ProcessWire Weekly #338

Weekly update from Ryan

In this week's update from Ryan we get a little glimpse into the troubles one may face while living in Atlanta. To be a bit more specific, the work planned for this week had to be pushed further due to a new storm — Zeta — rolling through Atlanta and knocking some of the power lines down on it's way.

The bad thing is that we won't be seeing any core updates this week, but there's a silver lining here as always: the delay is only temporary, Ryan and his family are fine, and we should be back to our regular schedule by next week.

All the best to Ryan and his family, and thanks for sharing the news with us!

New module: KreativanLess

KreativanLess is a module by Ivan Milincic, the Serbian developer behind Kreativan. The module in question is a LESS parser for ProcessWire, powered by the Wikimedia fork of the official LESS parser.

The way KreativanLess works is through code calls, i.e. it's not going to do anything on its own automatically. The module provides a method for converting LESS file into CSS, and also accepts a secondary argument allowing you to pass in additional styles string.

Here's an example of utilizing this module in your code for processing a single LESS file, as well as an array of multiple LESS files:

// Load the module
$less = $modules->get("KreativanLess");

// Process a single LESS file
echo '<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="' . $less->getCssFile('templates/less/site.less') . '">';

// Process an array of LESS files
echo '<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="' . $less->getCssFile([
'templates/less/file-1.less',
'templates/less/file-2.less',
'templates/less/file-3.less',
]) . '">';

All in all this module is a nice drop-in tool for processing LESS files, and may well serve as a replacement for a full-blown build process, depending on your needs. The module is easy to use, and provides developer-oriented options for handling common issues:

• Auto browser cache buster based on a timestamp.
• Minify CSS option for removing comments and extraneous white space from CSS files, resulting in smaller file sizes overall.
• Development Mode for making the module parse LESS files on each page load, instead of only triggering the parsing process when changes are detected.

For more details, be sure to check out the KreativanLess GitHub repository. Big thanks to Ivan Milincic for sharing this project with us!

Site of the week: WebDevItaly

Our latest site of the week is called WebDevItaly — a blog for Italian web developers. Built by Frank Véssia, this ProcessWire powered website features a predefined set of categories, one of which is dedicated to ProcessWire itself.

As it happens, WebDevItaly has appeared in our weekly issues before: in issue #336 we featured some posts authored by Frank Véssia on this site about running very big ProcessWire sites effectively and combining the MVC model with ProcessWire development. Those posts were featured in the WebDevItaly website, although back then we didn't even realise that the platform itself was powered by ProcessWire.

Other than ProcessWire content, this site also covers more generic web design and development topics — CSS, JavaScript, front-end development, as well as developer oriented tools and platforms. There's quite a lot of content in here already, and though it's all authored in Italian, a tool such as Google Translate makes it available for us non-Italian speakers.

In addition to all the quality content and a very nice looking design, the site feels fast and responsive. The front-end is powered by a fresh version of the Bootstrap front-end framework, and assets are minified and served via the AIOM+ ProcessWire module. Not much else we can say about the backend implementation, except that it's doing a splendid job for sure.

Big thanks to Frank Véssia for working on this project, and thanks for including it in our sites directory — a very nice website, and we've been thrilled to browse through the content. Keep up the great work!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 338th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 7th 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!