ProcessWire Weekly #30

Latest ProcessWire core updates

This week our core updates focus on improving ProcessWire's built-in comments system by adding support for threaded comments. Until now the native comments feature has only had support for a flat list of comments, which didn't always lend itself well to complex discussions.

This is weeks update is actually just the first one in a series of updates sponsored by update AG – one which, according to Ryan, is going to be followed by several other updates and additions in the coming week(s):

• Notification emails for users participating in a comments thread
• Approving comments directly from the admin notification emails
• Promoted comments or likes – or both
• Textformatter support for comments
• Comments Manager updates
• More customization options and other updates

For more details and a live example of threaded comments, take a look at the latest blog post by Ryan, ProcessWire Core Comments Upgrades.

Brand new site providing recipes for ProcessWire is now open for public!

ProcessWire Recipes is a brand new site providing recipes – mini-tutorials, bits and/or snippets of code, whatever term you prefer – for ProcessWire users out there.

You can read more about this project from the ProcessWire Recipes forum thread, and here's a short excerpt from the site:

This directory aims to collect mini-tutorials for common and not-so-common ProcessWire tasks and problems, presented in concise and spot-on format to help you grow your ProcessWire mastery.

Contributors to the directory are encouraged to submit content as pull requests to a separate GitHub repository, and the site has the ability to pull content directly from Markdown files there using a module called Recipe Installer. This should make contributing to the directory easy for anyone with even basic expertise at working with GitHub.

Our sincerest congratulations for the authors of this project, Marcus Herrmann and Christian Raunitschka, for getting this thing started. Hopefully we'll see a lot more content on the site in the near future – it's definitely a great concept and deserves a special mention here!

Effortlessly embedding share buttons with Markup Social Share Buttons

Social Share Buttons is a new markup module by Philipp 'Soma' Urlich, one of our most active contributors of quality modules. This particular module, as the name already suggests, allows you to easily embed social share buttons on your site.

Supported services include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit – and a whole bunch of others. The module also boasts quite a few configuration options for defining exactly what gets shared, and even includes several pre-made PNG icon themes – naturally with an option to create your own as needed.

For more details visit the modules directory page, and for any additional questions and/or comments, the support board is your best bet. Thanks for making this module available for us, Philipp!

New Validation Module for ProcessWire, based on the GUMP validation class

Validation is a module that integrates the GUMP validation class into ProcessWire – and extends it by adding a couple of new features. The module was built by İskender Totoğlu, and the main feature it adds is the ability to validate user input (or any other data, really) at API level with an extensive set of tools.

ProcessWire's native Sanitizer is intended for making sure that data is valid and secure for specific, partly internal, use cases – including usernames, page names, and selector values. This module, on the other hand, validates arrays of data against more specific set of rules, making it a very good tool for validating user input from POST request, etc.

Available validators include required, valid_email, valid_ip, iban, containsList, and doesNotContainList, just to name a few. For a comprehensive list of validators and examples of this module in use, please visit the GitHub page. For questions and comments head down to the support board.

Thanks to İskender for making this module, it's definitely going to be useful!

Site of the week: UF/IFAS Assessment

UF/IFAS stands for the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences of the University of Florida, and the topic of the site in question is Assessment of Non-Native Plants in Florida's Natural Areas. In essence, it's a site listing non-native plants in Florida, and assessing how invasive they might be.

Naturally great design and a responsive layout is a big plus, but one specific highlight of the site is the real-time text search, which actually comes in two flavours; one on the home page and one on the assessments page.

Together with quite extensive filtering tools on the assessments page, this site has pretty neat tools for filtering large amounts of data – and considering that handling large amounts of data is one of the strengths of ProcessWire itself, it too seems like the perfect tool for a site like this.

Overall this is another great site by the very talented Tom Reno of Tom Reno Design. For more details, please visit the related forum thread, in which Tom introduces the site himself and explains some of its inner workings. Great stuff!

Stay tuned for our next issue

Hope you've enjoyed your stay, and please let us know if there's anything we could improve in these weekly updates. Your feedback is always appreciated. For more news, updates, and great discussions, remember to visit the ProcessWire support forum.

Our next issue, ProcessWire Weekly #31, will be out Saturday, 13th of December. Until then, happy hacking with ProcessWire!