ProcessWire Weekly #242

On the blog this week: rebuilding the processwire.com website, part 5

In this week's post at the processwire.com blog Ryan provides a brief update on last week's master release, before turning his focus on the status of the processwire.com website rebuild project. To summarise the first subject, so far no notable issues have been raised, and everything seems to have gone as planned. At this point we can say with some confidence that 3.0.123 is every bit as stable as the previous master, 3.0.98.

Status update on the 2019 version of the processwire.com website

First things first: the timeline for the release of the new processwire.com website – the first version of it, anyway – is currently either the 1st of January, or if that turns out to be impossible, some other day on the same week. As for the relatively tight schedule and the steps following the initial launch, here's what Ryan had to say:

Once the whole site is live, some of you may be interested in redesigning some or all of it, and that’s great, I invite the collaboration. But in the interest of time, I just wanted to do everything I could with it first, and then let the community have at it, where there is interest.

While the first version of the design and most pages are already done, Ryan is still fine-tuning some of the smaller details. If you'd like to help, we'd particularly appreciate any ideas regarding the screenshot designed to showcase the system on the home page –what to include, how to best represent the system, image or GIF animation, etc.

Another part that needs your help are the testimonial type quotes used on the site: if you could say something about ProcessWire, what would it be? The comments section at the blog is temporarily closed before the migration to the new site, but feel free to provide your input via the support forum.

What to expect after the initial processwire.com website launch?

Other things we can expect shortly after the initial launch are support forum updates (mainly to better accommodate the design changes on the main site), and a whole new integration between the forum and the main site. Related sites, such as the modules and developers directories, also need to be updated – and there's still content to be updated as well.

All in all while we're aiming for a January launch date for the new site, there's still plenty of work to be done – some before, and some after the launch. Either way, we should be able to greet 2019 with an all-new processwire.com website as planned.

For more details about the processwire.com website rebuild project and the steps that will follow, be sure to check out Ryan's latest post at the processwire.com blog. If you have any feedback or would like to help with the missing pieces, feel free to participate in the discussion at the related support forum thread. Thanks!

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 of all, we've got a splendid new tutorial from Moritz L'Hoest on setting up Composer and using external packages within ProcessWire. Highly recommended for anyone serious about developing more complex solutions using ProcessWire!
• While we're on the topic of tutorials, there's a new one available from Howtoforge on the topic of installing ProcessWire on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. This tutorial covers all the steps from setting up the system – including MariaDB database and Apache – to installing ProcessWire itself. Despite the wide range of topics covered, this is a relatively beginner-friendly article.
• Users of the Tracy Debugger module (if you're not using it yet, well, all we can say is that you should be) Adrian had a very nice present for the new year: not only are various panels now faster due to caching improvements, there's also a brand new "new since last installed version" section. Sweet!
• Robin Sallis has recently shared a clever solution for automatically displaying the expected input format for datetime fields, either in the notes section or as a title, with a simple hook method. Particularly useful if you've got multitude of datetime inputs on your site, and want them to have proper, always up to date instructions.
• Finally, a nifty little front-end trick particularly for Uikit users, courtesy of Chris Bennett: CSS only solution for sleek toggle-style checkboxes in Uikit. Thanks to Chris for sharing this!

In case you're looking for something else to watch during the weekend, or happen to have some vacation time around the new year, I'd like to once again recommend the WordPress vs. ProcessWire playlist from Jonathan Lahijani. We've mentioned it a few times already, but it's just that good – and despite the name, it's definitely not about bashing one system or the other.

​​​​​​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: Australian Antarctic Jobs

Our latest site of the week is Australian Antarctic Jobs, built by the web team at the Australian Antarctic Division – a part of the Australian Government's Department of the Environment and Energy – for the needs of the Australian Antarctic Program. This program is a collaborative effort comprising partnerships across government and with more than 150 national and international research institutions, conducting world-class science of critical national importance and global significance at the Antarctica.

The content covered on this site can be split roughly into two categories: employment opportunities, and life at the Antarctica. In the employment section there are open jobs both at the Antarctica – further split into smaller categories, such as support, medical, and telecommunications – and Australia. The site's content is further elaborated through embedded video material, and the site features plenty of quality photographs as well.

The team behind the site posted a brief update on the support forum shortly after the site's launch, explaining among other things that the site was created in a bit of a hurry – they only had about a month to get it up and running – and that the main site of the Australian Antarctic Division is currently waiting for a redesign and migration to ProcessWire.

Regarding the implementation side, there's no full-blown front-end framework here, and other dependencies have also been kept to the bare minimum: Plyr media player is used for embedding locally hosted video material, Matomo (formerly Piwik) handles the analytics, Modernizr is used for capability checking – and that's just about it As a minor point of interest this site seems to be running on an nginx setup, but even though nginx isn't officially supported by ProcessWire, to be fair this isn't particularly uncommon.

Congratulations and our gratitude to the web team at the Australian Antarctic Division for their trust in ProcessWire, and also thanks for the kind words about the experience of working with it. We're glad that you've been enjoying working with ProcessWire, and hope to see more ProcessWire projects from you folks in the future!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 242nd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 5th of January. 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!