ProcessWire Weekly #194

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.89

After last week's snowy disaster – which turned out not to be such a huge disaster after all, but you can read more about that from Ryan's latest post – we're back to our usual update schedule. This week we have, in fact, both fixes and a new feature to introduce.

What's new in the core this week?

In his latest post at the processwire.com blog Ryan talks introduces ProcessWire 3.0.89 – our latest development version. This version includes two kinds of changes: a bunch of fixes to various user-reported issues and a new feature called focus point cropping.

First let's take a quick look at what was fixed in this dev release:

• Issue #467, where the getPaginationString method of PaginatedArray was always returning "0 of N" instead of the correct page number.
• Issue #468, where autocomplete Page inputfields were not working as expected with the "starts with" (^=) selector operator.
• Issue #473, where the addOptions method of the Options fieldtype was resulting in an argument type error due to an incorrect type hint.
• Issue #474, where disabling guest role view access to templates could result in the page-view permission being removed from other roles.
• Issue #475, where non-superusers were under some specific conditions unable to create new users.

Those were the fixes applied during the past week, and next we'll take a closer look at the major new feature added this week – focus point cropping.

Focus point cropping in a nutshell

So, what is focus point cropping you ask? In a nutshell it allows you to define the key content in each image via admin GUI, and when you resize and crop the image via the API, that important content is automatically kept in the picture. It's an intuitive way to avoid those situations where, say, faces get cropped out of the thumbnail.

Another key point – and a big reason why focus point cropping is such a great fit for ProcessWire – is that it doesn't require predefined crop dimensions or aspect ratios: in case you decide that your front-end requires different sizes or shapes of images, just request a new image, and your important content is still in the picture.

Pretty neat, right? Oh, and don't worry if you didn't quite get that yet, as Ryan has kindly provided us with a screencast showcasing this new feature – and the upcoming addition of a per-image customizable zoom level, which will crank this feature to the next level:

You can read more about focus point cropping in ProcessWire from Ryan's latest blog post. Feel free to leave some feedback there too – we'd love to hear how you folks feel about this new addition. Thanks again!

New module: PayWhirlAPI by Clip Magic

PayWhirlAPI is a brand new third party module brought to us by Clip Magic. This module is essentially a wrapper for the API of the PayWhirl service – a commercial platform for managing recurring payments and subscriptions.

Here's a simple example borrowed from the PayWhirlAPI support forum thread. This one grabs a list of subscriptions for a customer identified by the email address of currently logged in ProcessWire user:

<?php namespace ProcessWire;
use PayWhirl;

$payWhirl = $modules->get('PayWhirlAPI')->login();
$data = array('keyword' => $user->email);
$userSubs = $payWhirl->getSubscriptions($payWhirl->getCustomers($data)[0]->id);

For more details on how to use the PayWhirl API itself, please refer to the instructions at the PayWhirlAPI module GitHub repository, and of course the official API documentation for the PayWhirl service.

Note that since PayWhirl is a commercial service, you'll need to set up an account there first. They have a number of plans ranging from $0 to $249 a month, depending on what your needs happen to be. You can find more details about this from their pricing page.

Once again big thanks to Clip Magic for your particularly well timed contribution to the ProcessWire community – as always, your contribution is very much appreciated, and this module will no doubt come in handy for a number of projects out there!

Module preview: ProcessMention by BitPoet

Our second third party module for this week's issue is ProcessMention – a module and CKEditor plugin combination from BitPoet. Please note that this module is currently in an early alpha stage, and as such using it on a production site is highly discouraged.

Now that we've got the necessary disclaimer out of the way, we can move on to the gist of this module, which is implementing forum-style @-mentions on a ProcessWire site – although instead of the typical use case of linking to users, in this case you can @-link to any page in your system matching a selector you've configured via module settings.

If you want to get a better impression of how this module actually works, the support forum thread introducing ProcessMention includes a GIF animation of the module in use. While the UI is still a bit rough, to say the least, the core feature is already there, and looking pretty cool indeed.

Big thanks to BitPoet for your work on this module. As with your earlier modules, this one also looks like a real game changer, and I for one can already see how it could notably improve my everyday ProcessWire workflow. Keep up the great work!

Site of the week: Yukseklik

Our latest site of the week belongs to Yukseklik Ltd, which – according to their ProcessWire powered website – is "the most experienced and leading company in the production of metal roof tiles not only in Azerbaijan but also in the whole Caucasus region." While ranking metal roof tile production companies is well beyond our ability, what we can say is that their website is pretty darn neat.

The responsive, multilingual website of Yukseklik, designed and built by Jeykhun Imanov Studio, is a great looking site with a number of fun little details – such as the parallax effect on the home page hero image, various carousels and layouts of product pages, and the fancy letter-and-envelope themed contact form on the Contact page. Although this is a relatively simple site, there's still plenty of stuff for the visitor to marvel at.

The front-end of this site is based on something that we don't see in action that often: the Robo Framework. Other than that, there's not much we can tell you about this one: apart from jQuery and some map related features the front-end doesn't seem to have any major dependencies, and since there are no traces of familiar third party modules on the front-end, the inner workings of this site remain largely a mystery.

Congratulations to the client, Yukseklik Ltd, for having such a great site – and of course to the company behind the implementation, Jeykhun Imanov Studio, for a job well done. It's always a pleasure to come across an agency working extensively with ProcessWire!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 194th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 3rd of February. 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!