ProcessWire Weekly #158

On the processwire.com blog this week: ProcessWire 2.8.62, ongoing projects, and some thoughts about ProcessWire's usage

In the latest post at the processwire.com blog Ryan talks a bit about the legacy branch of ProcessWire, which has just been bumped to version 2.8.62, bringing it up to date with our current master branch. Legacy branch is, for the most part, identical with our master branch – the main difference being that it doesn't use PHP's namespaces.

Other than that, this week there were no major additions to the core, as Ryan himself has been pretty busy with other stuff. We should get back up to speed by next week, and just to summarise, here's what's on Ryan's plate right now:

• Implementing a built-in page export/import feature
• Further developing the Uikit based admin theme
• New site profiles for ProcessWire 3.x
• Pro module additions and updates

For more details, you should check out Ryan's post. The page export/import feature in particular seems very promising, and Ryan already has a whole bunch of details to share about how it's most likely going to work.

In other news, ProcessWire is now more popular than ever. Not a big surprise, really, and in his post Ryan also shares some of his views regarding popularity, and why it's actually not even that important for us. Obviously we hope that more people benefit from ProcessWire, but as Ryan summarises it:

Our focus has always been to be the best CMS according to our standards rather than anyone else's.

That's it for the core updates section this week. Don't forget to check out the weekly processwire.com blog post for more details. Thanks!

New tutorial by Ben Byford: 7 Tricks and Tips to Help You Become a ProcessWire Master

In his latest tutorial submission for Envato Tuts+, labeled 7 Tricks and Tips to Help You Become a ProcessWire Master, Ben Byford shares some pretty handy tips and tricks for mastering ProcessWire:

1. Bulk delete images in Admin using a built-in, but often missed, feature
2. Regain entry to the ProcessWire backend after losing your password
3. Migrate from WordPress to ProcessWire with some select tools
4. Upgrade your ProcessWire installation safely and with ease
5. Gracefully halt the output in any one of your template files
6. Add global functionality, functions and such, for your site
7. Avoid accidents and vulnerabilities by sanitizing content

We really don't want to spoil the fun, so be sure to visit Ben's article for actual tips and tricks. This tutorial is a pretty short read, but you never know – you may very well learn something that will come in handy at some point.

Once again thanks to Ben for sharing what you've learned with the community!

New module: HelperPhone

HelperPhone is a brand new module – or, rather, a module bundle, as it consists of three separate modules: FieldtypePoll, InputfieldPoll, and HelperPhone. There's also the PhoneNumber class, which is a wrapper for libphonenumber for PHP, a PHP port of Google's libphonenumber.

Together the bundled modules and classes make it easy to store and manage phone numbers. Inputfield and Fieldtype allow you to input and store phone numbers on ProcessWire pages, while the HelperPhone module loads libphonenumber, which in turn makes a whole lot of API level magic possible:

<?php

// provide a phone number in any recognizable format:
$phone_number = new PhoneNumber('8 (916) 318-07-29 ext 1234', 'RU');

// check if this is a valid phone number:
echo $phone_number->isValidNumber() ? 'Yes' : 'No'; // Yes
echo $phone_number->isValidNumberForRegion('RU') ? 'Yes' : 'No'; // Yes

// check what type of number this is:
echo $phoneNumber->getNumberTypeTitle(); // Mobile

// check the region code associated with this number:
echo $phoneNumber->getRegionCode(); // RU

// format the number for calling from a specific region:
echo $phoneNumber->formatForCallingFrom('US') // 011 7 916 318-07-28
echo $phoneNumber->formatForCallingFrom('GE') // 00 7 916 318-07-28

The code snippet above, borrowed and adapted from the dedicated support forum thread, shows just a small portion of this module's capabilities. For more examples and detailed instructions, you should check out the forum thread itself, and of course the HelperPhone GitHub repository.

Big thanks to Andrey Valiev for sharing this module with us – it'll definitely come in handy for some of our future projects!

Site of the week: Auer Signal GmbH

Our latest site of the week belongs to one of the world's leading manufacturers of signalling equipment – Auer Signal GmbH. Founded in 1910, Auer Signal is an Austrian family business with presence in over 70 countries worldwide. For more details you may want to check out their about page.

As for why this is our pick for the site of the week this time, there are a couple of reasons: first of all it's a pretty good looking site, but even more than that, there's a whole lot of specifically designed content here. The site is available in five languages and contains detailed product pages, regular content pages, special tools, a very cool search feature – and more. It's pretty obvious that a considerable amount of both time and skill was required to set all that up.

The visible parts of this responsive site are powered by the Bootstrap framework and various JavaScript and CSS libraries, such as slick, Isotope, jQuery Form Validator, and Marka. Behind the scenes the AIOM+ module works its magic, and of course all connections to the site are protected with HTTPS.

Our congratulations to Auer Signal GmbH for their wonderful ProcessWire powered site. We don't really know if this site was built in-house or by a separate studio, but what we can tell is that whoever did this really knows how to build great sites!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 158th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 27th 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!