ProcessWire Weekly #313

Weekly update from Ryan

This week there were no new core updates. That client work Ryan mentioned last week has been his focus for this week as well, which means that core stuff unfortunately had to wait — but, on the other hand, there are some pretty interesting details about the newly redesigned Tripsite in the weekly update!

The latest iteration of Tripsite — some quick facts and figures

You can find a more in-depth introduction from Ryan's update, but the long story short is that the latest iteration of Tripsite — which, according to Ryan, was originally one of the earliest ProcessWire 2.x sites out there — was just released for the public.

The design part was handled by Pete, who is also the moderator of our support forum, while Ryan handled the development work. Behind the scenes Jan, who also happens to be the administrator of the servers powering the processwire.com sites, did his magic to get the server side stuff up and running in the AWS environment.

Tripsite is your comprehensive marketplace for cycling and hiking holidays in Europe, Asia, and beyond, showcasing hundreds of tours for the active vacationer, including bike and boat tours, bike tours, hiking adventures, cultural river cruises, and multi-adventure experiences!

— Tripsite.com

There's a second stage for this project as well, but that's going up at a later date. As Ryan explains in his post, this site has been literally running for a decade on the same installation it does now, and while this still works just fine, some steps will be taken in the next version to make full use of newer core and Pro module features.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes...

Just in case you're wondering what makes a site like this tick, here's a list of some behind-the-scenes details Ryan shared in his post:

• The site is now running on the latest version of ProcessWire, and — as we briefly mentioned above — hosted on a load-balanced server setup at Amazon AWS.
• The redesign was developed side-by-side with the existing site. A combination of $config->setLocation('templates', 'site/tpl') and a custom switch in their user profile allowed the client to switch between the two versions in a couple of clicks.
• The output strategy for this site was Markup Regions, and the front-end framework is Uikit 3. Localized weather information — soon to be added — will be pulled in using a custom module developed by Pete.
• The site makes use of a very recent core addition called custom Page classes for some added Page level functionality, as well as the Functions API for a clean and consistent API access.

For more details, be sure to check out the weekly update from Ryan. Thanks!

New module: InputfieldUID

Inputfield UID is a brand new third party module developed by Klaus Hintraeger of Hintraeger Werbeagentur. This module adds an option to text fields for validating the inserted value on page save, making sure that it's a valid EU VAT number.

Behind the scenes the validation process makes use of the European Commission VIES (VAT Information Exchange System) service, and more specifically their public SOAP web service. The VIES service in turn checks the VAT number from a national database, so it should be just about as accurate as you can get.

Note: this module makes use of the SoapClient PHP extension, so before installing this module, please make sure that you have said extension installed and enabled as well.

Thanks to Klaus for sharing this project with us!

New module: Image Thumbnail Tags

Next up we have the latest module developed by Robin Sallis: Image Thumbnail Tags. What this module does is that it displays image tags overlaid on the thumbnail using customizable colors:

The idea behind this module is to make it easier to identify which images have which specific tags without needing to open the edit view for each image, or even switch the image field display mode to list. Color configuration is optional, but pretty useful for making things extra easy to interpret.

Big thanks to Robin for sharing yet another very useful module with us!

New module: Textformatter Lite YouTube Embed

Textformatter Lite YouTube Embed is a new Textformatter module by Jacques Maes — and it's actually his first public module, so congratulations are in order!

Now, in a nutshell this module is an adaptation of Textformatter Video Embed, designed to use the Lite YouTube Embed script from Paul Irish. Compared to Ryan's original video embed module, here are some of the key differences:

• According to Paul Irish, the embed script used here should render the video "just like the real thing but approximately 224x faster". And if you were wondering, he has indeed done proper testing and gathered data to back his claim.
• Lite YouTube Embed injects videos using JavaScript into a custom element. This should work just fine for most modern browsers, but means that certain legacy browsers (such as Internet Explorer) are not supported.
• The Textformatter Lite YouTube Embed video supports YouTube, but not Vimeo. There is a largely comparable Lite Vimeo JavaScript implementation, so perhaps Vimeo support could be a later addition (or separate module).

Other than that, the two modules are basically the same, so depending on your needs you could use this module as a drop-in replacement for Textformatter Video Embed — or vice versa.

Thanks to Jacques for sharing this module with us. Very interesting project!

Site of the week: Jonatan Rønsholdt Portfolio

Our latest site of the week is the newly released portfolio of Jonatan Rønsholdt. Jonatan is a graphic and web designer, as well as a (self-labeled) ProcessWire lover, based in Denmark.

This site focuses on Jonatan's work, but also contains a brief "about me" section, as well as his CV. The work samples highlighted on the site are all visually striking, and range from logo design and illustration work to web and print design. For each sample there's a dedicated page providing a short summary, and often some additional details as well.

Design wise this site is a model example of a typical portfolio website: a large grid of thumbnails on the front page, and a simple yet stylish layout page for regular pages, accompanied by some custom views for the "about me" and "CV" pages. It's clearly a site designed for a single purpose, and it fulfills that single purpose splendidly.

Behind the scenes the site uses the Bootstrap front-end framework, along with some familiar JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery and the HTML5 media player Video.js. As far as we can tell there's not a whole lot of stuff going on here — this is quite a simple site after all — but we would still like to add that the performance of the site is exceptional.

Big thanks to Jonatan for sharing this project, as well as his numerous work samples, with us. Amazing stuff, keep up the great work!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 313rd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 16th of May. 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!