ProcessWire Weekly #548

Latest core updates

As Ryan explains in his latest weekly update post at the support forum, there is a new feature in the core this week: the $page->preload() method. It was added primarily to tackle performance issues on larger sites with more complex data structures.

$page->preload() in a nutshell

What the preload method does is similar to pre-existing field autojoin setting or the $pages->findJoin() method, in that it loads data for multiple fields in a single query. Unlike autojoin options, though, it applies to pages that have already been loaded — meaning that when you already have a page object and need to get a bunch of field values for it, you can use the autoload method to speed things up.

Values are preloaded either by calling the preload method without arguments, in which case it will preload all fields for that page, or by passing in an array of field names, e.g. $page->preload(['first_name', 'last_name', 'phone']). When you later call/use them, e.g. via $page->first_name, ProcessWire no longer needs to trigger any SQL queries. Under certain conditions this can provide a considerable performance boost.

This feature was suggested by @tuomassalo from Avoine. For the time being it should be considered somewhat experimental, but if you're on the dev branch feel free to use it and let us know via the processwire-issues repository if you run into any problems.

That's all for our core updates section for this week. For more details and a quick update from Ryan about meeting one of ProcessWire's long time users in person, be sure to check out the weekly update at the support forum. Thanks!

New module: RockGrid

RockGrid is a third party ProcessWire module that has been in development for a long time, and has also been featured in our weekly issues once before, but it has just been added to our modules directory, and introduced properly by module author Bernhard Baumrock via the support forum. The module has also gone through some major updates since we last took a closer look at it.

RockGrid is a tool for displaying and managing tabular data in the ProcessWire admin. The GUI for RockGrid was built on top of Tabulator and has a powerful — and very fast — set of tools for sorting, filtering, and managing data. If you're familiar with ListerPro, RockGrid is somewhat similar, but there are also notable differences.

Another thing to consider is that RockGrid can be used as an inputfield. Bernhard has posted an example of RockGrid being used as an input for selecting product variations for his upcoming RockCommerce e-commerce module. This is quite powerful feature in itself, and greatly increases the use cases for this module.

For more details about RockGrid, check out the docs at baumrock.com/RockGrid. This is a commercial module, and can be bought either as a stand-alone module, or as part of the RockSuite module bundle.

Thanks to Bernhard for creating this module!

New module: Theater Seating

Theater Seating is a new third party module created by Roych. With the fields that this module adds you can configure the number of rows and the number of seats on each row, and then select or remove individual seats from those rows.

This module was originally created for the needs of a small theater, but it could quite easily be adapted for many different types of seating arrangements, reservations, etc. You can get the module from the support forum, and there is a complete example for implementing it on the front-end of a site, along with a set of default styles.

Big thanks to Roych for creating this module and sharing it with us!

Site of the week: Werbeagentur Buerostark

Our latest site of the week belongs to Buerostark, an advertising agency based in Telfs, Austria. They are a full service agency providing graphic design, websites, content creation, search engine optimization, and a whole lot of other related services.

For our 10th anniversary, we treated ourselves to a brand-new website that perfectly reflects our development.

— Sites directory entry for the Buerostark website (translated)

We've featured some of Buerostarks client work as our sites of the week in the past, but now, for their 10th anniversary, Buerostark have revisited and reinvented their own site. It is a really great looking website, with superb design and typography, as well as plenty of quality content. The site is an introduction to the agency and their services, provides a filterable list of featured projects, has a news section, and of course contact details.

As for behind the scenes details, the front-end of this site was built on top of the UIkit front-end framework. The performance of the site is being boosted by the commercial ProCache caching and optimization module, and that's just about all that we can tell about how this site was implemented.

Thanks to Buerostark for sharing their site with us, and our congratulations for both their 10th anniversary, as well as their new, ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 548th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 16th of November. 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!