ProcessWire Weekly #383

by

In the 383rd issue of ProcessWire Weekly we'll cover the latest core updates, check out a brand new third party module called Custom Admin Menus, and more. Read on!

Welcome to the latest issue of ProcessWire Weekly. In this issue we're going to walk you through the latest core updates, introduce a new module called Custom Admin Menus, and check out our latest site of the week: a project built by millipedia for UK based hub for academic articles and information about security research, Crest Research.

Thanks to all of our readers for being here with us again, and as always, any feedback is most welcome – please don't hesitate to drop us a line if there's anything in your mind you'd like to share with us. Enjoy our latest issue and have a great weekend!

Latest core updates

In this week's update, posted to the support forum, Ryan talks about the latest dev branch additions and some of his other ongoing projects. The core updates for this week were relatively minor, and primarily revolve around database selectors:

  • Support for OR values on "status=" selectors: status=hidden|unpublished would, for an example, now find all pages that are either hidden or unpublished. This is supported for all available status names.
  • Support for OR type values on "sort=" selectors: sort=date|title can now be used as a handy shortcut for sort=date, sort=title, which in this case would sort items first by date and then by title.
  • Support for combined "start" and "limit" selectors: limit=5|10 can now be used as a shortcut for start=5, limit=10, which in this case would find max ten results starting from the sixth one.
  • Support for matching children paths: children=/path/to/page would find results that have a child page with path "/path/to/page". This behaviour was already available for "parent", so this update improves consistency ever so slightly.

In other news Ryan has been busy working on the upcoming Pages Snapshots module, which sounds like it's shaping up nicely. We'll let you know once there's more news to share about this tool.

That's all for the core updates section this week, but be sure to check out the weekly update at the support forum for more details. Thanks!

New module: Custom Admin Menus

Custom Admin Menus is a brand new module developed by Robin Sallis. Once installed, this module allows one to create custom admin menus from the module config settings screen with a straightforward and easy to use GUI. While it's possible to create new links through Process modules, if you really just need the links, this module is a much easier — and code free — solution.

Examples of what admin menus added with Custom Admin Menus module might look like. Screenshot by module author Robin S.

Currently the module makes it possible to add up to three custom menu items, each with optional dropdowns for children. Links can point the user to admin pages, front-end pages, or external URLs, and for more specialized needs it's also possible to set child items programmatically by hooking into CustomAdminMenus::getMenuChildren.

Thanks to Robin for yet another awesome contribution — this module will definitely come in handy for future projects!

Site of the week: Crest Research

Our latest site of the week is that of Crest Research: a publicly funded academic hub dedicated to behavioural and social science research into security threats. The Crest headquarter is at the University of Lancaster in the UK.

Current Crest Research website was recently migrated from WordPress to ProcessWire by the team at millipedia. According to the Crest Research case study posted just this week to the support forum said transition was done for a number of reasons, which included ease of development, better structuring and reorganization of content, and so on. This also allowed the developers to focus on optimizing the performance of the site.

The site contains a lengthy list of publications from nearly two hundred authors, all of which can be browsed by type, author, and category. There are also file downloads — the download numbers of which the system automatically keeps track of — and an internal site search that makes use of the powerful new text-searching features introduced in ProcessWire 3.0.160.

The case study provides a lot of insight into how the site was built, and particularly how it's content was migrated from WordPress to ProcessWire, so definitely check it out. As for modules used on the site, these include ProcessMigrator and ProcessBatcher (used for the migration part), Redirects, Hanna Code, AIOM+, Connect Page Fields, Page Field Edit Links, Dashboard, Schedule Pages, and Tracy Debugger.

Big thanks to the folks at millipedia for sharing this project, as well as many interesting details about the process of building it, with us. And our congratulations for the client, Crest Research, for their brilliant new website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 383rd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 18th of September. 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!

Post a comment