ProcessWire Weekly #155

This week on the processwire.com blog: processwire.com is now powered by Amazon AWS

This week in the processwire.com blog Ryan provides us with some details about the migration of processwire.com, and all it's sibling sites, from a dedicated server at IBM Softlayer to a fully cloud-based Amazon AWS environment. Here are some highlights from Ryan's post:

• We're using a proper combination of different Amazon services, including EC2 for our web servers, RDS for MariaDB databases, EBS, Cloudfront for our CDN needs, and Route53 for all our DNS services.
• The migration process went smoothly, with virtually no downtime at all – apart from some forum issues, which we'll leave for Ryan to explain. All in all it was a smooth transition, and things are running every bit as fast as before.
• Big thanks for the smoothness of this migration go to Jan VandenHengel of Perago Solutions. Jan is the one who helped us migrate from ServInt to IBM Softlayer last year, and thanks to him we're now in an even better place in terms of hosting.

In other news ProcessWire 3.0.61, released just last week, has been doing great. No big hiccups so far, and so on. We should have a new 2.8.x version ready soon too – that's something we'll cover in more detail in one of our future issues.

Ryan has also been busy working on a new version of ProDrafts, which should add support for Repeaters. ProDrafts is a commercial module that enables you to maintain separate draft and live versions of any page. Read more about ProDrafts here.

For more details about the weekly updates, and the AWS migration in particular, don't forget to check out Ryan's latest post at the processwire.com blog and the related support forum thread. Thanks!

Weekly forum highlights, tutorials, and other online resources

This time our highlights of the week have a clear theme: introducing some of the latest helper modules that don't necessarily require a section of their own, and reintroducing some modules and tools that have recently received updates.

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. Thanks in advance!

• Ben Byfords brand new PostProcessURL is a tiny helper module that truncates page name to a pre-defined length when the page is saved. Seems like a really handy feature for cases where you need to limit the length of URLs.
• Another new helper module was just released by Bea Dav and is called Template Cache Overview. This module provides an overview screen for checking the cache status, and includes handy shortcuts for clearing cache for a specific template.
• Tense, the command-line tool for running tests against multiple versions of ProcessWire, is in active development and has just recently received another helpful update introducing a new beforeCmd setting for running commands before tests but after a new ProcessWire instance has been set up.
• You may also want to check out the latest update to the Media Manager module by Kongondo – by far the most advanced media management solution available for ProcessWire. This update provides usability and i18n related improvements.
• Last but not least, a module providing an easy way to read EXIF metadata from images, Image Metadata EXIF Read, has officially made it's way to the modules directory. Built by Horst, this module was first introduced in our 116th issue.

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 Crafters

Our latest site of the week belongs to The Crafters, a Belgian company offering a wide range of cocktail and catering services: cocktail lounge, booze truck, tastings, workshops, coffee and tea bar, non-alcoholic juice bar – pretty much anything and everything beverage-related.

This site was first introduced in our support forum just this week, and the front-end of the site is based on Semantic UI. In case you're not familiar with it, Semantic UI is a front-end development framework designed with themeability and human-friendly language in mind — let's just say that it's a very interesting project in itself.

What one will no doubt find the most striking feature on this site is the design: the site of The Crafters looks really, really awesome. The layout is interesting and easy to follow, patterns and photographs are used to liven the site up, and typography is no less than top-notch. Complete with some well placed transitions and progressive image rendering, all in all this is one of the most beautiful sites we've come across in a while.

Behind the scenes the site is running a recent version of ProcessWire – 3.0.55 according to metadata – and protected with HTTPS using a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. There are very few traces of specific modules on this site; in fact the only one we were able to recognize was Simple Contact Form, powering the contact form on the site.

Congratulations to The Crafters for a wonderful site, and thanks to Pieterjan Maes for sharing this site with us. As always, we're really happy to see more great, ProcessWire powered sites like this!

Stay tuned for our next issue!

That's it for the 155th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 6th of May. 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!