ProcessWire Weekly #142

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.51 and a new site profile

In his latest post at the processwire.com blog Ryan introduces a new site profile he's been working on. While we'd definitely suggest reading Ryan's in-depth explanation – plus checking out the site profile and perhaps even taking it for a test drive yourself – here are some key facts to get you started:

• It's a basic yet fully functional site profile with a built-in blog, category support, etc. While you could use it as-is, it's also a great starting point for a completely customized site.
• The site profile makes extensive use of the recently introduced markup regions output strategy and includes a template showcasing ProcessWire's native front-end editing support.
• The front-end of the site profile is based on the Uikit 3 front-end framework and the site profile also includes a PHP library with Uikit specific helper functions. In case you're not familiar with Uikit, feel free to check out the Uikit docs too.

While the big news this week is definitely the release of a new site profile, some minor core updates also found their way into our latest development release now available from GitHub, ProcessWire 3.0.51:

• Inputfield objects now support an alternative, short way of setting and getting attributes: $inputfield->val() and $inputfield->val('new value').
• New "Save + Publish + Add Another" option was added to the submit button in Process Page Add when the template of the page being added has a title only.

For more details about the new site profile, remember to check out Ryan's weekly post at the processwire.com blog. Thanks!

New module: Inputfield Dependent Checkboxes

Inputfield Dependent Checkboxes is a new module with a pretty self-explanatory name: it allows you to add multiple collections of checkboxes so that each selection affects the options available for selection in consequent checkbox collections. The concept behind this module is pretty similar to the commercial Dynamic Selects module:

If you'd like to know more about this module, we'd suggest that you visit the dedicated support forum thread, where the developer of the module, gebeer, provides step-by-step instructions and also a real-world use case for this module. You can grab the module directly from GitHub.

Big thanks to gebeer for sharing this very useful module with us!

New module: FieldtypeFileS3

FieldtypeFileS3 is a new Fieldtype module that adds support for uploading files directly to S3, which is a "simple, durable, massively scalable object storage" – or, in layman's terms, a cloud based file storage – provided by Amazon as a part of the AWS platform.

Developed by fbg13, FieldtypeFileS3 can be used as a replacement for the built-in file field, FieldtypeFile. Since the intended usage for this module is uploading files to the cloud, files added to a FieldtypeFileS3 field are not only automatically uploaded to S3, but also removed from the local disk as soon as the page is saved.

For the most part FieldtypeFileS3 behaves like FieldtypeFile, but there's one difference in API usage: instead of $page->files->eq(0)->url you can request the URL of a file by calling $page->files->eq(0)->s3url(). There's also a module setting that allows storing files locally, effectively converting FieldtypeFileS3 fields to regular file fields.

If you have any questions, please check out the dedicated support forum thread. Big thanks to fbg13 for sharing this module with us – it's definitely a useful tool and no doubt something that'll come very handy in future projects deployed to AWS!

Site of the week: iLötscher

Our latest site of the week belongs to iLötscher, an informatics company based in Zürich, Switzerland. They specialize in Apple devices and networks, and their responsive, ProcessWire powered site was designed and developed by ED Design.

This is a relatively simple site, but the clean design – a familiar style to those who have seen the work of ED Design before – feels comfortable to use, and the overall look and feel of the site is in line with the that of Apple itself – which is definitely a nice touch for a company focusing on their products.

In our tests the site performed very well, and the use of a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt to secure all connections to the site adds a certain level of credibility. It's also a sensible move in the light of Google's recent Chrome announcements – and, as most of you probably already knew, because HTTPS is good for SEO.

All in all we're happy to have this site featured in our sites directory. Big thanks to ED Design for sharing this site with us and congratulations to the client for a fantastic, responsive, and well performing site.

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 142nd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 4th of February. 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!