ProcessWire Weekly #199

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.94

Although there's no big blog post from Ryan this week, there is a brief status update posted at the support forum. In his forum post Ryan talks about 3.0.94, which is mainly a bugfix release, and also drops some pretty big news: next week's release, 3.0.95, could actually be our next master release.

As we're getting closer and closer to a new master release, we'd really appreciate your help testing the current dev branch. If there are any outstanding issues that you haven't yet had a chance to report, please do so now – and if you've opened an issue and it has not been resolved by now, please let us know via GitHub comments.

Thanks for your help – it is highly appreciated – and don't forget to check out the support forum post from Ryan regarding the upcoming master release!

New module: GraphQLFieldtypeMapMarker

Remember the GraphQL module we introduced in some of our back issues? This project has gained a lot of traction since then, and has just this week received a new and pretty major new feature: the ability to add support for just about any custom fieldtype via a separate GraphQL Fieldtype module.

GraphQLFieldtypeMapMarker is the first publicly released module in this category, and as the name suggests, it adds GraphQL support for the Map Marker fieldtype. While this is in itself a nice thing to have, the really big news here is that it is finally possible for this module to support all currently available – and yet to be released – fieldtypes without its code base getting huge and bloated in the process.

For more details regarding GraphQL third party fieldtype support modules, check out the documentation at GitHub. If you'd like to add your own fieldtype, you can use the GraphQLFieldtypeMapMarker module as a reference.

Big thanks to Nurguly Ashyrov for all his work on the GraphQL module. It is by far the best and most complete plug-n-play tool we have for easily integrating ProcessWire with all sorts of front-end and backend tools out there!

New module: Checkbox Reversed

Another new module this week is called Checkbox Reversed. This module adds a whole new feature to the core Checkbox field: by default a checkbox field is checked in the Admin when it's enabled, i.e. its value is 1 – but with Checkbox Reversed you also get the option of displaying a checkbox as checked when its value is not 1.

In other words you can use this module to create a "checked by default" checkbox field. For an example: if you had a checkbox field called "Enabled", you can use this module to make it appear as checked in the Admin. "Appear" refers to the fact that, on the API side, said field would still return a falsy value.

The recommended solution for aforementioned gotcha is naming your field according to the reversed behaviour, which in this case could simply mean calling it "disabled". This way there's no confusion on the API side, and since the visible label in the Admin would still be "Enabled", content editors get exactly the UI they need.

For more details please check out the Checkbox Reversed support forum thread. If you'd like to give this module a try, you can download or clone it from the Checkbox Reversed GitHub repository. Once again thanks to Robin Sallis for sharing his work with us!

Site of the week: Velotraum

Our latest site of the week belongs to Velotraum, a bicycle manufacturer from South Germany. While technically this site is all about the bikes, there's a lot going on in here: they've got news and stories from the road, a gallery of customer photos, and of course contact information, techy details about the bikes, and so on. Judging from the amount of comments on the stories on the site I'd also say that they've got a rather active community going on in there as well.

Now, the design of the site is quite nice: not exactly flashy, but rather interesting, personal, and of course both readable and usable. In this case the typography and good quality photos alone make a huge difference, and there's a lot of quality content – although since it's all in German I had to rely on Google Translate, which does tend to make things a little bit weird. Finally different content blocks and layout choices often break the flow of the content – but always in a good way.

From the showcase forum thread for the Velotraum site we know that behind the scenes this site makes use of RepeaterMatrix, and has various content blocks designed for it. For more details on how RepeaterMatrix is used and what else is going on here, we'd recommend checking aforementioned forum thread. Other than that, a lot of the stuff here seems hand-built, so no traces of major front-end frameworks, third party modules, and so on.

Congratulations to the client, Velotraum, for a wonderful website, and big thanks to the folks at whitespace GmbH – and Gerrit van Aaken in particular – for sharing their work with us. Absolutely stunning work!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 199th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 10th of March. 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!