ProcessWire Weekly #431

Weekly update from Ryan: new version of the User Activity module

The latest weekly update from Ryan, posted via our support forum, covers a new, fifth version of the User Activity module.

This Pro module, which is available as a part of the ProDevTools set of modules, keeps track of what logged-in users are doing on the website or application. By doing that, it provides site admins with a handy view of what's happening right now, plus helps all content editors avoid overlapping modifications and other problematic situations sometimes occurring in any multi-user environment.

What's new in User Activity v5?

In addition to some pretty notable behind the scenes rewrites, intended to make the module more maintainable in the future, here's a summary of all-new settings and features available in the fifth version of the User Activity module:

• New options to detect when you yourself are editing a page in multiple windows
• The module now keeps track of edited fields, and displays these in the warnings
• When a page has been modified by another user while you're editing it, you'll get a warning and the option to either continue editing, or reload the page
• New option to properly lock pages while they are being edited, instead of "soft locking" them (i.e. warning users that someone else is also editing the page)
• New configuration setting for defining the refresh time in the page list view
• New feature to limit the idle notice ("you've been idle for a while...") to just the page editor, instead of displaying it in all admin processes
• Various improvements to the activity viewer module, including more obvious visible/hidden states and displaying changes made in page editor

Weekly core updates

There were a few updates to the core this week as well, but nothing particularly major: ProcessPageSearch now supports "owner" selectors, some updates were made to better accommodate CKEditor custom fields for files/images, and there were a few updates to phpdoc comments and overall code tidiness.

For more details about the new version of User Activity module, be sure to check out the weekly update from Ryan at the support forum. 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 mention the MIGZEN research project, a recently released site built by millipedia. You can read more about it from the case story. This is a very interesting project, and definitely worth checking out.
• Now, while we're on the topic of interesting projects, the visual page builder that Marc has been working on is a must-see. This is an inputfield that uses the Article editor behind the scenes — the same one that can be found from Bolt CMS. While the module is not publicly available (yet), be sure to check out the screencast.
• Next up we've got another detailed tutorial from Moritz L'Hoest, labeled How Twig can improve your template structure. Moritz has released tutorials for integrating Twig into ProcessWire before, so this is really more about the why than the how.
• Finally, a couple of existing projects that we figured deserve a special mention are the Template Field Widths module from Robin Sallis — new version of this module takes a big step forward, adding support for repeaters — and RockFrontend, which has been one of the hottest topics within the community since last week's release.

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: Kasper Communications

Our latest site of the week belongs to a company called Kasper Communications — a marketing agency from Freising, Germany, with quite a few sites of their own making in our sites directory as well.

Now, the Kasper Communications website is a beautifully designed, clean and modern site with various interesting visual effects and tactful transitions. While transitions can sometimes make things feel sluggish, on this site it's quite the opposite — they're fast and, as a result, make the site itself feel snappier. As for content, this site introduces the agency, their personnel, references, and customers — in other words it's exactly what you'd expect from a well-thought-out marketing agency website.

We write stories with heart, do PR with brains, advertising with passion and get your adrenaline pumping on social media.

— Kasper Communications

As for behind the scenes details, it looks like the front-end of this site is largely custom-built, without the help of a full-blown front-end framework. There are, though, a few JS libraries and other third party tools at work here — Swiper.js slider tool, AOS animation library, PhotoSwipe gallery, and so on. As for ProcessWire modules, only one that we could spot here is the commercial pro module FormBuilder.

Big thanks to the folks at Kasper Communications for sharing their site with us — we really enjoyed checking this project out. Congratulations for a job well done!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 431st issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 20th of August. 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!