ProcessWire Weekly #481

In the processwire.com blog this week: all about output formatting in ProcessWire

This week there have been a few core updates, but these have been primarily bugfixes and other minor updates — such as phpdoc comment updates and so on — and likely not all that interesting. If you'd like to take a closer look at said updates, feel free to check out the weekly commit log at the dev branch.

What is interesting, though, is the latest blog post at the processwire.com blog, which covers output formatting in ProcessWire. This post answers just about every question that one might have about output formatting:

• What is output formatting, and why do we need it?
• When is output formatting going to be disabled, why must it be disabled before page content can be modified, and how do we work with it?
• How does output formatting affect different field types, e.g. text or page fields?
• What are the security considerations and best practices for output formatting?

Output formatting is an important topic, yet also one that is frequently misunderstood, so it's definitely great to have a guide to refer to when in doubt. The post also provides instructions for adding your own custom output formatting rules with hooks, which will no doubt come in handy.

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

New module: Session Info

Session Info is a brand new third party module by Robin Sallis. What this module does is that it provides an info page for checking out open sessions, the pages being viewed, and (optionally) the user agents and IP addresses of users browsing the site.

As some of you already knew, the core Session Handler Database module — which is disabled by default — provides a similar info page, but also changes the way sessions are handled by moving session info to the (MySQL) database. Database sessions have their own pros and cons, but it's definitely nice to have this option available without necessarily having to change the session storage method for that purpose alone.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download it from the Process Session Info GitHub repository, or install it via the built-in modules manager in the admin. Big thanks to Robin for creating this module and sharing it with us!

New module: ImageColorThief

ImageColorThief, created by Jacob Gorny, is another brand new third party module for this week. This module is, in a nutshell, a wrapper for the Color Thief library — a tool built for analyzing images and returning the single most dominant color present, or alternatively a palette of colors ranked by their prevalence in said image.

The original Color Thief library is a JavaScript project created by Lokesh Dhakar, and the PHP port that this module uses behind the scenes was created by Kevin Subileau. This module makes it easy to use Color Thief features by extending PageImage objecs with two new methods:

• $image->maincolor() returns the dominant color for the image.
• $image->palette() method return ten most dominant colors for the image.

Both methods accept an array argument for additional options, of which you can read more in the ImageColorThief README file. If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download it from the ImageColorThief GitHub repository, or simply install it via the built-in modules manager in the admin.

Big thanks for Jacob Gorny for creating this very useful module and sharing it with the ProcessWire community!

Site of the week: Aicher Airport Services

Our latest site of the week is that of Aicher Airport Services, a division of the Aicher Group.

At the Munich Airport, the Aicher Mobility Service personnel are dedicated to aiding passengers with disabilities or reduced mobility, ensuring they can overcome any obstacles they may face while traveling. Meanwhile the Aicher Medical Service stands ready to offer their assistance in the event of an accident or medical emergency.

The website of Aicher Airport Services was created by Kasper Communications GmbH and consists of an info section, a careers section, FAQ, and a contact page with a Form Builder powered contact form. The site also features a very nice, modern design, and there's plenty of content available for those looking to learn more about the services provided by Aicher Airport Services — or perhaps interested in working with them.

As for behind the scenes details, the front-end of this site seems to be largely custom-built, with a few familiar JavaScript dependencies in play — such as PhotoSwipe, jQuery, and typed.js. As for ProcessWire modules, FormBuilder is the one and only third party module that we could spot in action.

Once again thanks to the folks at Kasper Communications for sharing this interesting project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Aicher Airport Services, for their new, ProcessWire powered website. Great job from everyone involved in the project!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 481st issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 5th of August. 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!