ProcessWire Weekly #230

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.115 and 3.0.116

Due to an unfortunate feline induced accident last week, Ryan wasn't able to write his regular blog post, and that's why in this week's processwire.com blog post we've got a summary of not just one, but two dev branch releases: 3.0.115 and 3.0.116.

To summarise, here's what's new in the core:

• Two brand new $page methods: $page->findOne(), which works exactly like $pages->findOne() expect for only finding descendants of a given page – and $page->numDescendants(), which returns the number of descendants, not just children, of a given page.
• Two new $page alias methods: $page->descendants() (alias for "find") and $page->descendant() (alias for "findOne").
• New Page list customisation options: ProcessPageList module settings now let you choose what the number after each Page in the Page list should mean: children (default), all descendants, both of them separated by a slash, or just the ID of the Page in question.
• Major refactoring of the PagesTrash core class for performance and stability, and some new features for the trash emptying screen as well: for cases where you've got loads of pages in trash, you can now specify a custom time limit for the process, and the trash emptying screen will also display details about how many pages were trashed, how long it took, and so on.
• The built-in two factor authentication support now includes an option for "strongly suggesting" users with specific roles to enable 2FA. These roles are selectable via the ProcessLogin module config screen once at least one 2FA module has been installed.
• There's a brand new password prompt for profile editing screen: when the user is trying to change values that require current password to be re-typed, this is now a lot more obvious than it was before thanks to a separate, Vex JavaScript library powered modal prompt.

We covered some additional bug fixes and probably less often required features – such as some $files API variable additions – in last week's issue of ProcessWire Weekly, so check that one out for more details on 3.0.115 in particular.

For more details on the updates mentioned here, and a healthy (?) dose of humor from Ryan, be sure to check out this week's post at the processwire.com blog. Thanks!

A small collection of recently published ProcessWire tutorials

It's been a while since we last covered forum updates and such, so this week we wanted to highlight some of the great tutorials we've been seen lately. So, if you'd like to learn something new this weekend – or week, or whatever – here are some ideas:

• Bernhard Baumrock has started a really in-depth tutorial on developing new fieldtypes for ProcessWire. We say "started" because the tutorial currently covers fieldtypes that don't really store anything in the database, but according to Bernhard he's working on covering data storing fieldtypes as well.
• Moritz L'Hoest has posted also rather in-depth tutorial for working with responsive images in ProcessWire. This tutorial covers both the background, i.e. what responsive images mean in this context and how browsers understand them, and then goes on to display a little snippet you can use to generate them automatically.
  • Note: it's worth checking the discussion as well, as there are some additional tweaks and also some alternate approaches (such as the MarkupSrcSet module) mentioned there.
• User LMD has posted some neat tips for creating a site search function that is able to find pages matching multiple works or phrases in any given order, even if they're not in the same field at all. Although the disclaimer states that this is not really a tutorial, it's quite helpful nevertheless, particularly thanks to the "pseudo-SQL" explanations on what's really happening with each selector query.

As a bonus, I've just stumbled upon this two-part article at dzone.com, which covers the setup of a LAMP environment and the installation of ProcessWire on Alibaba Elastic Compute Services (ECS) – of which, to be completely honest, I'd never even heard of before. First part of the article has very little to do with ProcessWire, but rather lays down the important groundwork of setting up the server, so bear in mind that this is a very "sysadmin oriented" tutorial altogether.

For more tutorials and such, remember to check out the Tutorials section of our support forum from time to time. The official ProcessWire Tutorials are also worth checking out, particularly if you're a new-ish ProcessWire user – although there are some pretty advanced ones there as well for long term ProcessWire users!

Site of the week: Ela Rüther – Food Photography

Our latest site of the week belongs to German freelance food photographer Ela Rüther. In her work Ela focuses on various sorts of food and kitchen photography, conception and production of cookbooks and features, reports, portraits – and she also writes recipes complete with tips and tricks.

The website of Ela is powered by ProcessWire CMS, and was designed and developed by ED Design, the German-Portuguese design duo of Diogo Oliveira and Erika Göbel. The website is responsive and has a beautiful, clean and focused design, complete with a usable yet completely unobstructive flyout hamburger navigation. There's a lot of space for showcasing the amazing photographs taken by Ela, and when it comes to content, the site includes a gallery of photographs, a list of publications, a personal profile of Ela, and even a blog.

From the brief showcase forum post by Diogo we know that this site includes only two third party ProcessWire modules: Admin on Steroids and Tracy Debugger. The slideshows and project pages are powered by a customised version of the Owl Carousel, and apart from that there are very few dependencies here – after all there's no need for a full-blown front-end framework or anything like that for a minimalistic layout like this.

Big thanks to the duo behind ED Design for sharing this site with us and also for their continued trust in ProcessWire – and congratulations from us to Ela Rüther for her awesome new site

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 230th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 13th 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!