ProcessWire Weekly #408

Latest core updates

The latest weekly update from Ryan details the updates added to the dev branch this past week. These consist of bugfixes and other small improvements — in preparation for upcoming master release — but there's also one all-new feature: new Sanitizer method $sanitizer->words().

A new $sanitizer->words() method was also added which reduces a string to contain just words without punctuation and such.

— Ryan

This new method, as explained by Ryan in his post, removes punctuation and any other non-word characters from provided string. Behind the scenes this method delegates all the heavy lifting to existing $sanitizer->word() method, which has been largely rewritten to support these new requirements.

As for other updates made this week, they are relatively minor, so we won't go into too much detail here. Feel free to check out the weekly commit log at GitHub if you'd like to see all the nitty gritty details.

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

New module: Podcast Subscriptions

Podcast Subscriptions is a brand new third party module developed by Neue Rituale. In a nutshell what this module does is that it provides the ability to subscribe to podcast RSS feeds: it provides a GUI for adding, viewing, or removing subscriptions, stores data for podcasts in a custom database table, and provides hooks for custom behaviour:

$wire->addHookBefore(
   'ProcessPodcastSubscriptions::processPodcast',
   function (HookEvent $event) {

   /** @var WireData */
   $feed = $event->arguments(0);

   /** @var \Lukaswhite\PodcastFeedParser\Podcast */
   $podcast = $event->arguments(1);

   foreach ($podcast->getEpisodes() as $episode) {
      // magic happens here: create pages for episodes, or do whatever else
      // that makes sense to you with the episode data
   }
});

As a stand-alone module Podcast Subscriptions provide an API method for querying the feeds it has stored, optionally based on a selector. Additional features can be added by hooking into various methods it exposes, and there's even a bundled example for this: the Create Episode Pages module, which — as you may have guessed — automatically creates pages for new episodes.

Behind the scenes Podcast Subscriptions makes use of a third party PHP library called podcast-feed-parser, developed by Lukas White. Note that since this dependency is not bundled with the module but rather handled by Composer, installing this module does require one extra step: running composer install in the module's directory.

If you'd like to know more about this module, be sure to visit the Podcast Subscriptions GitHub repository, where you'll find detailed instructions for installing and using it. In case you have any questions, head down to the dedicated support forum thread.

Big thanks to the folks at Neue Rituale for sharing this project with us!

Site of the week: Richard Antony

Our latest site of the week belongs to voiceover artist Richard Antony. This is easily one of the quirkiest sites we've featured here in a while, and definitely one that we'd recommend checking out yourself.

This site, built by ID Studio Web Agency, is a portfolio for voiceover artist Richard Antony, introducing the man, his studio, and his works. From the site you can find videos and recordings, including some that were done for major brands — Microsoft, Disney, BMW, Bosch, and Kellogg's, just to name a few. As you can probably guess, these rely heavily on the use of sound, so be sure to crank up the volume on your speakers first.

The site has a very nice, almost black and white design, complete with illustrations and cleverly implemented transition and animation effects. As for the implementation, this site is powered by the Bootstrap front-end framework, and appears to be built with a content block builder of some sort. One and only major third party module we could spot here is the commercial FormBuilder module from Ryan.

Thanks to the folks at ID Studio Web Agency for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Richard Antony, for his amazing website. Great work, as always, from everyone involved in this project!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 408th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 12th of March. 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!