ProcessWire Weekly #355

Latest core updates, and initial plan for core versions 3.0.173, 30.174, and 3.0.175

In the latest weekly update, posted via the support forum, Ryan talks about this week's core updates, upcoming 3.0.173 version, and initial plans for versions 3.0.174 and 3.0.175. To summarize:

• This week the focus has been on implementing requests from the processwire-requests repository. Some smaller updates already made it into the core, while others are still being worked on and will likely land by next week.
• Once those feature updates are done and 3.0.173 is out, for release 3.0.174 the focus will be on covering reports from the processwire-issues repository.
• 3.0.175 will again focus on the processwire-requests repository.

We'll likely provide more in-depth details once 3.0.173 is out, but as a quick sneak peek the new features added to the core this week include the ability to start/stop DB query logging programmatically, initial support for paginated Page references, and passing user info and roles to JS via newly added $config method $config->jsConfig().

That's all for this week's core updates. We should have more to share by next week, but in the meanwhile be sure to post any new feature requests to the processwire-requests repository for consideration in upcoming releases. Thanks!

Weekly forum highlights, tutorials, and other online resources

For this week we've gathered a list of support forum highlights and other useful and hopefully interesting resources. As always, please let us know if there's anything important we've missed, so that we can include it in one of our future issues.

• One of the hot topics on the support forum for past weeks has been routing; the use of 404 hooks for custom routes, and alternative ideas that could make things easier for developers — such as the WireApi proof of concept module by BitPoet.
• Another interesting recent thread is titled how to use ProcessWire standalone (without DB connection), which is closely related to the PwStandalone GitHub repository. The idea here is providing examples on how to utilize ProcessWire classes in your own code without an actual, installed ProcessWire instance.
• Next up we've got a couple of smaller, "tip of the week" type posts: how to show maintenance info on the admin backend, and how to make unpublished pages accessible via a GET parameter. Simple, yet very useful; great stuff, thanks to Bernhard Baumrock for sharing these with us!
• Finally, we've got an article that might be of interest particularly to the DevOps-minded: a tutorial for connecting DeployBot and ProcessWire for a sleek CI/CD pipeline. This one is definitely worth checking out.

If you're interested in ProcessWire news, discussions, and updates, there's always something going on at the support forum. Since we're only able to include a tiny selection of all that in our weekly updates, head down to the forum for more.

The results of our earlier page builder poll

In the Weekly issue #353 we asked you folks about page builder usage on ProcessWire sites. The results of that poll are now in, and it looks like page builders may indeed be relatively common among ProcessWire developers: slightly over 1/4 stated that page builders are their go-to approach, while by far the biggest group — roughly 1/3 — responded that they decide the suitable approach on a case by case basis.

If anything, this poll makes it pretty clear that while there are ProcessWire users that steer clear of page builder type features, there's no denying that the concept has its place in our ecosystem. We've also seen some pretty amazing proof of concept level projects recently, so we're quite eager to see where all that leads!

Got an idea for a future poll? Let us know via comments or the feedback form — we're always interested in finding out what's going on in the community, and what might be bubbling just under the surface!

Site of the week: Mais Liberdade

Our latest site belongs to Mais Liberdade, which is a liberal think-tank from Portugal. This non-profit organization was founded in 2021, and in their own words they promote the values of liberal democracy, individual freedom, and free market economy.

The Mais Liberdade website was crafted by SuperTINY agency. For anyone curious about what makes the site tick, Helder Cervantes of SuperTINY has posted a showcase forum thread in which he demonstrates the block editor used for building the bulk of content, provides some insight into the project, and briefly covers some behind the scenes tech choices:

The frontend was built using web components (Stencil js). Basic pages are built with a modular approach [...] The approach is a simple repeater with a custom block type selector interface.

— Helder Cervantes

Not only is this site skillfully designed and enjoyable to use, it also has a modern and powerful engine humming right under the hood, and the content editor experience (as far as we've seen) looks really slick. Brilliant on all fronts, just the way we like 'em.

Thanks to Helder for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Mais Liberdade, for their new website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 355th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 6th of March. 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!