ProcessWire Weekly #178

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.78 and more AdminThemeUikit updates

In his post at the processwire.com blog this week Ryan talks a bit about ProcessWire 3.0.78 and a bit more about AdminThemeUikit.

ProcessWire 3.0.78 is our latest dev release, and very much related to the development of the new admin theme. As mentioned by Ryan in his post, this version mainly includes updates geared towards customizing core modules from admin themes.

Last week we got the first taste of AdminThemeUikit with its brand new Reno outfit on, and though there were no major changes this week, the theme is now more polished, and has some new tricks up its sleeve too:

• Ryan has been busy working on the smaller details and fixing those things that didn't work quite yet — including support for the SystemNotifications module.
• There are brand new customization settings for individual fields, where you can choose their margins, borders, and colors to use with AdminThemeUikit.
• The Page List has gone through some visual and UI related changes that allow it to use the available space more effectively when used in a narrow container.

For more details and some screenshots, don't forget to check out Ryan's weekly post at the processwire.com blog. You can also give AdminThemeUikit a try right away simply by logging into our demo site with username "bloguser" and password "processwire3".

New module: LessQL for ProcessWire

LessQL for ProcessWire is a brand new module by Alex Andre' Guintu. In a nutshell this module provides a simple wrapper for the LessQL ORM — much the same way as an earlier module called ReadBeanPHP provided a wrapper for the ReadBean ORM.

LessQL for ProcessWire allows you to interact with LessQL ORM using a new API variable. By default the name of this API variable is $lessQL, but you can define a new name for it via the module settings. You can also define whether you want the module to use the same database as ProcessWire, or a separate database altogether.

For more details about what you can actually do with LessQL we'd suggest that you take a closer look at their documentation, but just to give you a taste here's the example provided by Alex in his support forum post:

$people = $lessQL->person()->select("id, firstname, lastname")->where("firstname LIKE ?", "%alex%")->orderBy("firstname")->limit(10);

If you ever need to work with custom database tables, an ORM like LessQL allows you to perform queries to the database with minimal amount of SQL, thus taking some of the complexity – not to mention potential vulnerabilities – out of the equation.

Thanks to Alex for sharing this module with us!

New module: Page Path History Central Manager

Page Path History Central Management is a new module by Nicko Winner. This module is, essentially, an interface for the Page Path History core module: whereas Page Path History works automatically behind the scenes and is practically speaking invisible to even site admins, this module makes all its data both visible and manageable.

Page Path History Central Management provides creates a new page in the ProcessWire Admin, and via this page you can view all the data that Page Path History has collected, remove individual rows, and even add your own custom redirects to the list.

It might be worth noting that this module is somewhat similar to an earlier module called Page Path History Manager — the main difference being that Page Path History Central Management displays site-wide data, while Page Path History Manager only displays just the data stored for current page and its parents.

Big thanks to Nicko for sharing this module with us!

Site of the week: the hrdiamonds office management suite

This time our site of the week is something quite special: an office management / CRM solution developed by Bernhard Baumrock for the Austrian personnel development company hrdiamonds.

In a nutshell this project is an application that allows hrdiamonds to easily manage their contacts, projects, and finances. The biggest difference between this site and our typical sites of the week is that there's quite literally no front-end for us to look at — in this case all the magic happens behind the scenes, in the ProcessWire admin.

Though the site itself is out of bounds for us, Bernhard has kindly provided us with plenty of details about this extremely neat project. These include both technical tidbits and a collection of screenshots with dummy data. Here are some of the most prominent highlights of this project:

• Custom Process pages, largely powered by the RockDatatables module, allow the client to view and edit sizable chunks of data with ease by providing an easy-to-use Excel type UI.
• Google Charts and chartjs are used to visualize the stored data in various human-friendly ways. Since these play well together with datatables, editing data updates the connected charts real-time.
• Invoices are created using ProcessWire's native Admin UI, and then automatically converted into PFD files using PHP and the mPDF library.
• A web based GUI can't always do everything that a full-blown spreadsheet app does, which is why exporting data from the Admin datatables to an Excel file is always just one click away.

For more details and screenshots about this project, visit the showcase thread at the ProcessWire support forum. Bernhard also has a portfolio page on his own site that covers some additional details and even includes client quotes (in German).

Huge thanks to Bernhard for trusting ProcessWire with this amazing project, and for sharing it with us. This is easily one of the biggest, most complex, and most amazing ProcessWire projects that we've ever seen!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 178th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 14th of October. 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!