ProcessWire Weekly #414

The 414th issue of ProcessWire Weekly covers ProcessWire 3.0.198 dev and brings in the latest news from the ProcessWire community. Modules, sites, and more. Read on!

Welcome to the latest issue of ProcesWire Weekly. In this issue we'll dig into the latest ProcessWire core updates, share some recent ProcessWire related highlights from the support forum and the web, and finally take a closer look at a very interesting new site of the week belonging to the Transferware Collectors Club.

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: ProcessWire 3.0.198

In this week's weekly update at the support forum Ryan covers the latest ProcessWire development version, 3.0.198. This version is available via the dev branch at GitHub in case right now you'd like to give it a try, and introduces some really nice updates compared to previous version, 3.0.197:

  • Support for runtime page cache groups, which allows us to cache and uncache pages as a group. While anyone can make use of this new feature, it was mainly added to enhance the performance of $pages->findMany(), which now provides great performance in addition to being very memory efficient.
  • ProcessWire's built-in dependent selects feature (undocumented yet still quite widely used feature, where values of one select field are updated based on the value in previous select field) has been updated to support Repeaters.
  • $pages->findRaw() method was updated with a "nulls" option, resolving feature request #1553. If you pass true as the value of the nulls option, array of results contains null values as placeholders for any fields you requested that were not present on each matching page.

In addition there are some bug fixes in this week's release, the details of which you can find from the dev branch commit log. Among these fixes were GUI improvements, mainly user-related search fixes, and an update to built-in image orientation corrections array.

That's all for our core updates section this week. Be sure to check out the weekly update at the support forum, and as always please let us know if you run into any issues while trying out this week's development version. Thanks!

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.

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: Transferware Collectors Club Database of Patterns and Sources

Our latest site of the week is the Transferware Collectors Club Database of Patterns and Sources, and it's kind of unconventional in a few ways — one of those being that it's not a publicly viewable site, which also means that we don't have our usual device images available. Instead we have an enlightening demonstration video from the developer of the site, Jonathan Lahijani, and also a rather detailed case story.

To summarize, this site is a vast database of information about transferware: images, dates, creator details, bibliographic records, and so on. Just in case that you're like us and the word transferware doesn't instantly ring a bell, Wikipedia defines it like so:

Transfer printing is a method of decorating pottery or other materials using an engraved copper or steel plate from which a monochrome print on paper is taken which is then transferred by pressing onto the ceramic piece. Pottery decorated using the technique is known as transferware or transfer ware.

The database of patterns and sources, which consists of nearly 20.000 individual resources, can be seen in action in this video introducing various aspects of the database's search feature:

As we can see, the search is indeed a major feature here. As Jonathan explains in the showcase forum thread introducing this project, previous version of the database was ProcessWire integrated with Elastic Search. With the latest iteration Elastic Search has been dropped, and the search is instead based on ProcessWire's page finding features, the WireWordTools module, and BigHugeThesaurus API for auto-generated synonyms.

The front-end of this project is based on the Uikit front-end framework and makes use of both htmx and Alpine.js for dynamic features. For additional technical details, check out Jonathan's post, which covers these in greater detail than we're able to do here.

Thanks to Jonathan for taking the time to introduce the project, and congratulations to the lucky owners of said project — it's great to see how the database makes the best of ProcessWire's capabilities in terms of storing, structuring, and finding content!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 414th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 23rd of April. 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!

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