ProcessWire Weekly #102

On the processwire.com blog this week: the API reference for the 3.x branch is here!

This week there are no feature updates for the core, but we've got something really neat in terms of documentation instead: as Ryan explains in his latest processwire.com blog post, the new, extensive and automated API reference for the 3.x branch of ProcessWire is finally out and includes details and examples about all the available API variables.

Automated API reference?

One common issue with documentation is that it's often separated from the product it is intended for. When the product is updated, the documentation needs to be updated separately, or it will become stale. The only thing worse than no documentation is wrong documentation.

By "automated" we mean that, at the moment, our API reference is automatically kept in sync between the ProcessWire installation running processwire.com and the reference. This task is handled by the ProcessWireAPI module, which is something that Ryan built specifically for this purpose.

Good things take time

Documentation is an important asset for all software projects out there and, in this regard, ProcessWire is no exception. We need to make sure that it's as solid as the platform itself: it needs to be helfpul for both new and old users of all skill levels.

The work with the API reference and our other documentation is currently ongoing and we've still got a whole bunch of things to figure out. Among those is finding a way to combine what we already have – such as the awesome cheatsheet – with what the ProcessWireAPI module has to offer in terms of automation.

Hopefully we'll have more details to share in the near future, but for now it should be enough to say that we've just taken a very important first step. Time will show where exactly this road takes us.

Don't forget to check out Ryan's latest blog post for more details and, of course, the 3.x API reference itself. For next week we've also got more updates planned for the newly released API reference, so stay tuned for those.

New module by Bernhard Baumrock: InputfieldFileSort

InputfieldFileSort is a new module by Bernhard Baumrock. InputfieldFileSort provides automatic sorting for uploaded files and images: when enabled, all the files in specific file or image fields will be sorted based on field-level sort settings.

Please note that, while this module is already functional, it is still at an early stage of development and should be considered an alpha release. There are still some quirks that need to be worked out, but overall the module looks promising.

For more details about the module, it's current status, and a GIF of the module in action, don't forget to check out the support forum thread. Thanks to Bernhard for sharing your work with us – this looks like a very useful feature, and will definitely come in handy for all sorts of real-world situations!

New module by Philipp 'Soma' Urlich: ClearCacheAdmin

Another new module we're introducing this week was built by Philipp 'Soma' Urlich and is known simply as ClearCacheAdmin.

What this little beauty does is that it adds a new menu for the admin with a bunch of shortcuts for clearing out specific caches – and also an admin page for clearing multiple caches at once.

One reason why ProcessWire is so effective is the fact that it makes extensive use of all sorts of caching methods. There are caches ranging from the $cache API variable intended for template and module use to various automatic ones, such as the FileCompiler cache found only from ProcessWire 3.x.

By default each cache is cleared in context, which means that there's no "cache clearing view" to be found anywhere. This is why ClearCacheAdmin is so useful: it provides handy shortcuts for clearing exactly the caches you need without the need to figure out where and how a specific cache can be cleared.

Thanks to Soma for sharing this module with us – it's a welcome addition and can become particularly useful during the development phase of a new site!

Weekly forum highlights, tutorials, and other online resources

Here we've got a new collection of support forum highlights and other useful and/or interesting resources. As always please let us know if there's anything important we've missed so that we can include it in one of our future issues!

• First of all a module update some of you might've missed: the Multisite module, originally built by Antti Peisa and now managed by Soma, received a big update back in February. At that time, among other things, module config settings were moved to config.php. Now, thanks to Bea Dav, this module has received another update that makes site-level module configuration easy as pie!
• Another module-related highlight is the Tinify PHP Client for ProcessWire. While already usable, this module isn't necessarily something we'd call "production ready" quite yet. Stay tuned for more updates on this one!
• Maurizio Bonani has just recently released the third part of his awesome Basic ProcessWire website workflow series of blog posts. This time Maurizio goes into more detail about some of the most popular ProcessWire module out there.
• Talking about tutorials, Leonid Lezner has just recently made a pretty extensive series of YouTube video tutorials available for all the German speaking users of ProcessWire. For non-native speakers this could be a perfect chance to level up your language skills!
• Last but not least, there's an interesting announcement from Mark Goldsmith in which he explains that the website he built for The Chapel using ProcessWire is now open source and available for anyone to download via GitHub. Check out Mark's blog post for more details about the open source church website!

If you're interested in ProcessWire news, discussions, and updates, there's always something going on at the support forum. Since we're only able to include a tiny selection of all that in our weekly updates, head down to the forum for more.

Site of the week: Into Nature

Our latest site of the week belongs to Into Nature, an "art expedition" located at the province of Drenthe in the Netherlands. Judging from all the different locations they're utilizing for Into Nature, it really does seem like an expedition!

Being a site for an art exhibition there are obviously certain expectations to be met, and as a site Into Nature is definitely unique in various ways. Another thing that makes Into Nature unique is the sheer size of the event in terms of locations: there are a total of 17 unique locations to visit, which is why the site also has a strong focus on maps.

From a technical point of view there's quite a bit going on behind the scenes. The site was built by Eelke Feenstra, and in a recent forum post Eelke has kindly shared some insights into how he built the site using Ember.js and a RESTful JSON API provided by ProcessWire with some help from the REST helper by @clsource.

Big thanks to Eelke for sharing your work with us. The site is only available in Dutch, but worth checking out nevertheless. Google Translator also seems to do a decent job here for anyone interested in learning more about the event and the artists involved.

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 102nd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 30th of April. As always, ProcessWire newsletter subscribers will get our updates a few days later.

Thanks for staying with us, once again. Hope you've had a great and productive week, and don't forget to check out the ProcessWire forums for more interesting topics. Until next week, happy hacking with ProcessWire!