ProcessWire Weekly #418

Introducing ProcessWire 3.0.200, our latest stable/master release

This week we've got a new post from Ryan in the processwire.com blog. In his post Ryan walks us through all the key updates — new features, performance improvements, and whatnot — introduced by 3.0.200 master release.

This version has been in the works for quite a while, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the list of new features and other improvements is quite lengthy, to say the least. Here's a small sneak peek into what's covered in the blog post:

• Repeater field upgrades, which include many UI improvements, such as the ability to insert items before or after an existing item, and the ability to copy and paste as well as clone existing repeater items. There's also a new option to use fewer pages, which has a huge effect on the amount of pages created automatically.
• $pages API additions, which include all-new API methods $pages->new(), $pages->request()->getClosestPage(), and $pages->loader()->findByName(). Additionally existing methods — such as $pages->findRaw(), $pages->find(), and $pages->add() — received updates, "sort" got support for OR syntax, "limit" and "start" can be combined with new shorthand syntax, and more.
• $sanitizer API additions, which include all-new methods $sanitizer->words() and $sanitizer->entitiesA(), E notation support for $sanitizer->float(), improvements to $sanitizer->getTextTools()->markupToText(), and more.
• $database API additions, which include new $database->renameColumns(), $database->renameColumn(), and $database->getServerType() methods, along with some pretty handy new flags and options for existing methods.
• Other API updates and additions, which include new $files->getCSV(), $files->getAllCSV(), and $user->setLanguage() methods, various improvements to the InputfieldWrapper, WireArray, and WireHttp core classes, and more.
• Admin theme, Inputfield and UI upgrades, which among other things make it much easier to customize the default Uikit powered admin theme, add new options to fields, improve usability and performance of the admin, and more.
• URL-to-page upgrades, which include noticeable performance improvements for converting URLs to pages, multilanguage support for the PagePaths core module, and more.
• Performance and optimization, which include both removal of features that were not all that necessary — such as many bundled site profiles, which are still easily installable as separate repositories — and significant performance improvements for core features and certain API methods.
• Other additions and improvements, which include various improvements to the fields editor, ProcessWire installer, site profiles, module config screen, core multilanguage support, and more.
• New hooks, which include Fieldgroups::fieldRemoved(), Fieldgroups::fieldAdded(), Templates::renamed(), Fields::renameReady(), and more.

The blog post also briefly covers new Pro modules that were developed alongside the dev branch, and provides detailed, easy to follow instructions for upgrading your site from previous master (or an earlier version) to the latest release.

All in all this is a major milestone for the ProcessWire project, and we're quite certain that you'll find that it makes the system once again smoother, more efficient, and just overall more enjoyable to use and build upon. As always with a new release, if you find any glitches, please let us know so that we can get them sorted out.

That's all for our core updates section this week, but be sure to check out the blog post from Ryan for more details. 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.

• First of all we'd like to share a simple yet effective — not to mention efficient — trick for selecting site language at htaccess level based on cookies. This clever little trick was posted to the support forum by community member Zeka.
• We've linked to a few similar threads recently, but one subject that keeps popping up are JavaScript libraries enabling various types of dynamic behaviour; the latest one is this question about Livewire, Hotwire and ProcessWire. In our opinion such frameworks integrate very nicely with ProcessWire, so definitely check them out.
• Next up we've got a handy tool for PHP developers, shared via the support forum by szabesz: caniphp.com. Though unofficial and incomplete, this looks promising; essentially it is to PHP what caniuse.com is for web technologies in general, and could definitely come in handy for, say, module development.
• Finally, we've got another post geared towards developers: the latest update from The PhpStorm Blog, PHP Annotated — 2022 Sprint Catch-up. In addition to a lot of valuable links, this post also contains the latest news from PHP Foundation, PHP-FIG, and more. A must-read for PHP developers out there!

As a special mention this week, there's a job opening at the support forum for anyone residing near (or willing to relocate to) South Windsor, Connecticut: Solution Innovators are looking for a developer with ProcessWire experience. Check them out if you'd like to learn more and apply, or perhaps connect for possible future work opportunities.

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: Die Kunst der Nächstenliebe

Our latest site of the week is called Die Kunst der Nächstenliebe, which roughly translates to "The Art of Charity".

Die Kunst der Nächstenliebe is a touring exhibition, focusing on the question of human dignity and how we deal with being different. The exhibition is built around the portraits of young and old people with disabilities who lived in diaconal institutions in both East and West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.

The site was built by ENORM Digital, and it's a single page introduction to the exhibition complete with locations and timetable.. Though the scope is limited, there's still plenty of information here, and both the layout and the design are really nicely crafted; all in all this is simply a really nice website.

As for the implementation side, the front-end of this site is hand-crafted, so there's full fledged front-end framework here — and only third party dependency appears to be the jQuery library. Since there are no third party modules visible here either, that's just about all we can say about how this site was put together.

Big thanks to the folks at ENORM Digital for sharing yet another splendid project with us, and congratulations to The Art of Charity exhibition for their new ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 418th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 21st of May. 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!