ProcessWire Weekly #31

Latest ProcessWire core updates

Last week we discussed various improvements already introduced to the native comments system, and a few others that were planned. This week we've got more comments system updates to announce:

• Admins can now approve comments directly from a link sent with a notification email, without the need to log in to the site first.
  This is achieved by generating a one-time token for each unapproved comment – we consider security a very important factor for ProcessWire, and the comments feature is no exception to that.
• Admin notifications can now be configured more freely.
  Instead of having to specify an admin email with the comments field, you can also specify username – or even a page field, in which case the recipient of the admin notifications can truly depend on the specific page containing the comments field.
• Users leaving a comment can subscribe to replies to their comment, or other new comments.
  Again, this is implemented in such a way that unapproved comments don't generate such notices, meaning that your site can't be used to spam unsuspecting email addresses. A double opt-in feature is also on its way, further enforcing the security of this system.

Other udpates to the comments system include re-do of the comments field settings sreen, configurable notification email "from" address, HTML and plaintext email (instead of just plaintext as before), etc.

For more details about the comments updates, including instructions for enabling user notifications etc. in the first place, you should visit the latest blog post at processwire.com by Ryan.

Create full-screen cross-fading slideshows with Markup Crossfade

Markup Crossfade, a markup module built by Steve Dickinson, is one of the more specialized markup-generating modules available for ProcessWire. What it does is that it helps you create full-screen cross-fading slideshows, with quite a few different options available.

For more details about the module and a list of all the settings available, you should visit the support thread, and if you'd like to see an example of this module in action, there's a demo hosted at lightning.pw.

It's really quite a neat feature, so if there's ever need for a full-screen slideshow, you should definitely keep this module in mind. Thanks to Steve for making this module available for us!

Image Animated GIF adds proper support for resizing and cropping GIFs

Image Animated GIF is a new module by Horst Nogajski. As the name suggests, this module simply adds support for resizing and cropping animated GIFs for anyone using GD library for resizing their images. If you dont know whether you're using GD, you probably are – it's the default option with ProcessWire (and most PHP installations).

Whether or not you believe that GIF is still a viable format for animated content on the web, it's nevertheless good to know that there's a solution available, should you need one. Thanks to Horst for crafting this module for us!

#VATMOSS, #VATMESS, and other forum highlights of the week

Perhaps the most important topic discussed at the forum this week has been the new EU VAT legislation. If you're a developer, a designer, or otherwise provide digital goods to customers within the EU, whether you're from an EU country or not yourself, we strongly urge you to check out this forum thread about the new legislation.

As a result of this new legislation, some web stores will be shutting down, others could refuse to sell their goods to the EU, and in some cases prices could go up. Another problematic effect is that each business will be required to store your identifying information for ten years, introducing a whole new set of security issues. In other words: this will affect consumers too, not just businesses!

Other topics of interest include the PVC (Page - View - Controller) module thread, which actually sparked a wider discussion about various MVC solutions available to ProcessWire. This is definitely an interesting topic, and one we hope to cover in one of our weekly updates – what are current ProcessWire MVC alternatives like, and how do they differ from each other?

Our last forum highlight this week is one we've featured before: the ProcessWire Recipes thread. In case you managed to miss our previous issue, where we mentioned that the ProcessWire Recipes service has now been launched, this is definitely worth checking out!

Site of the week: Winder Gibson Architects

Winder Gibson Architects relies quite heavily on photography – which, considering the theme in question, shouldn't come as a much of a surprise. Much of the content is loaded via AJAX requests, which actually works very well, giving the site just the right amount of wow factor.

Behind the scenes this site utilizes Foundation front-end framework, and a few other open-source components, such as blueimp Gallery. There's nothing wrong with that, of course – no need to reinvent the wheel when a freely available component, library, or framework already does what you need.

ProcessWire sites based on Foundation seem to be quite popular these days actually, probably for a good reason. It does indeed provide a great foundation (no pun intended) for responsive sites, while ProcessWire, thanks to its markup-agnostic approach, lends itself perfectly to any front-end framework out there.

Congratulations to Jonathan Lahijani for building such a great site – keep up the good work!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for this issue – thanks for staying with us and hope you've enjoyed our weekly update. Suggestions and feedback are most welcome, either as comments here or via the feedback form.

Our next issue, ProcessWire Weekly #32, will be out Saturday 20th of December. Until then, happy hacking with ProcessWire!