ProcessWire Weekly #238

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.120 and another status update on the processwire.com rebuild project

In his latest blog post Ryan covers ProcessWire 3.0.120, talks a bit about his plans for releasing the next stable version of ProcessWire, and provides a lengthy status update on the progress of the processwire.com rebuild project. Here's a brief summary of the topics covered in the post:

• ProcessWire 3.0.120 is now available via the dev branch at GitHub. This update focuses primarily on resolving issue reports from GitHub as well as various other small improvements and optimizations.
• During the next week the focus will be on resolving any issues in the current dev branch that aren't present in the master branch, and then releasing ProcessWire 3.0.121, the first release candidate for our next master version.
• New processwire.com website has progressed on a steady pace, and now the main site is nearly fully built out. The post includes loads of brand new screenshots of the current design, so be sure to check it out for details!
• One area of focus for the past week has been the site search. This has been identified as a problem on the old site, and the new search feature is a major update: it has built-in live search, results are grouped by content type, there are content-specific custom sub-search-features, and so on.

For more details, visit the latest post by Ryan at the processwire.com blog. The post is a relatively short read, but it features plenty of screenshots from the current, still work-in-progress processwire.com website, complete with detailed explanations regarding where and why you'd end up in specific view, and how it should work.

New module: TextformatterPageTitleLinks

TextformatterPageTitleLinks is a textformatter module that automatically adds a link to another page if and when you mention its title in your text content. This is particularly useful when you want to create connections between different content pages, and don't want to go through the trouble of adding links all the time yourself.

While TextformatterPageTitleLinks bears some similarities with an earlier module called TextformatterGlossary, it is more of a general purpose tool – even though glossaries are definitely one of its use cases.

You can limit linked pages by template, which gives you quite a bit of control over what gets linked. If you're working on a site that has one or more directories of content, you could, for an example, configure the module so that each time you mention an item in one of those directories, it is automatically linked. Of course this module also works nicely on a blog type site, or just about any other site for that matter.

Some features of the TextformatterPageTitleLinks module:

• Only published and visible pages are linked by default, but linking hidden pages can be enabled via configuration settings.
• Multi-language support is baked in, which means that pages will only be linked if there's a title match in current language.
• For performance reasons titles are queried directly from the database.
• Automatically created links can get a configurable CSS class.

For more details, check out the TextformatterPageTitleLinks support forum thread, or visit the TextformatterPageTitleLinks GitHub repository. Thanks to Moritz L'Hoest for sharing this very useful module with us.

Weekly forum highlights, tutorials, and other online resources

Here we've got a collection of support forum highlights and other useful and/or interesting resources. As always please let us know if there's anything important we've missed so that we can include it in one of our future issues.

• First highlight for this week is a case story from schwarzdesign, discussing the process of relaunching the website of design business expert Joachim Kobuss. As far as case stories go, this one is loaded with details: features of the site, modules used, specific optimization and layout needs and how they were solved, and even a complete PasswordProtectedPage class used for protecting parts of the site.
• Next we have a very interesting project called Solidwire Language. Solidwire is a CSS type (pseudo) language drawing inspiration from other languages – such as C, UML, Markdown, and so on – created as a tool for documenting Processwire's hierarchies and relationships. Very technical, but definitely something to check out if you're working on a large scale ProcessWire project.
• Moving on to weekly tips and tricks, Bernhard recently posted a nice little guide for setting up specific permissions for subpages of a Process module. This week there's also a new tutorial from user Gadgetto on how to set up a language switcher for a ProcessWire website, and one more from Bernhard on how to submit pull requests for the ProcessWire core. So much great stuff to learn!
• Finally, the German language pack for ProcessWire has a new maintainer. Since the GitHub repository of the language pack has also changed and includes branches for both the stable (master) and dev versions of ProcessWire, I'd recommend anyone using ProcessWire in German to check the post out for more details. Big thanks to Jens Martsch for stepping up and taking over this role!

​​​​​​If you're interested in ProcessWire news, discussions, and updates, there's always something going on at the support forum. Since we're only able to include a tiny selection of all that in our weekly updates, head down to the forum for more.

Site of the week: si.design, the home of Solution Innovators

Our latest site of the week belongs to Solution Innovators – a Connecticut based company specializing in website development and IT support.

Solution Innovators are a full service web design and development company: they provide everything a client needs to get a web site up and running, starting from the initial discovery phase, moving on to design and development, and finally hosting and continuous support. They also provide a so-called BYOS plan, where a client can move an existing site to Solution Innovators, and they'll take care of it from that point on.

The design of the Solution Innovators website is quite interesting. While it definitely has a modern look, at the same time there's this unconventional, almost old-fashioned vibe about it. You just don't really see this type of design, curves and all, too often in modern web sites – and that's one of the reasons why it feels so refreshing. The performance of the site is also top notch – moving from page to page feels almost instantaneous.

Behind the scenes this site isn't using any of the popular front-end frameworks. Rather, it appears that there's a custom framework in play here, complemented by some hand-picked external dependencies, such as Chosen for nice select boxes and Hamburgers for a bit of visual flare, and on the JavaScript side libraries such as jQuery and Cycle2. Only third party ProcessWire module clearly visible on this site is Email Obfuscator.

Thanks to Solution Innovators for sharing their own site with us! We've featured plenty of their client projects before, and it's great to finally have their own site as our site of the week as well.

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 238th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 8th 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!