ProcessWire Weekly #458

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.212

This week's update from Ryan is an introduction to the latest development version of ProcessWire, 3.0.212. Compared to previous tagged version 3.0.212 contains 32 commits, fixes for 16 issues, and 3 new merged pull requests.

Some highlights from ProcessWire 3.0.212

As usual there's quite a lot in this update, but here are a few highlights:

• Refactoring of the link editor dialog (the ProcessPageEditLink module) used by rich text editors, which now among other things retains HTML classes in links.
• Refactoring and major performance updates for the PagesParents class, which builds the pages_parents table used internally by certain selector queries.
• Support for UTF-8 characters for addresses stored by core email inputfield.
• New API methods $sanitizer->htmlClass() and $sanitizer->htmlClasses().

Among the most recent updates, implemented just this week, is a new uploadName() method for Pagefile and Pageimage objects. ProcessWire sanitizes names of uploaded files automatically, while this method returns the original, unaltered, and unsanitized name of the source file in case it is ever needed.

That's all for our core updates section this week. For more details regarding ProcessWire 3.0.212, be sure to check out the weekly update from Ryan at the support forum. Thanks!

New module: Replace Home

Replace Home is a new Admin Actions add-on module developed by Robin Sallis. This module, which was crafted to solve a real user need, can replace entire home page — content and template and all — with those from another page.

The concept behind this module is that if you need to rebuild the home page of a site, which is normally not a simple thing to do without at least some downtime, you could instead build a new version behind the scenes, and then replace the old one with the new in one easy step.

Here's what this module does for you:

• Removes all the fields from the home template, which simultaneously gets rid of any old, now-obsolete content on your home page.
• Adds all the fields from the selected source template to the home template, and also applies any template-specific overrides.
• Updates values of your home page to match those of the selected source page.
• Updates all file and image URLs in textareas to point to the files on the home page, rather than those on the original source page.

As expected, the one thing that this module won't do is directly swap or otherwise alter your template file(s). That part is left to the developer, but all else can be automatically taken care of, which makes the whole process pretty much as smooth as it can get.

If you'd like to give this module a try, install Admin Actions and Admin Actions Replace Home via the module's manager in admin, or by cloning or downloading module files from GitHub. In case you have any questions, be sure to head down to the Admin Actions Replace Home support forum thread.

Big thanks to Robin for developing another very useful module and sharing it with us!

Site of the week: Real SF Properties

Our latest site of the week belongs to Real SF Properties, a San Francisco based real estate agency. This project was introduced recently by developer Jonathan Lahijani at the showcase area of our support forum.

The Real SF Properties website, built as a co-project by BuzzCandy.Design (design) and Jonathan Lahijani (development), provides an introduction to the company, a place to find open San Francisco area listings, and serves a way to contact Real SF in case you have a property you'd like to sell, or something else related to real estate that you'd like to enlist their consultation for.

In addition to a beautiful design and plenty of interesting content, this project also has a few interesting technical highlights — some of which include the use of the Tailwind utility-first front-end framework, Flickity, and Headroom.js on the front-end of the site, and (of course) ProcessWire in the back-end. According to Jonathan this site is actually relatively simple on the implementation side, and doesn't make use of a page builder or anything like that, instead relying on "hard-coded" sections.

This was my first time using Tailwind CSS and it was a great fit for this project. I wish it existed back in 2015 because while UIkit has been my go-to CSS framework for several years now, there are some site designs (and designers) that I work with that simply need a higher level of precision to slice correctly and be maintainable.

— Jonathan Lahijani

In addition to the showcase forum post, Jonathan has also posted a case story for the Real SF Properties project on his site, so be sure to check it out in case you'd like to learn more about this site.

Big thanks to Jonathan for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to both the team behind the implementation, as well as the client for their newly redesigned and rebuilt, ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 458th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 25th of February. 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!