ProcessWire Weekly #45

Latest updates to ProcessWire and the commercial FormBuilder module

The updates this week, as described by Ryan in his latest processwire.com blog post, mainly stick to the plan we discussed in our previous issue. The bulk of the commits to the dev branch this week were minor fixes, tweaks, and optimizations all in order to get our current development version steady for the 2.6 release.

A week without anything truly new would be pretty boring, though, so right under the surface there were some pretty interesting changes. These changes affect the visible parts of fields, inputfields – and specifically their styles – and essentially enable support for a much wider range of front-end frameworks (instead of being forced to rely on jQuery UI alone).

While this won't have much of an effect on regular users just yet, it opens all new possibilities for us in the future, and if you're a FormBuilder user, you can already choose from a variety of themes based on alternative frameworks. We're pretty sure that you'll be seeing the results of this update in more places soon enough, however.

Especially if you're a FormBuilder user, we strongly recommend that you check out the full details and screenshots included in Ryan's blog post. This is a pretty big update, and one that makes FormBuilder a very robust solution for sites with specific design-related needs.

Page Path History Manager, a brand new companion module for Page Path History

Page Path History Manager is a companion module for Page Path History, the core module that keeps track of Page URLs and 301 redirects users to current URL from earlier ones. While Page Path History works just fine on it's own, Page Path History Manager adds couple of new and very handy features:

• Display past URLs for the current page and it's parents in the Settings tab of Page Edit
• Delete past URLs you don't want redirected to current URL anymore
• Create new fallback URLs for the current page

While first two options are geared towards helping you manage your content, the third one – the ability to create new fallback URLs – means that this module could actually be used as a lightweight alternative to more comprehensive redirection modules, such as Jumplinks. While not necessarily the most sensible use case, this opens up new possibilities.

All in all this is a splendid example of a module that, instead of trying to completely reinvent the wheel, simply takes an existing solution and adds some new and very useful features on top of it. If any of this seems useful, you can find more details from the forum page linked above or grab the module directly from GitHub.

Thanks to Marc Löhe for this module, your contributions are very much appreciated!

FormBuilder Email Extensions

FormBuilder Email Extensions is another example of a module that isn't intended to work on it's own, but rather adds features to another module. In this case FormBuilder Email Extensions, as it's name suggests, adds new email-related features to the commercial FormBuilder module.

Without going too deeply into what FormBuilder is and what it does (most of you are probably already familiar with it), sending email to administrator(s) when new form replies are added is one of it's many features. FormBuilder Email Extensions adds support for configuring both global and form-specific "from" addresses – a very helpful feature in certain situations.

Additionally the module provides nice little shortcut for cases where the recipient of the administrator email is defined by a Page field on the form (another native FormBuilder feature). Instead of having to type in each user individually, you can let the selected Page define which target address should be used:

// native FormBuilder method: recipient+email are configured on a form-by-form basis
[email protected]
[email protected]
// etc.

// FormBuilder Email Extensions: grab email address from a field of the selected page
!recipient?email

For more details head down to the support forum thread or grab the code directly from GitHub. Please note that this module requires FormBuilder, which is a commercial module built by Ryan Cramer, available from the ProcessWire Store.

Thanks to Benjamin Milde for building and releasing this module!

Site of the week: Washington Waldorf School

Washington Waldorf School is an independent school located in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Established in 1969 and currently serving 270 students ranging from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade, they utilize Waldorf education methodology developed by Rudolf Steiner.

The site of WWS is a great example of how much can be achieved by combining bold colors and clean, simple design. It looks and feels splendid, is responsive and follows many usability best practices on both desktop and mobile devices – yet at the same time has a very unique feel to it.

The site was designed by Catalone Design and put into action by the father of ProcessWire itself, Ryan Cramer. For all parties involved: great job, and thanks for sharing this splendid site with us!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 45th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content next Saturday, 28th of March. 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!