ProcessWire Weekly #478

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In the 478th issue of ProcessWire Weekly we'll check out what's new in dev branch this week, introduce a new third party module called Page List Auto Expand, and more. Read on!

Welcome to the latest issue of ProcessWire Weekly. In this week's issue we're going to take a peek at what's new in the latest development version of ProcessWire, 3.0.222, as well as introduce a new third party module from Robin Sallis — Page List Auto Expand.

As always we've also got a new site of the week to highlight, and this week that would be the corporate website of Blue Tomato. They are a well known company in Europe, with a chain of shops offering a wide variety of products for snowboarders, freeskiers, surfers, and anyone interested in current streetstyle.

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!

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.222

This week there's a new version of ProcessWire available via the dev branch at GitHub, 3.0.222. This version contains some bug fixes, at least one new hookable core method (ProcessPageEditLink::getFilesPage()), and a couple of pretty neat new features:

  • WireDateTime class, made available as the $datetime API variable, now contains a list of translatable month and day names. This allows wireDate() function and the $datetime API variable to use translated terms when outputting dates.
  • Support for conditional hooks based on argument type. Basically this allows us to hook into a method only when an argument is of specific type. Here "type" can be a class, an interface, or one of supported PHP data types: array, bool, float, int, null, object, string.

Here's an example of a conditional hook based on argument type, borrowed from the hooks section of the official documentation:

$wire->addHook('Pages::saveReady(<User|Role|Permission>)', function($event) {
    $page = $event->arguments(0);
    $event->message("Saving user, role or permission: $page->name");
});

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

New module: Page List Auto Expand

Page List Auto Expand is a brand-new third party module created by Robin Sallis. This module adds a nice little usability improvement to the page list in admin, expanding branches of the page tree automatically if you drag a page above them and keep it there for a configurable amount of time (by default 1 second).

A GIF animation by Robin Sallis, showcasing the Page List Auto Expand module in action.

This is super handy since dragging a page under a specific section would otherwise require one to open each section by hand; having this module installed can save us from a considerable amount of time — and frustration, for that matter.

There have already been suggestions of adding what this module does as a built-in feature for the core ProcessPageList module, but we're not quite there yet. At the support forum Robin has mentioned wanting to wait a little before considering submitting a pull request, mainly to see if there are any unexpected issues.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can download and install it via the built-in modules manager in admin, or clone or download it from the Page List Auto Expand GitHub repository.

Big thanks to Robin Sallis for building this module and sharing it with us! A great addition, and definitely one I'll be trying out as soon as possible.

Site of the week: Blue Tomato Corporate Page

Our latest site of the week is the corporate website of Blue Tomato, one of the leading chain of stores in Europe when it comes to snowboarding, freeskiing, surfing, skateboarding, and streetstyle.

The corporate site of Blue Tomato was built in-house, and consists of a home page that familiarizes the visitor with Blue Tomato and their culture, brand, and history, a page about working at Blue Tomato, a jobs section, and a press and news section. The design of the site is clean and modern, with quality images and what appears to be a custom font — as well as a few well-placed GIF animations — to liven things up a bit.

As for behind the scenes details, there's not a whole lot to say here, but what we can say is that this site appears to be largely custom-built: the front-end of the site does not have any traces of familiar front-end frameworks, and there are no signs of third party ProcessWire modules either. One interesting nuance is that the site is multilingual, and has quite a few languages available for that matter.

Thanks to the folks at Blue Tomato for sharing this project with us — it's a splendid site for sure, and we're very happy to have it featured in our sites directory, as well as our latest site of the week!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 478th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 15th of July. 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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