ProcessWire Weekly #186

In the 186th issue of ProcessWire Weekly we cover a processwire.com guest post by Bernhard Baumrock, newly released module called Duplicator, new weekly poll, and more. Read on!

Welcome to the 186th issue of ProcessWire Weekly! This time we'll start by taking closer look at a processwire.com guest post – a tutorial for building Process modules – from Bernhard Baumrock, and we've got a loosely related weekly poll as well.

In the "new modules" section we've got a newly released third party module Duplicator, and as our latest site of the week we've picked the website of an Ireland-based medical tourism company called TourMedical.

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.

In the processwire.com blog this week: how to build custom admin pages – an in-depth tutorial by Bernhard Baumrock

This week we have a guest post by Bernhard Baumrock at the processwire.com blog. In his post Bernhard walks us through the entire process of creating an admin page of your own – or, in the ProcessWire terminology, a custom Process module.

The guest post is based on an earlier tutorial released via the support forum, and with Ryan still out of office for the most of this week, it came at a perfect time. While there's already lot of stuff covered in the article, we may in fact release a part 2 at some point.

Main topics covered in this week's guest post

Bernhard's tutorial is neatly split into four main topics or chapters:

  • Building a basic custom admin page
    In this chapter we build a really simple Process module and show you how easy it really is to get a custom admin page up and running. This chapter is really easy to follow, but also really enlightening, particularly if this is your first Process module.
  • Building a module with multiple pages and buttons
    This is where we start adding more complex features – multiple views, data tables, charts, etc. – to the basic Process module built in the previous chapter. Even if you already have experience with Process modules, this chapter is worth checking out.
  • Handling user-input: Using Forms & Inputfields
    Finally, in the third chapter, we start by splitting our sample Process module into separate module, configuration, and info files, and then take a closer look at how you can handle user input, and add dynamic effects to your custom admin page.

For those who prefer to start by exploring source code...

Finally, all the files required to install a working demo of the Process module built in the tutorial are made available via GitLab. If you prefer to start by exploring a ready module, or just want to make sure that you got everything right, you can grab it and install it on your own development site.

Huge thanks to Bernhard for sharing your expertise with us – it's always a pleasure to read your posts, so keep 'em coming!

Weekly poll: have you built a module of your own – and if not, why not?

This week's poll was inspired by Bernhard's tutorial in the processwire.com blog: this week we'd like to know how many of you have had the chance to build a ProcessWire module of your own.

If you haven't built one yet, we're also interested in hearing more about the why – was the process too complicated, was there an issue with documentation, or could it be that you've just never really needed one to get the job done? As always, you can also leave a comment on this post if you'd like to provide more details regarding your answer.

  1.   Most of my projects depend on custom-built modules (20.9%, 18)
  2.   I have, but custom modules are not a part of my typical workflow (29.1%, 25)
  3.   I've never really felt the need to build a custom module (10.5%, 9)
  4.   I've wanted to, but building a module seemed too difficult for me (15.1%, 13)
  5.   I've considered it, but found the documentation lacking (12.8%, 11)
  6.   I've considered it, but couldn't find a good example to go by (11.6%, 10)

Total votings: 86

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: Duplicator

Duplicator is newly released third party module that was originally announced back in January, made available for closed beta testing in February – and now, finally, released as a stable version for the general public.

The idea for Duplicator originates from a WordPress plugin with the same name, and just like its namesake, Duplicator for ProcessWire also allows you to create a backup of your site, export the package and an installer file to another location, and then set up a copy of the original site with ease.

It is important to keep in mind that Duplicator is not just a tool for creating duplicates of your site – it's also a really useful tool for managing manual or automatic backups, and you can configure it to upload the backups to Amazon S3, Dropbox, or Google Drive.

In other words Duplicator ...

  • makes it easy to create an identical copy of your site for, say, local development;
  • makes it easy to migrate a site to a production server after – or in between various stages of – development;
  • and, finally, functions as a flexible and powerful tool for managing regular, automated backups of your site.

For more details about this module, check out the Duplicator support forum thread. If you'd like to it a try, clone or download it from the Duplicator GitHub repository. Big thanks to flydev for all your hard work on this module, and keep up the great work!

Site of the week: TourMedical

Our latest site of the week is TourMedical, an Ireland-based medical – and more specifically dental – tourism company. In their own words they schedule "dental healthcare services by combining treatment and holiday" in order to provide a service that is both affordable and enjoyable.

Although we try to prioritize sites that have been submitted to the ProcessWire sites directory, but the TourMedical site was submitted to us via the ProcessWire Weekly feedback form by Cemal Sert of Corepany Software Ltd – a Turkish digital agency providing web and graphic design, development, hosting, and social media management services.

TourMedical is a multilingual, responsive website with a really beautiful design. Transitions and overlays are used to liven up the browsing experience, and there's plenty of quality content, ranging from treatment introductions and customer reviews to blog posts. The visible part of the site is based on the Bootstrap framework, jQuery, and other well known libraries.

We enjoyed every moment while developing the web page. We used twig as a template engine which is known by the team so the learning curve was pretty easy.
– Cemal Sert, Corepany Software Ltd

Big thanks to Cemal Sert and the folks at Corepany for trusting ProcessWire and sharing this site with us, and our congratulations to TourMedical for a wonderful new website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 186th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 9th of December. 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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