ProcessWire Weekly #390

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.188

Latest core update, ProcessWire 3.0.188, follows in the footsteps of last couple of weeks, bringing in another batch of Repeater updates. This version adds both user-facing and behind-the-scenes updates:

• As a performance improvement Repeaters have a new (disabled by default) option for creating fewer repeater pages — or, in other words, only creating pages behind the scenes if there's at least one Repeater item for given parent page.

Without this option Repeater fields always create a hidden page structure for all parent pages, which — though mostly harmless — can in certain situations result in a massive amount of placeholder pages being created, as explained by Jonathan Lahijani in last week's weekly updates forum post.

Once this option has gone through a bit more testing, it'll likely become the default mode for Repeaters.

• The GUI clone option has been replaced with an extended set of tools, providing an option to clone an item above existing item, and an option to copy Repeater item from one parent page to another (assuming both have the same Repeater field on them).

The way this new copy-paste feature works is that it allows one to save an existing item into memory, navigate to another page, and paste a 1:1 copy of the original item directly into a matching Repeater field in that page.

Check out following screencast from Ryan to see the copy-paste feature in action:

That's all for our core updates section this week, but be sure to also visit the weekly forum post introducing aforementioned updates for more details. Thanks!

New module: AppApiFile

AppApiFile is a brand new third party module from the author of the AppApi module, Sebastian Schendel. As the name of the module suggests, it's an extension for AppApi: once both modules are installed, AppApiFile registers a new "file" endpoint to AppApi routes, providing rather straightforward API access to page files.

Following parameters can currently be used to modify images upon request:

• width
• height
• maxwidth
• maxheight
• cropX
• cropY

Now, what's perhaps even more interesting here is that AppApiFile is the first extension module for AppApi. Support for registering routes via third party modules was added in AppApi version 1.2.0, making it a lot easier to package and reuse prebuilt API features in new projects.

Big thanks to Sebastian for all his work on the AppApi project — it's a brilliant module, and both the extension support and the AppApiFile module are very nice additions!

Site of the week: EntryAdvise.com

Our latest site of the week is a newly released project called EntryAdvise.com. EntryAdvise.com is a directory of country-specific travel advisory articles, providing neatly packaged information for anyone interested in traveling to foreign countries.

The things you can find for each listed country include details regarding current travel restrictions, important contact details and phone numbers, handy guides for everyday things (such as electrical outlet types), and plenty of useful links. Obviously COVID situation is quite prominently featured for each country, but there's indeed plenty of other useful information here as well,.

In addition to quite a nice design, this site provides quite an enjoyable user interface, making it very easy to find and consume available information. Each country has a page of its own on the site, and one can search for a country either using an autocomplete search, or by browsing them by continent (or a few other special criteria).

As for behind the scenes details, there's not much we can say except that the front-end of this site appears to be powered by the Spectre.css CSS framework, along with some specific JS libraries, such as jQuery and typeahead.js for the autocomplete search.

Thanks to the designer and developer behind this site, Maciej Bis, for sharing it with us! There's a lot of potential here, and we're quite thrilled to have this site featured in the ProcessWire sites directory, as well as our latest site of the week.

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 390th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 6th 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!