In the 541st issue of ProcessWire Weekly we'll share the latest core development news, check out a new module called Search Corrections, and more. Read on!
Welcome to the latest issue of ProcessWire Weekly. In this issue we're going to kick things off by sharing the latest weekly update from Ryan, and by taking a quick peek at what's new in the core this week.
In other news we've got a very interesting new third party module to introduce: Search Corrections, created by Robin Sallis. And, as always, we've also got a new site of the week to highlight — one that this week belongs to the Amsterdam based designer and writer Xiaomin Deng.
Thanks to all of our readers for being here with us again, and as always, any feedback is most welcome – please don't hesitate to drop us a line if there's anything in your mind you'd like to share with us. Enjoy our latest issue and have a great weekend!
Latest core updates and a weekly update from Ryan
In his latest weekly update Ryan talks a bit about the current status of core development, as well as one particular update that was committed just this week, resolving a potential issue with ProcessWire's built-in caching feature WireCache.
The long story short is that core development is likely going to be slower than usual in both September and October, as Ryan is going to be traveling a lot. Major updates are likely going to be pushed to a later date, but as this week's update shows, smaller updates may still find their way into the dev branch at GitHub.
What's new in the core this week?
This week there has been a single update to the core, resolving a potential issue with the WireCache caching method when caching data in the database. As Ryan explains in his post there have been some instances in which problematic dates (those that are either before year 1971, or completely zeroed out, i.e. 0000-00-00) have found their way in the database, and as a result caches were not being cleared at all.
WireCacheDatabase now implements a separate maintenance feature that makes sure that caches stored with a bad timestamp will be properly cleared out. This method should also improve performance of cache clearing, as it requires just a single delete query.
For more details, be sure to check out the latest weekly update from Ryan. Thanks!
New module: Search Corrections
Search Corrections is a new third party module created by Robin Sallis. This module adds support for suggesting alternative words for a given input word, for e.g. cases where a site search query doesn't find results with the provided query string, but using an alternative spelling or just the stem of the word might.
The module provides two methods that you can access in code to provide relevant suggestions:
- findSimilarWords(), which suggests corrected spellings or similar alternatives for given word based on words that exist on the site.
- stem(), which returns the stem of given word, which in turn may be used to find more results.
Both methods can be used separately to provide further suggestions, as they have different scopes: findSimilarWords() makes use of actual content of the site to create a list of words, comparing them with provided words based on Levenshtein distance to find those that are similar, whereas stem() makes use of the php-stemmer library to find the stem or "root" of provided word.
For more details, available arguments, and usage examples, be sure to check out the modules directory page for the Search Corrections module
If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download it from the SearchCorrections GitHub repository, or install it via the built-in modules manager in the admin. If you have questions, head down to the Search Corrections support forum thread.
Big thanks to Robin for creating this module and sharing it with us!
Site of the week: Xiaomin Deng
Our latest site of the week is the portfolio of Amsterdam-based designer and writer Xiaomin Deng.
This website, which in itself is reminiscent of an art installation, has an about section introducing the author, while the rest of the site is dedicated to her works, including installations, published articles, and sketches.
Created by Xiaoyuan Gao and Marie Madonna, the Xiaomin Deng website is definitely fitting as a portfolio for a designer/writer, as it features various unique design choices, combined with a minimalistic visual style, making content very much the main focus of the site. Thanks to the unique layout and transition effects occurring while navigating the site, at times it feels more like a presentation or installation than a regular website.
From a technical implementation point of view this site appears to be hand-crafted, without the help of a full-blown front-end framework. Only third party dependencies are jQuery and the Amiamie font used for the typography of the site. There are no traces of ProcessWire modules on the front-end of the site, so not much we can say about what's happening behind the scenes.
Thanks to the team at studio xiaoyuan gao for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Xiaomin Deng, for her new, ProcessWire powered website!
Stay tuned for our next issue
That's it for the 541st issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 28th 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!
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