ProcessWire Weekly #162

The 162nd issue of ProcessWire Weekly brings in all the latest news from the ProcessWire community. Modules, core updates, sites, and more. Read on!

Welcome to the 162nd issue of ProcessWire Weekly! This time we're going to take a peek at the latest ProcessWire core updates, as you folks about your CMS preferences, and introduce a very interesting new module called ServiceWorker.

Last but not least, our latest site of the week has some pretty neat ideas behind it, so definitely check that one out too.

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 3.0.64

In the latest post at the processwire.com blog, Ryan mainly talks about the page import/export feature, which is currently under development. At the moment it's still only partially implemented and not necessarily ready for actual use, but hopefully in the near future we should be able to give it a proper try.

The page import/export feature is going to be available both via the API and as an admin feature, and here's what it can do, once fully implemented:

  • You can export/import individual pages or multiple pages from a PageArray using a JSON based file format.
  • When exported data includes file/image fields, a ZIP file is created, so that all related assets can be included.
  • Template, parent, and other settings of a given page can be retained or modified during the import process.
  • When a page already exists, you can choose to update, skip, or create a copy of it under a different name.

For more details, please check out the latest post at the processwire.com blog. In this post Ryan talks about the implementation of the page import/export feature and explains in detail what this feature is all about.

Weekly poll: in addition to ProcessWire, which other CMS platforms do you use?

This week we're curious about the other platforms you use, in addition to ProcessWire, in your web projects. If ProcessWire is your one and only tool, then that's fine too – as always, there are no wrong answers here!

Since here are a lot of platforms out there it's more than likely that we've managed to miss something interesting, in which case please let us know via post comments. We'd be happy to add new items to the list.

Note also that we had to leave web application frameworks out of this poll. We may go there one of these weeks, but including them in this one would've made the list a tad too long for our taste.

  1.   ProcessWire is my only game (35.3%, 53)
  2.   WordPress (23.3%, 35)
  3.   Drupal (3.3%, 5)
  4.   MODX (8%, 12)
  5.   ExpressionEngine (2%, 3)
  6.   Craft CMS (4%, 6)
  7.   Bolt CMS (0.7%, 1)
  8.   Concrete5 (1.3%, 2)
  9.   Joomla! (4.7%, 7)
  10.   Kirby (3.3%, 5)
  11.   Grav (4.7%, 7)
  12.   Liferay (0%, 0)
  13.   Sitecore (0.7%, 1)
  14.   SharePoint (2%, 3)
  15.   Something else – please let us know via post comments! (6.7%, 10)

Total votings: 150

Feel free to check out the poll archive for results of our earlier polls. All suggestions for future polls are more than welcome too. Thanks in advance for both your answer here and any additional suggestions or feedback you might have!

New module: ServiceWorker

ServiceWorker is a new ProcessWire module developed by Johannes Dachsel and made freely available for anyone to download, install, use, and modify under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.

There are various great resources available online that focus on the general concept of service workers, so we won't dive too deep into that topic here. As a brief and possibly oversimplified explanation, service workers are a standardized way to run JavaScript code independent of pages, and they make some pretty neat stuff possible:

... and so on. Simply put service workers are an interesting new technology (emphasis on new, considering that they are not yet even supported by all browsers) that will no doubt make a lot of fun and useful stuff possible in the near future.

When installed, the ServiceWorker module itself installs a service worker that, in turn, adds offline support for your site. Though this may sound like some pretty hardcore stuff , it's really not, and this module is also really easy to use. All you need to do is install the module and include a single line of PHP in your template files:

<?php $modules->get('ServiceWorker')->renderJavaScript(); ?>

That's it, really. After those two steps you're good to go.

For those who need some extra control the module has a bunch of config settings: the amount of content that gets cached, current version number of the cache, static assets that should always be cached, etc.

Big thumbs up to Johannes Dachsel for building and sharing this module with us. I for one will be using this module in some of my own projects in the near future, so thanks again – and keep up the great work!

Site of the week: Coachy

Our latest site of the week is Coachy – an online platform that enables trainers and coaches to create their own member areas, where they can share video courses they've created. Access to these member areas is limited to paying customers, and thanks to Digistore24 payment integration, this whole process is apparently pretty much automated.

In the case of this site, big part of the "magic" actually happens behind the scenes, and thus our review here is mainly based on the summary provided by the author of the platform, Dennis Spohr, via the sites directory – and, of course, the demo course that works as a showcase of the member area feature. Nevertheless Coachy seems like a really interesting project, from both a technical point of view and as an actual product.

Technical highlights for this project include integrations with tawk.to, Klick-Tipp, AWS SES and S3, and of course Digistore24. The site is based on the Foundation front-end framework and the one and only ProcessWire module we were able to spot right away was Email Obfuscation. As one would expect from a site that includes closed member areas, all connections to this site are SSL protected, thanks to a free certificate from Let's Encrypt.

Big thanks to Dennis Spohr for sharing this project with us – it looks very interesting to say the least, and we sincerely hope that it gains proper momentum in it's intended audience!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 162nd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 24th of June. 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!

This post has 2 comments:

Yannick Albert on Friday 23rd of June 2017 21:56 pm

Directus - https://getdirectus.com/
Cockpit - http://getcockpit.com/

totoff on Monday 26th of June 2017 14:01 pm

besides PW I use HUGO a lot - though not a CMS ;-)

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