ProcessWire Weekly #393

Latest core and PageAutosave/LivePreview updates

In this week's weekly update Ryan walks us through all the updates made to the (work in progress) autosave and live preview module, which he's been working on for a while now. Here's a summarized version of said updates:

• Support for automatic detection of best placement for live preview window position based on available space.
• Support for remembering live preview window position in a cookie.
• New option to support automatic replacement of individual page field values without having to add your own pw-value-* classes to page markup.
• LivePreview editor and preview windows talk to each other with JS rather than SSE/streaming, mainly for reliability and performance reasons.

Additionally, there have been some bug fixes and other general improvements, so if you're using this module already, be sure to grab the latest version via the support forum for an improved experience.

Summary of weekly core updates

As for ProcessWire core updates, there were a few of those this week as well, but nothing particularly major. As a result, there's no core version bump for this week either. Here's a summary of this week's core updates:

• Support for specifying background color for Repeater item labels by including a (hex) color code in the label name. Primarily intended for RepeaterMatrix, where you'll typically have more than one item type.
• Small update to $pages->add() to make it pull fresh data from the database after adding a new page. This should help alleviate some API use cases where returned $page wasn't fully initialized yet.
• A fix for an issue where WireHttp was hanging up until max_execution time was reached when using sockets.
• A fix for various PHP 8.1 deprecation issues.

That's all for our core updates section this week. Be sure to visit the weekly update forum post for a more comprehensive changelog for the PageAutosave/LivePreview module. Thanks!

New module: Anonymize fields

Anonymize fields is a newly released third party module developed by Jens Martsch. As the name suggests and the description in the GitHub repository further explains, this module allows you to define fields that get anonymized after a defined period of time.

In the context of this module, anonymization refers to either replacing field values with a configurable fill word, or removing stored data altogether. The time period after which page content gets anonymized can be configured (default is 60 days), and anonymized fields can be selected manually via module config screen.

Behind the scenes LazyCron is used to trigger the anonymization process, which makes the whole process completely automatic.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can download or clone it directly from the Anonymize fields GitHub repository. Thanks to Jens for developing this module!

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.

• First of all we have a very detailed answer from Jan Romero to a question about creating forms and saving form answers as pages in ProcessWire; Jan's answer is basically an easy to follow mini-tutorial in itself.
• Another tutorial type post comes from KarlvonKarton, and is labeled as helpful little script that copies images from pages to a folder and resizes them. The use case here is copying singular images from all pages to a directory for use in a mosaic picture built with PhotoShop. Handy!
• Next up we've got a new project from Timo Hausmann: processwire-docker, which is a Docker image intended for ProcessWire development. While there are other solutions available for this as well, it's nice to have options — thanks, Timo!
• Finally, we'd like to share a tool that has been around for a while, but which we've completely forgotten to mention here: the pwsnippets extension for Visual Studio Code by Bernhard Baumrock. There are quite a few options here, so definitely check it out if you're using VSCode to build ProcessWire powered projects.

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.

Site of the week: Sixlab

Our latest site of the week belongs to the Italian IT company Sixlab.

Sixlab provides various technology services and products for B2B customers. Their offering consists of various IT consulting services, data analysis and visualization solutions, and web development — which, in this case, covers both web sites and e-commerce solutions.

The site of Sixlabs was developed in-house, and consists of regular content pages that introduce the company, their clientele, and services, a blog and news section, a project portfolio, and a contact page with a FormBuilder powered contact form. Each page looks great and feels intuitive to use, and transitions from page to page feel smooth — which is in part thanks to a pretty neat little loading animation.

The front-end of this site is powered by the Bootstrap front-end framework and a few smaller tools and utilities, such as Owl Carousel and Animate.css animation library. As for back-end, the one and only third party module we could spot was the commercial FormBuilder module from Ryan.

Big thanks to the folks at Sixlab for sharing their site with us, and congratulations from us — the site looks nice, performs swimmingly, and is effortless to browse. Great job from everyone involved in this project!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 393rd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 27th 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!