ProcessWire Weekly #466

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.215

This latest development version of ProcessWire, 3.0.215, is focused around some of our most important JavaScript dependencies — namely jQuery and jQuery UI — up to date. You can read all about it from the weekly update from Ryan.

Just for the record, the TinyMCE update we discussed a while ago for the core has not been forgotten. The TinyMCE Inputfield will likely be merged in for the next version of the core, 3.0.216. We'll let you know as soon as there's more to tell.

From jQuery 1.8.3 to 1.12.4 — and 1.12.4 to 3.6.4

The long story short is that the core is now by default using the latest of the 1.x branch for jQuery, which would be 1.12.4. Meanwhile, if you set $config->debug as "dev", you'll get jQuery 3.6.4 instead. That is the latest of the 3.x branch as of this writing.

The core has been tested with this version for a while now, and we don't expect to see any problems with it, but module authors and anyone else using the jQuery from the core with their own code should to see that everything still works fine. In most cases upgrading from 1.8.3 to 1.12.4 should be smooth sailing.

Module authors ahoy!

If you're a module author, you should also test your code with the "dev" flag enabled to see if it works with jQuery 3.6.4. The dev mode will also load jQuery Migrate with logging, so you'll get useful messages in the console in case there's something to fix. After some time (perhaps next master/stable release) 3.x will become our default jQuery version.

As Ryan mentions in his post most of the time code written for 3.6.4 will work just fine with 1.12.4, but of course the reverse is also true — after updating your module to work smoothly with 3.x, you should probably go back and give it a spin with 1.x to make sure that it will still work for most of current setups.

On that note, this could also be a good time to consider if jQuery is actually something that your module should depend on. Rewriting snippets of jQuery reliant code to vanilla JavaScript tends to be a pretty easy task these days, and dropping any dependency that you don't truly need is arguably a good idea.

That's all for our core updates section this week. Be sure to also check out the weekly update post from Ryan for more details, as well as some background information for those wondering why this update hasn't been done earlier. 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.

• To kick things off, there's a forum thread and poll from flydev regarding Vite and various JavaScript frameworks. We've been meaning to set up a poll for similar topics, so we're quite curious about this — not to mention that it's going to be interesting to see the setup for integrating Vite into ProcessWire!
• Next up we've got another forum thread about a somewhat similar topic, this time by kongondo, covering some demos that demonstrate how ProcessWire, Alpine.js, and HTMX go hand in hand. Definitely interesting to see how aforementioned JavaScript based technologies can mix up with ProcessWire.
• Next up we've got a video tutorial for setting up ProcessWire — but what makes this one somewhat special (and worth sharing with you folks) is that it also goes through the entire process of setting things up on Amazon stack: Ubuntu running on EC2 server, DNS managed via Route 53, and SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. If you've ever considered cloud hosting your site, this is a very nice intro into that.
• Moving on to tutorial type content, first off we've got a handy little trick from Jonathan Lahijani for removing unwanted pages from the sitemap generated via WireSitemapXML, one of the latest additions to the ProDevTools package.
• Another handy trick comes from MarkE and explains how one can easily prune ProcessWire log files to contain data from defined number of days. This can be achieved in just a single line of code, with some help from the LazyCron module.

That's all for our latest weekly highlights. As a sort of bonus content we'd like to also recommend the Machine Ethics podcast, which we've found both informative and very relevant to the time of rapid AI development that we're currently going through. The Machine Ethics podcast was created by ProcessWire community member Ben Byford.

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: kulturzüri

Our latest site of the week is one called Kulturzüri — a website dedicated to events, exhibitions, and organizers in and around Zurich, Switzerland. Launched in 2016 by Verein Forum Kultur, Kulturzüri is a non-profit cultural platform with editorial content, offering its complete events database as a free export for other informational portals.

The Kulturzüri website is multi-lingual, available in German and English, and focused on interesting cultural events and providing quality content around them. In addition to an extensive events database — and a very neat search tool for finding suitable events — this site also features articles that provide context for said events; it's definitely worth visiting even if you're not currently planning to attend events near or at Zurich.

As for behind the scenes details, it looks like the front-end of the site is largely custom-built, as there are no tell-tale signs of any front-end framework we're familiar with. On the other hand there is one pretty familiar third party ProcessWire module here, and that would be ProCache.

The website of Kulturzüri was designed by Das Kollektiv and built by update AG for The Verein Forum Kultur. Our congratulations to the client, as well as everyone involved in this project — splendid work!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 466th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 22nd 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!