ProcessWire Weekly #18

ProcessWire 2.5 soft launch

In our first issue, ProcessWire Weekly #1, we mentioned that "the release ProcessWire 2.5 might be drawing near". Admittedly it has been quite a while since then, but now it's finally official; ProcessWire 2.5 is here!

We're (intentionally) trying not to make too much noise about this yet, mainly because we're considering this a soft launch. This means, in essence, that if you download (or clone) ProcessWire right now from GitHub, you'll get 2.5, but we're waiting a little while – a week or so – before sending out more official announcements.

"I've got an existing site I'd like to upgrade / I'm about to start a new site right now, what should I do?"

Short answer: go with 2.5 if you're creating a new site right now, but before upgrading an existing live site to 2.5 you might want to wait for the official announcement.

If you haven't yet checked out the dev branch as it is now, this is a perfect time to grab 2.5 and let us know how it works for you. It's stable and fully functional already, but during the time between the soft launch and the official announcement we'd really appreciate any additional feedback you can provide!

On the other hand, if you've got a live site running earlier (stable) version of ProcessWire, you might want to wait a week or so before upgrading it to 2.5 – just to make sure that there aren't any glitches that have gone unnoticed so far. Of course there shouldn't be any of these, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Final updates to the development branch before the merge into master

Lately there have been fewer actual additions and more fixed and minor improvements to the dev branch as we've been getting ready for the 2.5 launch. This wek is no exception. The small additions the dev branch received right before getting merged to master branch were...

• $modules->isInstalled() now supports defining a version; for an example to check if ProcessChangelog 1.2.12 or newer is installed, you can simply use $modules->isInstalled('ProcessChangelog>=1.2.12').
• Minor UI improvement to Admin: after clicking a page in Page Tree and then clicking Move, you'll see a Trash button at the rightmost part of that row. This is just a shortcut for trashing Pages.

ProcessWire Upgrade module by Ryan Cramer

Upgrading ProcessWire from one version to another has never been exactly complicated process, but this module promises to make it even easier. ProcessWire Upgrade is a module Ryan has been working on lately and it's essentially a GUI tool (i.e. Process module) for upgrading ProcessWire to latest version with a few clicks.

Ryan has written a pretty extensive post explaining all the details, so instead of digging too deeply into the nitty-gritty of this module I'll let him explain what it's all about. Nevertheless I'd like to point out that – at least in my opinion – this is a huge feature and definitely something we've been missing so far.

Thanks to Ryan, once again, for making our workload slightly lighter!

ProcessWire online resources of the week

Here's another weekly hand-picked collection of online resources (forum posts and external resources alike) related to ProcessWire:

• Marcus Herrmann is suggesting a "ProcessWire Recipes" repository – would you use that?
• Another nifty resource from Marcus for ProcessWire developers, "Limiting debug mode to your development environment"
• From an idea and suggestion to actual, working module in a blink of an eye: the story of a new fieldtype called FieldtypeDecimal

Finally, "Making PW more userfriendly" is the latest incarnation of a topic that's been going on pretty much non-stop for weeks already. What started out as a discussion about making ProcessWire more appealing for "enterprise users" has evolved into something quite different..

Site of the week: Gregg ORR Auto

One of the latest additions to the ProcessWire sites directory, GreggOrrAuto.com is a site built by WebProJoe for Gregg Orr Auto, a company with car dealerships in four U.S. states. There's also a short writeup of this project at the showcase thread here.

The main reasons this site made it's way into our site of the week section are it's clean, usable design (Bootstrap really fits this site perfectly) and the fact that it's a great example of putting ProcessWire's custom data types (i.e. templates) into proper use.

Just take a look at the car search; quite a bit of content there already and the search is still lightning-fast. Overall the has a very good look and feel, so congratulations to WebProJoe for a job well done!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for ProcessWire weekly #18. Our next weekly issue will be out 20th of September and sent a few days later to ProcessWire newsletter subscribers. In the meantime please don't hesitate to add your comments here or send us feedback via the ProcessWire Weekly feedback form.

Until next time: happy hacking with ProcessWire.. and don't forget to check out ProcessWire 2.5!