ProcessWire Weekly #440

In the 440th issue of ProcessWire Weekly we're going to cover the latest core update news, check out weekly forum highlights and other online resources, and more. Read on!

Welcome to the latest issue of ProcessWire Weekly! This week we're going to kick things off by briefly covering a new weekly update from Ryan, in which he shares the latest news about a big update coming our way soon: an editor that will eventually replace CKEditor 4 as the primary rich text editor in the core.

In other news we're going to check out a bunch of recent forum posts and other online resources, and last but not least dig into a brand new site of the week — one that belongs to Calitime AG, which is a Swiss company developing a tool for time tracking.

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!

In the processwire.com blog this week: considering the CKEditor 4 to 5 upgrade

The latest weekly update from Ryan is a long and detailed post about a topic that was last covered back in July in a weekly update: the update — or rather migration — from CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5. The gist of this week's update is that while CKEditor 5 did at first seem like the obvious way forward, that's not necessarily the case anymore.

Why do we need to upgrade in the first place?

In case some of you didn't read the original post, or can't remember exactly what it was all about, the long story short is that the version 4 of CKEditor, which we've used as the primary rich text editor for ProcessWire since 2014, is nearing the end of its lifespan.

Updates for version 4 will cease in 2023, which means that we can't rely on it for much longer. There could even be security implications for using outdated, unmaintained version of the editor, so that's not an option in the long term.

What's our current take on CKEditor 5?

CKEditor 4 has been working well enough for our purposes, so upgrading to the next version did seem like an obvious next step. In this week's post Ryan explains in some detail why we're now considering other solutions instead.

To summarize, there's no easy way to "just upgrade". Instead, this upgrade would be more like a complete rebuild of our RTE feature, along with any parts of ProcessWire that rely on it. What's also troubling is that in terms of features etc. CKEditor 5 is just about the same as CKEditor 4.

That's a lot of hard work for negligible payout.

Now, it does sound like Ryan has found a better solution, but the post ends in a bit of a cliffhanger. We should know more very soon, but for the time being be sure to check out the weekly update 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 a quick module update: RockAnalytics, covered in Weekly issue #426, has just been added to the modules directory. Since we covered this module, a mention has been added that it supports umami (in addition to Plausible).
  • Another module, one that we haven't had the chance to introduce here before, is RockImagePicker. The module was introduced by Bernhard Baumrock via a forum post, and there's not a whole lot of information available, but it does look like a great solution when you need a centralized image storage coupled with a picker.
  • Moving on to tutorial content, we have a detailed post from Tom Arnold, aka Webrocker, about using unpublished posts with Page Reference fields.
  • Another tutorial comes from Henning Heyne, and is aimed at those just taking their first steps with the system: ProcessWire Seminar - Teil 1 - Installation von ProcessWire. This is a German version of the Installation of ProcessWire video from a few months ago.
  • In case you — like us — enjoy seeing beautiful work done on ProcessWire, we can definitely recommend checking out the Blue Fox Studios showcase thread, as well as the site in question, of course. Yet another truly stunning project built by the team at ID Studio Web Agency!

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: Calitime AG

Our latest site of the week belongs to Calitime AG, a Swiss company developing time tracking solution called TimeRocket.

Calitime was founded as a subsidiary of another Swiss company Calida in 1988. Since 1993 they've operated under current name, while the original vision has lasted through the years. Their product TimeRocket is a full featured time tracking solution, with different calculation types, customizable workflows, absence planning and multi-timezone features, and much, much more.

The Calitime website was developed in-house, and features a beautiful and modern design, a variety of interesting content blocks — including dynamic ones, such as the pricing calculator on the TimeRocket product page — and an actively maintained blog section. Much of the content is dedicated to TimeRocket, and as far as product pages go, this is one of the best ones we've come across in a while.

As for behind the scenes details, it looks like the front-end of the site is custom-built, without the help of a full-blown front-end framework. JavaScript side of things appears to be equally straightforward, with a relatively small sprinkle of vanilla JS baked in, and in terms of third party ProcessWire modules there's just one that we could spot from the outside: the commercial caching and minification solution ProCache.

Big thanks to the folks at Calitime AG for sharing their site with us, and best of luck with their product — TimeRocket seems like a great piece of software, and the site sure looks nice as well!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 440th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 22nd of October. 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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