcessWire ProFields: Watch this screencast for the 1st ProField called Textareas – https://t.co/VS11gvx25w

— ProcessWire (@processwire) May 12, 2014

Introducing Multiplier– Turns other ProcessWire Fieldtypes into multi-value types! Watch the screencast here: https://t.co/OocOdmGXaa

— ProcessWire (@processwire) May 14, 2014

New core additions

In addition to Selector Inputfield mentioned earlier, PageTables has also made it's way into core. What it does is essentially adding an easy way to view, create, edit and remove related pages within page edit and then access to pages via page field.

Another core addition with huge potential are the subselectors – concept very similar to subqueries in SQL:

These can be used on the 'id' property of any field that maps to a page. It can also be used on the 'parent' property. Subselectors are specified between [square brackets]. Example: $pages->find("template=product, categories.id=[title%=electronics, active=1, include=hidden], include=all");

An addition that might seem subtle but is very notably in large scale use is support for extended pagefile paths. This means that files that were added by users are now managed in a way that eliminates risks of hitting folder limits on some file systems. This change is discussed at Github.

Horst has also been contributing to improve the built-in image handling capabilities. Part of that work has found it's way to core as improvements while other part is about building new ImageMagick replacement for some of the current GD based image features.

Huge thank you is in place for all the people contributing towards making ProcessWires core better and better. All the contributors out there, I salute thee!

ProcessWire 2.5 drawing near

There have been various comments indicating that the release of ProcessWire 2.5 might be drawing near, but the schedule isn't entirely certain yet.

In any case I can say that current dev branch is pretty far ahead of the stable one and pretty stable itself, so that's probably where I'd start if I was going to build a new site right now.

With new features coming in all the time it looks like 2.5 is going to be another huge release.

Finnish ProcessWire meetup

Last but not least, first Finnish ProcessWire meetup at Tampere was organized by forum member apeisa (Antti Peisa of Avoine, the company that has also been sponsoring ProcessWire's development every now and then).

Meetup started with relatively serious discussions about ProcessWire and web dev in general and ended with downing a few beers at local pub, sharing memories of old ventures and reminiscing classic games and such – what a great time!

Antti was kind enough to grab a photo of our group:

#pwmeetup #processwire #success pic.twitter.com/NGSqxtcB59

— Antti Peisa (@apeisa) May 2, 2014

Antti also had a slideshow prepared for the meetup, with some subjects that I've already mentioned here, and some that I haven't, such as the new admin theme for ProcessWire 2.5. Definitely worth checking out.

Stay tuned for next issue

Overall a lot has happened in last few months and there are quite a few new things bubbling right under the surface. This year has already been big for ProcessWire and it's fans alike.. and we're apparently just getting started.

Great things are still to come in the form of modules, sites, products based on ProcessWire just about anything you can imagine.

Thanks for staying with me and stay tuned for our next issue. If you've got any suggestions, please post them to me here (comments), via email (teppo at flamingruby.com works fine) or via Twitter (@teppokoivula).