ProcessWire Weekly #404

Latest core updates

This week there's a blog post from Ryan about the latest core updates, which introduce major performance boost to ProcessWire powered sites, and particularly those sites with a relatively large number of templates and/or fields.

Improvements to lazy loading of fields and templates, and other core level performance tweaks

As Ryan explains in his post, this week's updates were initially suggested by Michael Spooner, who ran into some trouble with a site that included templates and fields in the hundreds. While ProcessWire can easily deal with massive amounts of pages, massive amounts of fields/templates is completely a different story — until now.

The results of the co-operation between Michael and Ryan has landed in the GitHub dev branch this week, and promises substantial updates for sites with very large number of templates and fields.

Here's what the numbers looked like for a site with 1000 fields, 1000 templates, and 1000 fieldgroups before this week's updates — times in seconds:

0.7160 all (full execution time)
0.6790 boot
0.6560 boot.load
0.5167 boot.load.fields
0.0537 boot.load.fieldgroups
0.0449 boot.load.templates

... and here are the same numbers for the latest core version:

0.1078 all (full execution time)
0.0820 boot
0.0598 boot.load
0.0062 boot.load.fields
0.0077 boot.load.fieldgroups
0.0062 boot.load.templates

In other words: for this setup, on the test machine Ryan was running the numbers on, we can observe a 0.6 second (600 millisecond) improvement for boot times. That's a notable number, and definitely one you can notice. This is with lazy loading enabled; there's a setting for toggling this on/off, or enabling it for only a specific type of core data structure (fields, templates, fieldgroups), in case it causes issues with your setup.

What about sites with smaller amount of fields/templates, how are those affected?

As Ryan notes in his post, one thing that's great about this week's optimizations is that they have no adverse effects for setups with smaller (or, shall we say, normal) amount of fields/templates. While the benefits will be much bigger as the numbers get bigger, even smaller setups will gain a small boost — which, of course, is always welcome.

For more details and additional metrics, be sure to check out the weekly blog post from Ryan, and if you'd like to check out the weekly core updates in detail, feel free to also check out the commit log at GitHub. Thanks!

Weekly forum highlights 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 off there's a new site profile from Kreativan that we've just been made aware of, called WireKit. Introduced as a starting point for lightning-fast and feature-rich websites, WireKit appears to be in relatively early stage of development, but it's definitely something to keep an eye out for.
• Another newly released project is the Romanian language pack for ProcessWire. This language pack is not yet available via our modules directory, but seems rather complete — so if you're looking for one, be sure to check it out.
• Now, if you've been following the discussions at our support forum, there' been a lot of talk about development and deployment workflows lately. One of the latest additions to that topic is a detailed how-to post from gebeer for automating deployments with Git hooks. Nice one, thanks for sharing!
• ... and while we're on the topic of tools and processes, there's plenty of valuable new content at the share your PW dev setups/tools thread, as well as the better configuration for fields and templates thread, so definitely check them out too. Should you have anything to add to the discussion, definitely feel free to!

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: SIN WITH MIND

Our latest site of the week belongs to a German company called Universe-CFC. Their main products are the exclusive Merlot and Chardonnay red wines, made available under the SIN WITH MIND brand.

The content of this site is mainly about aforementioned wine products, but there are also some details about the company behind them, the awards they've won, and a built-in e-commerce and shopping cart feature.

Since the site is age restricted due to the nature of the products, we'll stick with the age verification page for the screenshots. Anyway, the overall design of the site is quite nice; the color scheme is very dark, which works beutifully when combined with bold, neon-type reds, product images, and other graphical elements. There's also the right amount of animation here to make the site feel alive, without being annoying or distracting.

The SIN WITH MIND website was developed by Agentur BRANDMARKER GmbH, and while it's essentially a one-pager, the one exception is the e-commerce features, powered by the Padloper e-commerce module. The front-end of the site is based on the Bootstrap front-end framework, and additional visual effects are implemented with the popular Animate on Scroll JavaScript animation library.

Big thanks to the folks at Agentur BRANDMARKER for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations and best wishes in their future endeavors to the client, Universe-CFC. Great work from everyone involved in this project!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 404th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 12th of February. 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!