ProcessWire Weekly #168

The 168th issue of ProcessWire Weekly brings in all the latest news from the ProcessWire community. Modules, core updates, sites, and more. Read on!

Hello there and welcome to the 168th issue of ProcessWire Weekly! This time we'll walk you through the latest core updates, introduce new modules, and take a closer look at our latest site of the week. There's also a new weekly poll, in which we're asking your opinion on local ProcessWire meetups.

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 3.0.69 and the Login for Facebook module

This week in the processwire.com blog Ryan talks about the latest development version of ProcessWire, 3.0.69, and introduces a new module called Login for Facebook. 3.0.69 is a minor bug fix release and thus the bulk of this week's post is dedicated to the Login for Facebook module.

Here's a brief summary of what you can expect from this module:

  • This is a brand new module and now freely available from the Login for Facebook GitHub repository. While it's still in beta, it's already fully functional, but in order to install it you'll need to be running at least ProcessWire version 3.0.42.
  • The Login for Facebook module enables users to log into a ProcessWire site using their Facebook accounts. By default the module creates a new, private local user account for each Facebook user, but you can also choose to map all Facebook users to the same local user account instead.
  • After a user has logged in using their Facebook account, you can access Facebook account data via the Login for Facebook module or you can configure the module to map specific Facebook data fields with ProcessWire fields and automatically fetch new data when the user logs in.

For more details, installation instructions, usage examples, and screenshots for the Login for Facebook module, remember to check out Ryan's latest post at the processwire.com blog. Thanks!

Weekly poll: would you participate in a local ProcessWire meetup?

One of the core strengths of ProcessWire has always been it's active and international online community, but sometimes it's still nice to meet other developers face-to-face. Generally speaking local meetups are a wonderful way to share experiences, discuss past and future projects, and perhaps even learn a thing or two.

This week we'd like to hear how you folks feel about the idea of a local ProcessWire users meetup – if you had the chance would you participate in one, or have you perhaps already participated in one

  1.   I have already participated, and would definitely do it again (4.3%, 4)
  2.   I haven't had the chance to participate yet, but would like to (38.7%, 36)
  3.   If there was one, I would seriously consider participating (49.5%, 46)
  4.   Meetups are really not my thing, so I'd probably pass (7.5%, 7)
  5.   I have already participated, but wouldn't do it again (0%, 0)

Total votings: 93

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: RockDummyData

RockDummyData is a new-ish module from Bernhard Baumrock. In a nutshell it's a tool that can be used for creating sets of dummy data for performance testing – or any other situation where you need to populate a number of items with seemingly sensible data without actually having any real data at your disposal:

<table>
    <tr>
        <th>Name</th>
    </tr>
    <?php
    $rdd = $modules->get('RockDummyData');
    for ($i=0; $i<15; ++$i) {
        $dummy = $rdd->getDummy();
        echo "<tr><td>{$rdd->forename} {$rd->surname}</td></tr>";
    }
    ?>
</table>

In case you're wondering what kind of data RockDummyData can produce, there's a bit of a twist here: out-of-the-box it can only produce a bunch of forenames, but it comes with a directory called "data", and what you need to do is generate your own collection of whatever items you might need and paste them into that directory as new text files: /data/forename.txt for forenames, /data/date.txt for dates, and so on.

There are online services you can use to generate source data files, and there's actually one notable benefit for this approach: this way you can define exactly the kind of data you want. If you, for an example, want your mock data to contain Finnish and Russian names, that's entirely up to you. (That being said, some pre-made data sets will likely make their way into this module at some point.)

For more details, please check out the dedicated support form thread. Big thanks to Bernhard for sharing another useful module with us!

Site of the week: The Moment Hotel

Our latest site of the week belongs to The Moment Hotel, a boutique hotel on the Sunset Blvd, Hollywood. Their site was crafted by Zambezi Search Marketing – a digital marketing and advertising agency based in Newport Beach, CA.

What makes this site special is really the whole feeling it gives: this is one of those sites that position themselves firmly between a presentation and a typical website, and while some users will likely find the whole idea of an automatically playing audio track rather annoying, even that particular detail fits the overall theme of the site. On top of all that some of the effects here are really neat, and the design isn't half bad either.

What about behind the scenes stuff? Well, some of the familiar features we've spotted so far include the ProCache module, JavaScript carousel plugin slick, and all the typical culprits from jQuery to Font Awesome. This site also makes use of JSON-LD metadata – and those fancy full-screen header videos are actually embedded YouTube videos.

Big thanks to Zambezi Search Marketing for sharing this wonderful site with us. Keep up the great work!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 168th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 5th of August. 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!

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