ProcessWire Weekly #253

This week in the processwire.com blog: announcing ProcessWire ProMailer

The big news this week is the release of a brand new Pro module from Ryan, our lead developer. ProcessWire ProMailer is a commercial module providing tools for creating and sending out newsletters and managing newsletter subscriptions directly within a ProcessWire powered website.

More about ProMailer, and a discounted price for the beta period

ProMailer was originally planned as a part of the ProDevTools module package, but as the development progressed, the scope of the module also increased, and the end result is definitely worth being a stand-alone product of its own.

With coupon code PWPMBETA you get a $20 discount for ProMailer during the beta period. This may not last more than a week or so, so act fast.

ProMailer provides similar features as third party services such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc. but without any recurring fees. ProMailer also lets you manage your emails and subscribers from your own server, thus giving you more control of your emails and subscriber data than you would have with an external service.

Some highlights from the ProMailer product info:

• ProMailer runs on your own server, so there's no need for a separate, often costly third party solution. This also guarantees that you're in total control of your own data – an important factor considering various privacy rules and regulations.

• ProMailer uses ProcessWire pages and templates as the source for emails, which gives you total control over the output. Creating and editing newsletters is just as easy as editing any regular page with ProcessWire.

• ProMailer handles the subscribe and un-subscribe processes, and confirms new subscribers with double opt-in email confirmation. Built-in import and export features for email lists make transitioning to and from other services a breeze.

• ProMailer works beautifully with WireMail modules and third party SMTP / email sending providers, such as Mailgun. If you want to use an external SMTP server or a third party for sending out your messages, ProMailer has you covered.

For more details on the module and it's capabilities, check out the complete product info page, and the manual and user guide:

• ProMailer product info
• ProMailer manual and user guide

Like our other Pro modules, sales of ProMailer support the ongoing development of the ProcessWire core. You don't have to buy any Pro modules to get the full benefit of the ProcessWire system, but they provide extra value, and their sales helps keep us afloat.

Some updates to the dev branch, but no new core release this week

There's no new core version this week, but if you're using the dev branch, you can grab the latest version directly from GitHub for some minor updates. We'll most likely cover some of these in more detail in our future issues.

Support forum software upgrade introduces new design and improves security, usability, and performance

In case you haven't visited the support forum in the past few days, you're up for quite a surprise: our resident forum admin Pete upgraded the support forum software (powered by the Invision Community platform) on last Thursday.

Not only are we now running on the latest and greatest version of the forum software and thus able to put all the bells and whistles it comes with into good use, the overall design of the forum is now also in line with the processwire.com main website.

The new design alone is a big step-up from the old forum, and the upgrade also brings in new features, improves performance, improves usability particularly for mobile users, and has loads of other, behind-the-scenes goodies as well. The upgrade schedule was somewhat tight due to the old version containing security issues, so some parts of the forum are still a work in progress – we should have everything nailed down shortly.

If you run into issues with the new forum version, please post your findings to the forum upgrade announcement thread. Thanks in advance, and hope you enjoy the new forum! Also big thanks to Pete for handling the update like a pro and with barely any impact to regular day-to-day use – great work as always :)

New module: Sanitizer Transliterate by Robin Sallis

Sanitizer Transliterate is a brand new third party module from Robin Sallis. This module adds a new Sanitizer method Sanitizer::transliterate() used for character replacements, the rules for which can be defined via module config. Default transliteration settings are based on the ones from ProcessWire core (InputfieldPageName module), enhanced with matching uppercase variants:

<?php
$string = "Ťhîš īš à šťŕîñğ";
$transliterated_string = $sanitizer->transliterate($string);
// The value of $transliterated_string is now "This is a string"

While the default list of character replacements is based on core rules for converting non-ASCII characters to their ASCII counterparts, the replacement table for Sanitizer Transliterate is intentionally kept separate, which allows you to configure it separately, while leaving native transliteration behaviour (used for Page names, etc.) intact.

Additionally Sanitizer Transliterate can be used for simple text replacements: for an example adding replacement key-value pair dog=cat would replace all instances of "dog" with "cat" in transliterated text.

You can grab this module directly from the Sanitizer Transliterate GitHub repository, or install it using the built-in module installer in ProcessWire Admin. In case you have questions or require additional support for the module, feel free to visit the Sanitizer Transliterate support forum thread.

Big thanks to Robin for yet another useful addition to our modules directory!

Site of the week: Galerie Claeys

Our latest site of the week belongs to Galerie Claeys – an art gallery from Freiburg, Germany with focus on exhibitions from female artists. This site was developed by designconcepts, and features the latest exhibitions of the gallery, as well as an archive of previous exhibitions. Each artist gets their own page on the site, complete with an excerpt of their works and some biographical information.

The word that best decribes the design of this site would be "elegance". There's little unnecessary here, whitespace is used generously, and there's also plenty of stunning artwork to browse through. The whole experience feels really streamlined, which is in part thanks to a couple of performance optimizations: lazy loaded images have been implemented in order to decrease the initial load times of (particularly image heavy) pages, while Barba.js is used for smooth transitions between page loads.

In the Galerie Claeys showcase forum thread Andreas from designconcepts has outlined the modules working their magic behind the scenes, and these include Front-End Page Editor, Markup Sitemap XML, ProCache, Tracy Debugger, and Upgrades. The layout, which is based on the UIkit front-end framework, scales really nicely on different screen sizes.

This is a good-looking and performant website, and definitely one that we're happy to feature as our site of the week. Big thanks to Andreas and the team at designconcepts for sharing their work with us, and congratulations to the client for their new website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 253rd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 23rd 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!