ProcessWire Weekly #375

Latest core updates

In this week's update at the support forum Ryan provides a brief glimpse into what has been happening behind the scenes this week: continued work on the PagesSnapshots module — which is, according to Ryan, progressing steadily — as well as some fixes for core issues reported via GitHub.

There's no core version bump for this week, but some updates have still made their way into the dev branch — here's a brief summary of this week's commits:

• New Sanitizer method Sanitizer::selectorValueAdvanced() intended for filtering selector values used with the advanced text operator.
• Ability to provide an empty value for $config->pageNameWhitelist, in which case all characters are allowed. Primarily added for compatibility with languages for which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to provide a list of all characters.
• Fix for an issue where renaming images in a field with single image allowed didn't work properly, and another issue where in some cases renaming an image could leave some variations of it untouched.
• Fix for an issue where the depth of comments was not handled correctly.

In his weekly update Ryan also provides a rough timeline for a new stable release: if all goes well, this could happen in 2-3 weeks from now. As always, the schedule will be adjusted if there's a need for that, but that's the current plan anyway.

Be sure to check out the weekly update from Ryan as well. If you have any questions or comments regarding this week's core updates or upcoming master version, feel free to post a reply there. Thanks!

New module: Debug Mode Switch

Debug Mode Switch is a brand new third party module for ProcessWire. As you may have already guessed from the name, in a nutshell this module adds the ability to enable or disable debug mode via the admin panel.

Once the module is installed, the debug mode toggle can be found from Debug Mode Switch module configuration screen. Accessing this requires superuser access, which is indeed a safe and sensible approach considering that under normal circumstances you wouldn't want to leave debug mode enabled on a live site (at least any longer than is absolutely necessary).

This module can be downloaded from the Debug Mode Switch Github repository, and you can find some additional details about it from the tech-c.net blog. Big thanks to tech-c.net for developing this module and sharing ti with us!

New module: Manifest

Manifest is a third party module developed by Rudy Affandi. This very simple developer helper module is intended to work as a bridge between the front-end code of your site and a manifest file created by a tool such as Webpack or Laravel Mix.

When using this module you'll need to set your manifest file location and the location of built CSS/JS assets, after which you can use the module to output tags with current paths for specific files included in the manifest.json file:

// CSS <link> tag:
echo $modules->get('Manifest')->css('/css/app.css');

// JavaScript <script> tag:
echo $modules->get('Manifest')->js('/js/js.js');

Or if you're using Twig for your front-end:

{{ global.manifest.css('/css/app.css') }}
{{ global.manifest.js('/js/app.js') }}

Thanks to Rudy for developing this handy little front-end utility module and sharing it with us!

Site of the week: Conversations between Academics and Artists

Our latest site of the week is one called Conversations between Academics and Artists — a project built for the department of Arts and Culture at Queen Mary University in London by millipedia.

The idea behind the project was to start a dialogue between artists and academics of various fields, and the site is primarily built around the recordings of said discussions: a performance artist meeting a historian, a sculptor discussing imaging techniques and the art of teeth with a researcher in the field of dentistry, and so on. From the site you'll find the dialogue documented as text, images, and audio and video recordings, as well as biographies of all parties involved, and information about the project itself.

If you'd like to learn more about this site, a case story can be found from the support forum. Some of the behind the scenes details mentioned in the case story include the use of Pro modules ProFields (Repeater Matrix) and ProCache, free third party modules Page Field Edit Links and LoginPersist, as well as front-end JavaScript tools PhotoSwipe (for galleries) and Plyr (for embedded audio and video files).

Big thanks to the folks at millipedia for sharing this very interesting project with us — there's plenty of quality content on this site to enjoy!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 375th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 24th of July. 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!