ProcessWire Weekly #287

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.145

In the latest post at the processwire.com blog Ryan covers, in some depth, the updates included with ProcessWire 3.0.145 dev, as well as the updates introduced in last week's dev release, 3.0.144. Another topic that the blog post gets into are our short-term plans, which basically boil down to getting the next major release of the master branch out.

There are two major features covered in the blog post:

• Field template context override settings
  Recent ProcessWire versions have introduced a number of improvements to the "overrides" tab displaying the field settings in the context of different templates.
• Inputfields JavaScript API
  This new JS API is makes it easier to manipulate Inputfields from the JS side, and provides an elegant solution to various core and module development needs.

We mentioned both of these last week in our weekly issue, but in his post Ryan goes a bit further, explaining the reasoning behind these features, as well as including some examples of their use. The post also provides a list of available Inputfields JavaScript API methods, their parameters, and a summary of what each of them actually does.

For most parts this new JS API is intended for core and module development purposes, but it can actually come in handy whenever your goal is to modify the admin interface in some way, or perhaps provide additional clues to editors by implementing JavaScript widgets of your own – and what's particularly neat is that as soon as you've updated to the latest dev version, you can try them out directly in your browser's developer tools.

For more details and some sample code to try in terms of the Inputfields JavaScript API, be sure to check out the weekly blog post by Ryan. Thanks!

New module: Sanitizer EasySlugger by Robin Sallis

Sanitizer EasySlugger is a brand new module from Robin Sallis. What it does is basically integrating the EasySlugger library – described as "a fast PHP library to generate slugs, which allow to safely include any string as part of an URL" – into the built-in Sanitizer class of ProcessWire as a set of new methods:

echo $sanitizer->slugger('Lorem Ipsum');
// Result: lorem-ipsum

echo $sanitizer->utf8Slugger('这个用汉语怎么说');
// Result: zhe-ge-yong-han-yu-zen-me-shuo

echo $sanitizer->seoSlugger('The price is $5.99');
// Result: the-price-is-5-dollars-99-cents

echo $sanitizer->seoUtf8Slugger('价钱是 $5.99');
// Result: jia-qian-shi-5-dollars-99-cents

The separator generated by EasySlugger can be defined by providing an optional array of options to the method, and there's also an option of appending a random suffix to the slug in order to make it unique:

$slug = $sanitizer->utf8Slugger('这个用汉语怎么说', [
    'separator' => '_',
    'unique' => true,
]);
// Result: zhe_ge_yong_han_yu_zen_me_shuo_3ad66c4

While you can get similar slugs out of ProcessWire's native page name sanitization, the alternative and extended options provided by EasySlugger may well come in handy in cases where you're looking for some alternative or more specialised result, as can be seen in features like the seoSlugger, which generates particularly SEO friendly slugs.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can install it via the built-in module installer in the ProcessWire Admin, or grab a copy of the module via the Sanitizer EasySlugger GitHub repository. Big thanks to Robin for sharing this project with us!

Site of the week: Posh Gecko

Our latest site of the week belongs to the video and animation company Posh Gecko.

Posh Gecko is a London and Peterborough based company with a talented team of producers and animators. Their ultimate goal is to create films that connect, and they have a really great showreel to show for their dedication, as well as a clientele that includes big names such as Epic Games, IKEA, and Autodesk.

The Posh Gecko website, created by Internet Dreams Studio, is quite a stunning experience on its own: not only are the visuals here top notch, but there's also quite a bit going on in terms of animation and fancy transitions. The contents of the site are also skillfully crafted, and the video samples – which, rightfully, play a major role on this site – are intriguing to say the least.

Taking a quick peek behind the scenes we can see that the front-end of this site is built on top of the Bootstrap front-end framework and the animations are achieved in part by using the rather popular Animate on Scroll JavaScript library, but apart from that we can't really say much about the underlying implementation; the ProcessWire end of things remains hidden, as it should.

Thanks to the Internet Dreams Studio for sharing this site with us, and congratulations to Posh Gecko for their new and amazingly visual website – brilliant job from everyone involved in this project!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 287th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 16th of November. 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!