ProcessWire Weekly #423

Weekly update from Ryan

In his latest weekly update Ryan shares some details about an ongoing project, which involves migrating a WordPress powered site to the ProcessWire platform. This week's post focuses on merging the URL structures of the sites by making ProcessWire render content from WordPress URLs, which in this case don't reflect actual content structure.

In case you're wondering "why would I ever want to do that", there are a few reasons why this might make sense. Perhaps the most important one would be search engine visibility: changes in the URL structure tend to harm SEO, so it's best to keep URLs as close to what they used to be while migrating the site to a new platform.

So what's the trick for making ProcessWire render pages from non-hierarchical (WordPress) URLs?

We'll leave the specifics to Ryan, but to summarize: the approach that Ryan took for this project involves a custom "href" field for old URLs, a bit of template level code to handle page rendering, and a couple of hooks to modify page paths for pages that have a value in said href field.

What's particularly nice about this solution is that new pages can be placed logically in the tree hierarchy of the site and their URLs can reflect this structure, while pages that used to have an URL pointing somewhere else — e.g. /some-page/ instead of /actual-parent-page/some-page/ — will still be rendered from their old "short URL".

In the post Ryan also shares a couple of additional tricks, which may come in handy for anyone dealing with a similar need:

• forcing pages to only render from their "href" URL and not their real URL, and

• enforcing uniqueness and slashes in the "href" field values.

For those looking for a (mostly) no-code solution to similar need, there's also the Custom Paths module from Robin Sallis. Custom Paths is a powerful module that manipulates URLs and allows you to set up a custom path for any page, and even override existing pages (including the home page) with said custom paths.

That's all for our weekly update section this week. Be sure to check out the weekly update post from Ryan at the ProcessWire support forum 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 off we've got some recent module update highlights:

• Textformatter Video Options 0.4.0 adds support for the more privacy and GDPR friendly YouTube no-cookie domain.
• Markup Metadata 1.2.0 fixes some issues, adds new image fallback and inherit options, and adds support for image custom fields.
• Textformatter WebP Images 0.0.2 fixes an issue with doubled webp extension and adds a "Match attributes" configuration option.
• TfaWebAuthn 1.0.1 adds support for translatable strings in the GUI.
• Dashboard 1.3.0 adds support for setting browser title separately from headline, ability to trash pages from collection panel, and more.
• Padloper 2 0.0.2 adds brand new Import API for handling product-related imports, configurable dynamically loaded product variants, and more.

Moving on to tutorials and other content...

• Our first tutorial for this issue is from Pete and provides a solution for updating language translations via API. Syncing translations between sites via the API is quite simple using this clever trick.
• Another tutorial, this one also from Pete, is all about batch resizing images via CLI. This method doesn't actually require ProcessWire, but is still very much applicable to ProcessWire sites out there.
• While we wouldn't call this one a tutorial, it's definitely a shareworthy trick from user vwatson: how to add a descriptive text to the admin edit view using nothing but core inputfields/fieldtypes and native field settings. Nice one!
• Last but not least, anyone interested in ProcessWire powered page builders may want to check out the latest post from Jan Ploch regarding Fieldtype Page Table Grid module, which is currently in development. The module seems to have progressed nicely, but feedback would be highly appreciated.

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: Authaus Bendel

Our latest site of the week belongs to the Austrian car dealer Autohaus Bendel. The developer behind this project is Bernhard Baumrock, and the site was introduced to the ProcessWire community in a recent showcase forum thread.

In addition to a very nice design and some striking visual effects the Autohaus Bendel website features seamless integration with third party API for automatically fetching car details and saving them as ProcessWire pages, a very nice filter GUI for browsing said pages, and varying content pages, the content for which is built using a RockMatrix powered flexible content builder.

One particularly interesting feature, introduces in the showcase forum thread, is the "web coach". Simply put it is an automated tool that sends notifications to content creators, encouraging them to keep producing new content to attract clients:

Bendel Web Coach

The last news entry was created 21 days ago.
There must be something new that will interest your clients ;)

> To the website
> Create news entry

As for behind the scenes details, the front-end of the site is based on the Uikit front-end framework, and some of the third party modules working their magic behind the scenes include RockMatrix, RockForms, RockMigrations, must-have development tool Tracy Debugger, and the commercial caching and minification solution ProCache. For more details, be sure to check out the Autohaus Bendel showcase forum thread.

Big thanks to Bernhard for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Autohaus Bendel, for their newly released ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 423rd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 25th of June. 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!