ProcessWire Weekly #525

Latest core updates

As Ryan explains in his latest weekly update at the support forum, there are several improvements and optimizations for the core this week, but the core version wasn't bumped just yet.

Most of the updates this week are behind the scenes performance optimizations, but there are some feature additions and improvements as well. Here's a brief summary of what's new this week, based on the weekly dev branch commit log:

• Optimizations to ProcessPageEdit, Modules loader, and WireArray, plus some descending classes.
• Update for the Paths core class, improving the logic related to current HTTP host handling.
• Update for the Inputfield class, enabling AJAX loaded fields to work with field dependencies. There are some limitations to what this feature supports, but it will likely cover most typical use cases.
• Update for the InputfieldPageAutocomplete class, making it use provided class attribute as expected.
• Improvements for field dependencies for repeaters and other similar fields.

What that last bullet means is that it is now possible to refer to the page being edited in field dependencies for a repeatable field type by using forpage.field_name syntax. For an example if you wanted to make a field appear only on a specific template, you could use forpage.template=123 to achieve that (123 being the ID of the template).

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

New additions to the modules directory: Text Blocks Textformatter and Auto Links Textformatter

Text Blocks Textformatter and Auto Links Textformatter are new additions to the modules directory, but they have both been around for a while already, as a part of the commercial ProFields module bundle created by Ryan Cramer.

Text Blocks Textformatter

With this module you can assign a name to any block or region of text in any textarea field. You can define a block by typing "start_name" where the block starts, and typing "stop_name" where the block ends. Any text contained within these tags can then be embedded into any other textarea, anywhere on your site, simply by typing the block name on its own line in the format "show_name".

Note that the word "name" in all of the examples above would be whatever name you want to give to a particular block.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download the module's source code from the TextformatterTextBlocks GitHub repository, or install it via the built-in modules manager in admin.

Auto Links Textformatter

This module automatically links specified phrases or words to specified URLs. This is a potential SEO and accessibility tool, creating contextual links with minimal effort, fully automating the process. If there are pages that you commonly link to in your site from your textarea and/or rich text fields, this textformatter can save you effort and make sure that you are consistently linking the pages.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download the module's source code from the TextformatterAutoLinks GitHub repository, or install it via the built-in modules manager in admin.

Site of the week: e.Volution GmbH

Our latest site of the week belongs to e.Volution GmbH from Aachen, Germany – a provider of holistic mobility solutions and a developer and manufacturer of purpose-dedicated electric vehicles. Founded in 2021, they are currently working on the design and development of a sustainable electronic vehicle platform.

Our vehicles MAX and GIGA are absolute pioneers in the field of fully electric light commercial vehicles and are characterized by a particularly robust vehicle core and a high degree of variability. In addition, e.Volution is developing the SPACE and META, the world's first genuine circular economy vehicles.

— e.Volution GmbH

The e.Volution website was created by GPS GmbH and contains just about everything one would expect from a company website, including details about their products and services, a brief introduction the company, newsroom, contact details, and a page for job listings. All that content is presented using a straightforward, clean layout, complete with really nice looking photographs of vehicles and locations.

As for behind the scenes details, the front-end of this multilingual website was created using the Uikit front-end framework, with some minor additions, such as Leaflet library for embedded maps. As for third party ProcessWire modules, there are at least a couple that we could spot: the cookie management and asset loading solution PrivacyWire and the popular, commercial form management platform FormBuilder.

Thanks to the folks at GPS GmbH for sharing this site with us, and our congratulations to the client, e.Volution GmbH, for their new, ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 525th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 8th of June. 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!