The 166th 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 166th issue of ProcessWire Weekly! This week we've got some core updates from Ryan, a new weekly poll, a brand new markup module from Steffen Henschel, and of course a pretty awesome site of the week.
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 3.0.67 improves tag support in file and image fields
ProcessWire 3.0.67, introduced in the latest post at the processwire.com blog by Ryan, includes various smaller fixes and improvements, but most importantly revamps the tag support found from file and image fields.
Our file and image fields have always had an optional tags field, and there are already API level tools in place that you can use to fetch files or images with a specific tag. The only problem has been that the tags field was just a plain text input, which didn't make it exactly intuitive to use.
The latest dev version of ProcessWire, 3.0.67, builds on the existing features by adding support for predefined tags – and by making major improvements to the tag selection interface. UI improvements are largely thanks to the Selectize JavaScript library, which has now been integrated into ProcessWire's built-in jQuery UI module.
For more details about the tags support, it's possible use cases, the updates applied to it this week, and the API level tools available, don't forget to check out Ryan's latest post at the processwire.com blog. Thanks!
Weekly poll: what kind of modules do you find most useful?
In this week's poll we're focusing on a really important aspect of ProcessWire: the modules. To be more precise, we'd like to know what kind of modules you folks generally find most useful.
Though the general consensus is that ProcessWire itself should stay, as much as possible, out of markup generation, there are plenty of really helpful markup generating modules out there. Are these your favorites, or do you prefer tools that extend the admin side, or perhaps add new API level features? What about development tools or background tasks, how do you like those?
You may notice that the list below does not follow exactly the same logic as our modules directory when it comes to grouping modules. This is, believe me or not, intentional – but if you do feel that we left a very important category out, please let us know via comments. Note also that you can choose more than one option, but please keep your choices to minimum, two or three module types at most.
- Fieldtypes or inputfields: modules that add new or improved ways to store and input data (25.9%, 50)
- Markup generating modules: modules that produce visible output on the site – carousels, galleries, forms, feeds, and so on (8.8%, 17)
- Admin helpers, enhancements, or extensions: modules that extend the admin tools of ProcessWire with new or improved features (17.1%, 33)
- API level utility modules: modules that add useful features to the API of ProcessWire, without automatically generating any markup (11.9%, 23)
- Modules that run on the background, adding to or improving ProcessWire's existing features: mailers, schedulers, backup tools, etc. (12.4%, 24)
- Access or permission management: modules that add new ways to manage users and their permissions, limit access to the site, etc. (9.3%, 18)
- Development tools: modules that add tools intended mainly for developer use – migration and importing tools, debuggers, and so on (14.5%, 28)
Total votings: 193
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 by Steffen Henschel: MarkupProcesswirePhotoswipe
MarkupProcesswirePhotoswipe is a brand new markup module by Steffen Henschel. In a nutshell this module adds the ability to render a full-blown PhotoSwipe image gallery from a native PageImages object stored into ProcessWire's images field.
Getting started with this module is dead simple. First step is obviously installing the module, after which you can embed a thumbnail gallery in any of your template files with this little snippet of code, where "images" is an images field on current page:
<?php
$pswp = $modules->get('MarkupProcesswirePhotoswipe');
echo $pswp->renderGallery($page->images);... or you could do all that in a simple one-liner:
<?= $modules->MarkupProcesswirePhotoswipe->renderGallery($page->images) ?>The renderGallery method also accepts an options array, which is sent to ProcessWire's ImageSizer, and you can specify a pre-built theme to use. The default is to use a plain, unstyled output, but the module also includes some additional themes you can use right out of the box. For more details please check out the GitHub repository.
As an additional tip you could also combine the code snippet seen above with the field rendering support in ProcessWire 3.0.5 and then use <?= $page->_images_ ?> to render an image gallery anywhere on your site. Pretty neat, right?
Big thanks to Steffen for sharing this very useful module with us!
Site of the week: Feuerwehr Teisnach
Our latest site of the week is Feuerwehr Teisnach, and it is all about the firefighters in Teisnach — a municipality in Bavaria, Germany. Built by Maximilian Ehrhardt, this fantastic site covers a really wide range of topics from history and technology to news, events, and past missions.
Design wise this is a very good looking site, with plenty of variance in layout choices and a ton of prominent almost-full-screen images, combined with well selected smaller filler images. Some features, such as timelines – of which there are at least two on this site – and the off-canvas navigation menu, make use of some animation and effects, and the overall typography and colour choices are great for both looks and usability.
The front-end is powered by the Uikit front-end framework, and some extra flavour is added by implementing third party CSS libraries animate.css and Hamburgers. The easy-to-spot JavaScript libraries used on this site include jQuery and Owl Carousel, but when it comes to specifics about what's going on behind the scenes, there's not much we can say, except that there are no instantly recognizable third party modules here.
Big thanks to Maximilian Ehrhardt for sharing this site with us, and congratulations to the firefighters of Teisnach for an awesome introductory site. Keep up the great work!
Stay tuned for our next issue
That's it for the 166th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 22nd of July. 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!
MaxF5 on Saturday 15th of July 2017 15:05 pm
Wow, thank you so much for voting my site for the second time!
Though the client has still lot of editorial things to do, i think it will be a nice site in the future.
Thank you for the weekly articles and keep up the great work :)
Andreas on Saturday 15th of July 2017 16:17 pm
Does anybody have an idea on why my Feedly isn't able to get the latest articles from the RSS feed (https://weekly.pw/rss/) anymore? :-(
teppo on Friday 21st of July 2017 22:08 pm
@Andreas: sorry for the delayed reply, but I fixed an issue related to the RSS feed around when you posted here. Hopefully that issue is already solved, but if not, please let me know and I'll take a closer look at it! :)