ProcessWire Weekly #517

Weekly update from Ryan and the latest ProcessWire core updates

In his latest weekly update Ryan walks us through the latest feature updates available via the development branch at GitHub. There are two features covered in the post, both of which are intended to improve the user experience of moving pages around in the admin:

• A new way to select the parent page of a page.
  Instead of simply giving you a page tree to pick from, even in cases where there are actually just a handful of possible parents configured via field settings, the parent setting in admin now uses a more intuitive select menu with just allowed parents included.
• Improved move button logic in the admin page tree.
  Previously the move option was displayed if a page was technically moveable, even if there was nowhere to actually move the page to, but now the admin will also check if there are possible new parents (or if manual sorting has been enabled) before displaying it.

As for other core updates this week, there are a few smaller ones as well, including...

• a fix for an issue where autojoined page fields could return values in wrong order,
• a fix for an issue where autocomplete fields did not respect provided limit, and
• a couple of new classes added for page list items (PageListNotPublic if a page is not publicly viewable, and PageListNoFile if page has no template file.)

That's all for our core updates section for this week. Be sure to check out Ryan's weekly update for more details, as well as an interesting trick for enforcing required values for all languages instead of just the default language in a multi-language setup. Thanks!

New module: Reactions

Reactions is a new third party module for ProcessWire. This module adds the ability for site visitors to submit their reactions for pages, in a somewhat similar way as certain better known tools, such as React & Share. Reactions is currently in a very early stage, meaning that it's not yet well tested, and only provides a minimal set of features:

• You can configure reaction buttons (or reaction types) using $config->reactions['reaction_types'] as an array. Each button can have a title, icon (class name for <i> element, or markup, e.g. SVG icon), and sort value for defining the order in which buttons are displayed.
• The module provides a basic markup for rendering reaction buttons on the page.
• There are optional JavaScript and CSS files bundled with the module. CSS is fully optional, but since the module doesn't do anything out of the box without the JS part, it is recommended that you use that — at least as a starting point.
• Reactions are stored per user on local storage, meaning that they are not really permanent, but will typically be remembered at least for each browsing session.
• The module manages database table for storing per-page reactions, and there's a simple, optional Process module bundled that currently provides a list view for viewing all pages and reactions.

There are a bunch of things planned that did not make it into the initial release of the module, so more features will likely be added later on. And again, please test carefully before using this module on a live site; it is, after all, a very early release.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download it from the Reactions GitHub repository, or install it via Composer (composer require teppokoivula/reactions). If you run into any issues, please open an issue at the GitHub repository.

Site of the week: Rotes Kreuz Telfs

Our latest site of the week belongs to Rotes Kreuz Telfs, the local Rotes Kreuz — the Red Cross of Austria — organization at Telfs. Their new, ProcessWire powered website was created by Werbeagentur Buerostark.

Our goal was not only to give the Red Cross Telfs a modern appearance, but also to create an outstanding digital experience through first-class custom webdevelopment.

— Werbeagentur Buerostark

The Rotes Kreuz Telfs website has a beautiful, modern look and feel to, while also being very much in line with the Red Cross visual style. Projects such as this one are definitely a challenge for a designer, as there's a need to follow common guidelines, but also they need some unique features, and the Rotes Kreuz Telfs website pulls that off splendidly. Just as an example, the "back to top" arrow has a meter displaying how far on the page you currently are — a minor detail, obviously, but also a good example of a feature that both makes things more interesting and improve usability of the site at the same time.

As for behind the scenes details, the front-end of the site was created using the Uikit front-end framework, while some of the third party tools it integrates with include Klaro consent manager and a self-hosted version of Matomo for analytics. As for ProcessWire modules and such, there's only one that we could spot, and that would be the caching and optimization tool ProCache.

Thanks to the folks at Werbeagentur Buerostark for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Rotes Kreuz Telfs, for their ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 517th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 13th 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!