ProcessWire Weekly #484

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.225, our latest stable release is now out!

The big news this week is that there's a new stable release of ProcessWire available! This version, 3.0.225, was merged into the master branch at GitHub on Friday 19th of August. As usual we're doing a bit of a soft launch, though, so it has not been tagged with applicable version in GitHub just yet. That'll likely happen during next few days.

Another big milestone for ProcessWire

As Ryan explains in his weekly update at the support forum, this is a pretty massive update: compared to our previous stable release there are 76421 new lines of code, while 23539 lines of code were removed. There are also a lot of new and updated features in this release — most of which we've covered in Weekly issues 453–483.

A comprehensive "what's new" post should be available by next week. As always this release has been thoroughly tested in the dev branch by many users, but if you do update and happen to run into any unexpected issues, please let us know via the processwire-issues repository at GitHub.

Big thank you to each and every contributor, issue reporter, and community members who made this release possible

As always, this release has been a group effort. It includes numerous merged PRs (pull requests) with direct code contributions, but we're also grateful all those who took the time to report and helped debug issues via GitHub, submitted new ideas in the form of feature requests, or contributed via discussions at the support forum, etc.

A special thank you goes to Matjaž Potočnik for putting tremendous amount of effort into handling issue reports at GitHub — amazing dedication!

That's all for our core updates section this week. Stay tuned for a more detailed update post next week, and in the meantime feel free to give the latest stable release a try. And as always be sure to also check out the weekly update from Ryan!

New module: Textformatter Iframe Embed

Textformatter Iframe Embed is a new third party module for ProcessWire. This module provides a simple way to embed external URLs as iframe elements within page content, and is primarily intended to be used with content authored in a rich text editor, such as CKEditor or TinyMCE.

Embed tag and resulting iframe tag can both be customized via module configuration, but by default the module turns this:

<p>iframe/https://domain.tld/</p>

... into this:

<iframe class="TextformatterIframeEmbed" src="https://domain.tld/"></iframe>

In addition to absolute URLs (e.g. https//domain.tld/path/), relative paths are also supported, but only if they start with /site/assets/files/.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can install it via the built-in modules installer in admin, clone or download it from the Textformatter Iframe Embed GitHub repository, or install it via Composer.

Site of the week: Old Book Illustrations

Our latest site of the week is called Old Book Illustrations. As the name of this site suggests, this site is a catalog filled with old book illustrations — public domain, royalty-free restored images scanned from old books, to be precise.

The website, originally born out of the desire to share the illustrations in what the authors describe as a modest collection of books, now hosts a wide range of images from various categories; narratives, animals, buildings and monuments, humor, and so forth.

The images made available via this site are limited to those available in the US under public domain. This site makes it quite easy to find interesting content by providing us with a combination of categorized and tagged listings, and an advanced search engine. There is plenty of detail available about each image, and various resolutions are made available for site visitors to download — including original, unaltered, raw scans.

We are not the only image collection on the web, neither will we ever be the largest one. We hope however to be a destination of choice for visitors more particularly interested in Victorian and French Romantic illustrations — we understand French Romanticism in its broadest sense and draw its final line, at least in the realm of book illustration, at the death of Gustave Doré.

— oldbookillustrations.com

As for behind the scenes details, it appears that the front-end of this site was largely custom-built, with some help from a few popular third party JavaScript dependencies, such as jQuery and OpenSeadragon for embedding zoomable high resolution images. There are no familiar third party ProcessWire modules visible on the front-end of this site, so not much else we can tell about the technical implementation.

Thanks to the folks at oldbookillustrations.com for sharing this very interesting project with us, and of course for creating it in the first place — this is a valuable resource, and we're thrilled to have it featured in our sites directory!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 484th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 26th 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!