ProcessWire Weekly #539

Weekly update from Ryan and the latest core updates

In his latest weekly update, submitted via the support forum, Ryan talks about his plans for the next few weeks. Long story short, there's going to be some travel time, which in turn will likely mean that there won't be as many core updates during this time.

That being said, we're getting very close to a new stable release of ProcessWire, and as such a little break may in fact be a good thing; letting things cool down a bit gives us some time to make sure that everything is working as expected before the launch.

By November hopefully all will be back to normal in terms of schedule. I'll be focused on getting a new main/master version out then.

— Ryan

Core updates from the past week

There have been some, mostly minor updates for the core this past week. For an in-depth look you can check out the weekly commit log at GitHub, but here's a brief summary of what's new this week (excluding some phpdoc comment updates):

• a fix for an issue where Inputfield Selector could display the primary field label instead of the one from template context (when only one template is allowed),
• a fix for an entity encoding issue affecting the preview area of Inputfield Selector where the resulting selector string is displayed,
• a fix for an issue in PageFrontEdit when two pages are saved at the same time,
• a fix for TinyMCE field where empty external_plugins setting was stored in wrong format (array instead of an object) in JSON,
• automatic exclusion of the /vendor/ directory from FileCompiler, and
• automatically hiding hidden (i.e. dot prefixed) files from Process Template when checking for new templates.

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 ProcessWire support forum. Thanks!

New module: AltTextGPT

AltTextGPT is a new third party ProcessWire module, created by Max Fowler and built for automatically generating alt texts for image using the OpenAI API. Once you've installed and configured the module by providing an API key for the OpenAI, you can instruct the module to create alt texts via the module configuration screen.

The module currently looks for images stored in a field called "images" on each non-admin page, and populates alt texts for those that don't yet have one. Images are passed to the OpenAI API as URLs, so they need to be publicly viewable.

OpenAI API is a paid service, so there will be some costs involved, and creating alt text for an individual image can also take a while. For these reasons you have to set a max number for images processed during single execution. As for how much this will cost, that depends on various factors, and should be checked from OpenAI.

The README for the module provides some estimates:

Using the API requires an account with the Open AI API and costs money, although its pay-what-you-use and the charges are minimal. For example, alt text was generated for 200 images, using 94 cents of Open AI Credits.

— AltTextGPT README

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can install it via the built-in modules manager in the admin, or clone or download it from the AltTextGPT GitHub repository. If you need additional support or have any questions, head down to the AltTextGpt support thread.

Big thanks to Max Fowler for creating this very interesting tool and sharing it with the ProcessWire community!

Site of the week: Fuchs Garten & Landschaft

Our latest site of the week belongs to Fuchs Garten & Landschaft, a company that — in their own words — realises your garden and landscape dreams. They are a full service garden and landscaping company operating at Dellnhausen and the Hallertau region in Bavaria, Germany. Flowers and plant beds, garden decorations, lawn and tree care, accents made of natural stone and other materials — and more.

The Fuchs Garten & Landschaft website was created by typneun Designagentur and was introduced via our sites directory a while ago. it features a splendid design and plenty of quality content, introducing the company, the team, and their services to potential customers. The site is not massive by any means, but covers all the important stuff very nicely, and does it in such a way that provides the company plenty of credibility.

As for behind the scenes details, this site appears to be built using a custom front-end framework of sorts, and while there's quite a bit of custom work on the front-end, not many dependencies are included — mainly just jQuery, Slick, and PhotoSwipe. There are no traces of ProcessWire modules on the front-end of the site, so in that regard what happens behind the scenes stays behind the scenes.

Thanks to the folks at typneun Designagentur for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Fuchs Garten & Landschaft, for their new, ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 539th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 14th of September. 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!