ProcessWire Weekly #464

In the 464th issue of ProcessWire Weekly we're going to check out the latest core updates, introduce a new third party textformatter module for handling footnotes in text, and more. Read on!

Welcome to the latest issue of ProcessWire Weekly! In this issue we will take a closer look at the latest weekly update from Ryan, check out what's new in terms of core development, and we'll also introduce a brand-new third party module called Textformatter Footnote.

As always we've also got a new site of the week. This week that would be the website of a regional open air museum based in Schwäbisch Hall, southern Germany: Hohenloher Freilandmuseum. More about this very interesting project in a bit, so keep on reading.

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!

Lastest core updates and weekly update from Ryan

The latest weekly update from Ryan briefly mentions this week's core updates, which consists mainly of bug fixes and minor improvements. Closer look at the weekly dev branch commit log does reveal a couple of potentially interesting updates, though:

New method MarkupAdminDataTable::setColNotSortable($index) makes it possible to set individual columns on otherwise sortable table non-sortable.
PaginatedArray::getTotal() has been updated to return actual count of items instead of 0 in case a total number hasn't been set yet.

One core update that we were hoping to see this week was the integration of the new InputfieldTinyMCE rich text editor to the core. This has been delayed by about a week, since the bundled TinyMCE library just went through a pretty big update (from 6.2.0 to 6.4.1), which in turn means that some additional testing is required.

In the meantime if you have a chance to test the latest version of the InputfieldTinyMCE module, let us know — preferably by opening a new issue — if you run into any trouble.

Introducing version 2 of Wire Request Blocker

In other news, Wire Request Blocker (released just last week) has now been updated to version 2. This version includes a number of all-new features:

Added support for blocking groups, which make it possible to group similar rules, and can also provide a nice little boost in terms of performance.
Added configurable settings for immediate block (rather than just a strike) for URLs and user agents.
Added support for using RequestBlocker stand-alone in other PHP applications, without the need to boot up ProcessWire itself.
Added a feature for manually testing URLs or user agent strings to see if and how they would match your rules — and more.

That's all for our core updates section this week. For more details, including a more in-depth introduction to new features added to the Wire Request Blocker module, be sure to also visit the weekly update from Ryan. Thanks!

New module: Textformatter Footnotes

Textformatter Footnotes is a brand-new third party ProcessWire module from Romain Cazier of EPRC. This module adds the ability to define footnotes within rich text editor (CKEditor, TinyMCE) created content by using Markdown syntax.

Screen capture provided by module author Romain Cazier, displaying a side by side comparison of the "raw" text version of a text using footnotes and the end result after applying formatting.

Using this module is easy:

As usual install the module and then enable it via the "textformatters" setting of the field that you'd like to use footnotes in.
Insert a caret and a number identifying the footnote within brackets where you'd like the link to the footnote to appear: [^1].
Add the footnote on a separate row, using same identifier you used earlier: [^1]: Footnote content.

This will automatically put the footnote within the footnotes block at the end of your text. Via module config you can customize the way footnotes are displayed, and HTML tags that are allowed within them. If you need more control and/or per field settings, you can hook into the TextformatterFootnotes::addFootnotes method.

The module expects identifiers to be numeric, but is otherwise rather forgiving; in case you add footnotes in wrong order, this will be automatically fixed.

Big thanks to Romain for creating and sharing this module with us!

Site of the week: Hohenloher Freilandmuseum

Our latest site of the week belongs to Hohenloher Freilandmuseum — a regional open air museum based in Schwäbisch Hall, southern Germany.

Hohenloher Freilandmuseum has 70 historical buildings transported from various villages and towns all over the Franconian portion of Württemberg, each of them furnished with authentic period pieces. The beautifully designed website of the museum — created by praegnanz.de — provides plenty of information about the museum, activities, tours, and so on. There is also a shop for anyone looking to buy tickets or publications, and an events calendar.

When it comes to behind the scenes details, it looks like the front-end of this site was custom-built, so there's no full-blown front-end framework in action here. Meanwhile, the popular JavaScript calendar plugin FullCalendar is used to power a key part of the website's events section, and some of the ProcessWire modules we were able to spot include FormBuilder, along with the companion module FormBuilderMultiplier.

Thanks to Gerrit van Aaken of praegnanz.de for sharing this very interesting project with us, and congratulations to the client, Hohenloher Freilandmuseum, for their ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 464th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 8th of April. 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!