ProcessWire weekly #10

10th issue of ProcessWire weekly brings up latest news from the ProcessWire community, core and module development and other timely matters. Read on!

First of all, I want to say thank you for all of you who have been reading these weekly posts and encouraging me to keep writing them. Your support for me, the weeklies and ProcessWire as a project mean a lot – thank you, you're awesome!

This issue is a sort of a milestone for ProcessWire weekly. Ten is a nice round number and almost calls for a celebration on it's own, but that's not all; we're now also featured at processwire.com. Take a look at the footer area and latest news section too.

In other news, anyone subscribed to ProcessWire newsletters will be getting some extra content soon – but let's not ruin the surprise quite yet ;-)

Brief summary of latest updates in ProcessWire's dev branch

Latest updates in the dev branch of ProcessWire include ..

  • small optimizations for in-memory selectors and .htaccess (where requests for invalid URLs are now by default sent directly to 404 page),
  • various improvements related to command-line use, including a fix for user role checking
  • introduction of some template-level settings previously only available in advanced mode to 'Advanced' tab and
  • a new system that alerts superusers of outdated .htacces or index.php files.

One relatively small but useful update is the addition of a list of run-time settings at the end of /wire/config.php. These can't be overwritten in /site/config.php, but it's good to have documentation about what these options are and how they work in one place.

There's also one new config variable, $config->cli, which returns true if ProcessWire recognizes being used from command-line.

ProcessWire tutorials section, content by Joss Sanglier and Ryan Cramer

This is probably the one news item you really don't want to miss this week: Joss and Ryan have been working on a brand new tutorials section at processwire.com. If you're looking for a place to start learning ProcessWire and prefer to learn by example, this is your best bet.

I haven't yet had the chance to follow these new tutorials, but knowing just how awesome Joss is as a storyteller and writer and how well Ryan knows the things he talks about (well, he did build ProcessWire, after all..) they should be interesting to follow, to say the least.

There's already content for both beginner and intermediate level users, so be sure to head there (but only after this post, of course).

Schedule Cloud Backups for ProcessWire

Just a few weeks after Nelson Mendes' Amazon S3 / Cloudfront module was published, we've got another module that utilises Amazon S3 for file storage – this time with a slightly different angle: Schedule Cloud Backups by David Robertson introduces the ability to schedule automatic backups of a site to S3 cloud storage.

The concept is simple, really: set up a cron task to load a page every day and the module takes care of creating an SQL dump file, packaging your site's assets and delivering those behind the scenes to Amazon S3. According to David's comments in the support forum thread for the module, support for other storage engines might be added later.

For those looking to easily secure their sites from disasters small and large, this is a great tool to know. Even if you already have your server-level backups worked out, restoring entire server can take some time. Reinstalling a site from SQL dump and assets package is fast and easy.

Congratulations to David for his first (public) ProcessWire module – great work!

Highlights from the forum: how-to for creating PDF files and module updates

Creating PDF files from ProcessWire with custom template code is quite simple, as this tutorial by Can explains. The tutorial and provided sample code walk you through all the steps you'll need to take in order to build your own, custom-made template for spitting out PDF files.

For those who prefer a module solution over custom template code, Wanze has just posted a new dev release of his refactored Pages2Pdf module. This version adds support for MPDF via separate WirePDF module, makes it possible to create PDFs from any page and introduces various minor improvements.

In other news this week, PassiveCron is nearing it's first public beta; the plan is to start beta testing next week. In the meantime, Marvin from Conclurer, the company behind upcoming PassiveCron and already existing minimize.pw service, has posted new screenshots of PassiveCron's dashboard and reports views.

If you ask me, the service is starting to look really cool!

Read the CMS Critic ProcessWire vs. WordPress article yet?

This was already mentioned in previous ProcessWire weekly, but considering the attention it still gets in various places, it probably won't hurt to mention it again: CMS Critic has recently posted an article comparing WordPress and ProcessWire, sparking a bit of discussion.

The post is worth reading – and so are the comments it has received. If you've got an opinion on the article or the points raised in the comments and would like to share your opinion, why don't you take the time to add your voice to the discussion?

Keep in mind, though, that there are at least as many opinions as there are developers. If you are like me and believe that ProcessWire is the most awesome system out there, never hesitate to say it out loud, but a little bit of friendliness rarely hurts.. no-one wants to turn a sensible discussion into an all-out flame war after all.

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for ProcessWire weekly #10 – hope you've enjoyed reading our little weekly summary. We'll be back with more news next week. In the meantime, if you enjoy using ProcessWire and haven't done so yet, don't forget to nominate it for Critics Choice CMS Awards.

ProcessWire weekly #11 will be out Saturday, 26th of July. Until then, happy hacking with ProcessWire!

This post has 4 comments:

SiNNuT on Saturday 19th of July 2014 13:38 pm

Congrats on the 10th PW weekly! Good stuff as usual.

One thing, if i look at the html source of http://www.theartofdining.co.uk/ i see a whole lot of Wordpress stuff, which would lead me to conclude that this thing isn't PW powered.

Teppo on Saturday 19th of July 2014 19:13 pm

SiNNuT, very good point. Looks like the site has been rebuilt since. Updating the post now, thanks!

For anyone reading this, due to inadequate fact-checking from my part and relying on old information this post used to introduce another site of the week. I've just updated the post to introduce the site that was, in fact, supposed to appear in next weeks post. I'm sorry for the unnecessary confusion.

David Robertson on Wednesday 23rd of July 2014 23:40 pm

Thanks for the mention!

Ivan Gretsky on Thursday 24th of July 2014 14:41 pm

Congrats! Your blog has made it to the ProcessWire frontpage!

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