ProcessWire Weekly #148

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.55

In his latest weekly post at the processwire.com blog Ryan takes the time to introduce ProcessWire 3.0.55. In addition to a whole bunch of minor improvements and bug fixes, the most notable addition in this version is a brand new dropdown page tree feature!

Essentially this new dropdown menu provides a quick way to browse the page tree, and also provides a nice shortcut for both editing existing pages and adding new pages to a specific location. While best suited for the new Uikit admin theme, it is available for the default admin theme too, but currently not for the Reno admin theme.

Another addition made this week applie to Uikit admin theme only, and basically allows you to open the off-canvas sidebar – mainly intended for smaller screens – by clicking the ProcessWire logo at the top of the page. It can be a nice alternative for the top bar for certain use cases, so it makes sense to have it available for large screens too.

For more details about the new dropdown page tree, don't forget to check out Ryan's latest blog post. If you're using the dev branch of ProcessWire for a site of your own, updating to 3.0.55 is recommended, as it contains various minor bugfixes. Thanks!

New module: GUID Generator

GUID Generator is a brand new module developed by Bea Dav. For those not familiar with the term GUID, it stands for something called globally unique identifier. Another name for it would be UUID, as in universally unique identifier.

GUID's are typically used to identify unique pieces of content, and in a nutshell a GUID is a text string separated into various predefined parts. This right here is one example of what a typical GUID might look like: 30dd879c-ee2f-11db-8314-0800200c9a66. As for how unique GUID strings actually are, here's some insight from guidgenerator.com:

[...] if 1,000,000,000 GUIDs per second were generated for 1 year the probability of a duplicate would be only 50%. Or if every human on Earth generated 600,000,000 GUIDs there would only be a 50% probability of a duplicate.

The GUID Generator module adds a new config setting "Generate GUID" to each regular text field. If this option is enabled, the text field in question is automatically made non-editable and populated with a GUID value when a page containing it is being edited: if the field is empty a new GUID is created, otherwise the old value is displayed instead.

If you have any questions or would like to hear more about this module and see some screenshots of it in action, visit the dedicated support forum thread. You can also grab the module directly from GitHub. Big thanks to Bea for sharing this module with us!

New module: Facebook Events

Facebook Events is another new module by Bea Dav. This module provides an easy way to fetch an events feed directly from a Facebook page using Facebook's Graph API and render the contents of said feed on a ProcessWire site.

Using this module is pretty straightforward: first you need to crete a new app for your feed via the Facebook for Developers site, then type in your app's credentials and page details into the settings of this module, and fetch the events via the module's API:

<?php
$events = $modules->get('FacebookEvents')->getEvents();
foreach ($events as $event) {
    // your own markup goes here
}

That's just about it. This module does all the heavy lifting for you, and you can basically just focus on making the feed fit the look and feel of your site. As easy as pie.

If you'd like to hear more about this module and the API methods it provides, or take it for a test drive right away, check out the Facebook Events GitHub repository. If you have questions or feedback, there's also a dedicated support forum thread.

Once again big thanks to Bea for sharing her work with us – we're absolutely thrilled to have her as a part of our community, and we're always happy to feature her work here!

Site of the week: portfolio and blog of Eileen Petzold

Our latest site of the week is the portfolio and blog of German portrait and wedding photographer Eileen Petzold. In addition to her contact details, from this site you'll also find some thoughts about photography as a profession — and a whole lot of wonderful work samples: wedding photos, portraits, scenery, and so on.

Design wise this site is relatively simple, with emphasis on the beautiful photos both in the header and within content itself. The top navigation sits cleanly on top of the site, and the logo in the middle looks just plain awesome. The site is, of course, responsive, and works splendidly on all sizes of screens.

Some behind-the-scenes details we were able to pick up are the use of AIOM+ module for minification, Foundation front-end framework, and some smaller libraries, such as what-input, commonly used for detecting the input method of a visitor. Oh, and some extra kudos for protecting the site with HTTPS and a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate.

Overall this is a really great site: both the design and the tech side are in great shape. We'd like to congratulate both the client, Eileen Petzold, and the developer behind the site, Dennis Spohr, for building this site and sharing it with us. Great job indeed!

Stay tuned for our next issue!

That's it for the 148th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 18th of March. 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!