ProcessWire Weekly #115

The 115th issue of ProcessWire Weekly brings in all the latest news from the ProcessWire community. Modules, sites, and more. Read on!

This has been an amazing week and we're once again happy to share the latest news with you folks. The highlights of the week are a new Markup module by @flydev, some pretty awesome core updates by Ryan, and two extremely detailed and helpful tutorials by Ben Byford and Francesco Schwarz – both geared towards ProcessWire beginners.

Regarding those tutorials, it's also pretty great to see that we're getting noticed in what one might describe as web design / development mainstream media: one of them was published by Tuts+, the other at Smashing Magazine. Can't get much bigger than that!

Thanks to all of our readers for being here with us again, and as always, any feedback is most welcome – please don't hesitate to drop us a line if there's anything in your mind you'd like to share with us. Enjoy our latest issue and have a great weekend!

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 2.8.27 and 3.0.27

Last week we introduced the concept of paginated Fieldtypes, something that Ryan has been working on behind the scenes to make some of our fieldtypes scale way beyond what they've been able to scale until now. This week these updates have made their way to the core, though their impact is still pretty low for most users.

Major updates to the ProFields Table fieldtype

If you're using the Table Fieldtype from the commercial ProFields package, you can now give the latest beta version, v14, a try. This version adds support for pagination, sorting, and filtering – essentially allowing it to work nicely with any number of rows.

ProFields Table is the first Fieldtype to make use of the new pagination features, which means that most users probably won't see their effects quite yet. In the future we'll be adding pagination support to more core modules, so stay tuned for that.

When can we expect a new stable release of ProcessWire?

In his weekly blog post Ryan addresses a question that gets asked every now and then: when will a stable 3.0 version of ProcessWire come out? The brief answer is that there's still no solid time frame for this, but technically 3.0 is already "ready", and will most likely be released very soon.

As you folks probably already know, our current development versions 3.0 and 2.8 are practically speaking identical, the only difference being that 3.0 includes namespaces and 2.8 doesn't. For this reason they are likely to be released at the same time, which makes this our very first double release.

In the meantime please feel free to give the devns branch or the pw28 repository a try if you'd like to get an early look into our upcoming stable releases. For more details about the latest core updates, our future plans, and more please check out Ryan's latest post at the processwire.com blog!

New module: Markup Google reCAPTCHA

Spam is a common nuisance for website admins, and most of you are probably familiar with captchas – those pesky little inputs that ever so often ask you what a particularly unreadable word, or a pair of words, really says. For a long time captchas were the de facto standard approach to combating contact form spam on the web.

The downside of captchas is that, in addition to being quite obtrusive, they pose some serious usability issues. This is why Google decided to reinvent the whole concept with their own reCAPTCHA service, resulting in a modern alternative that simply asks you to check a box if you're human – and what's even better, it actually works!

Markup Google reCAPTCHA makes integrating reCAPTCHA to your own forms, whether they were built with native elements and the API or plain HTML markup, a trivial task. Configuring the module requires a free API key for the reCAPTCHA service, but actually using it is often as simple as embedding a couple of lines of code into a template file.

Check out the README file at GitHub for more details or grab the module directly from the modules directory. For questions and general support, please visit the dedicated Markup Google reCAPTCHA support thread at our support forum.

Big thanks to @flydev for sharing this module with us!

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.

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: The Eats and Sweets Essay Contest

The Eats and Sweets Essay Contest is more than just a great site: it's a great site with an interesting story behind it. The owners are hosting an essay competition where the author of the best essay wins the Eats and Sweets business.

This is not charity, though: the minimum entry fee for the contest is $150 for an essay of 200 words, with the option of spending more for a chance to submit a longer essay. Still, that's a pretty good deal, especially for the winner. If you'd like to hear more about the contest, check out the Eats and Sweets Essay Contest FAQs page.

This site is powered by version 2.6 of ProcessWire and includes a bunch of third party modules, such as Fieldtype Star Rating, Process Page Field Select, ListerPro, ProFields, and Fieldtype Range Slider. For more details about the implementation we'd suggest contacting the designer and developer behind the site, Joshua Gatcke of 99Lime.

The site itself is relatively simple, but does still have some pretty neat visuals, a bunch of animations, and a particularly refined tool for submitting contest entries. According to Joshua, the client was deeply involved with creating and adding the content for the site – a feat made possible in part by ProcessWire.

Thanks to Joshua for sharing this site with us – it's definitely a great site and the story behind it is quite intriguing to say the least. We hope that the contest results in many awesome entries and that Eats and Sweets finds a happy new owner!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 115th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 30th of July. 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!

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