ProcessWire Weekly #55

Latest core updates

The core updates we introduced last week have now been merged into the master branch, making 2.6.1 the latest stable release of ProcessWire. You can read more about these from Ryan's last week's blog post, "ProcessWire Core Updates (2.6.1) and more".

Field-level permissions introduce a whole new level of granularity for the built-in access control

This week we've got a pretty big announcement to make, and that would be the introduction of field-level permissions into the dev branch. As you probably knew, until now permissions have been managed at a template level, meaning essentially that the superuser can decide which roles have view and/or edit access to any given template.

Because permissions are inherited from parent page to any other pages using a template that doesn't define it's own permissions, this system has been both simple and (relatively) flexible. Various 3rd party modules already provide features for users wishing for more control than the template level access control system can offer, but lately we've also seen increasing amounts of requests for a more granular core-level access control system.

The latest core update brings very similar access control to the fields themselves, meaning that instead of giving a specific role edit access to a template as a whole, you can actually specify which individual fields given role can view or edit. Additionally these settings can be redefined on a per-template basis, giving superusers a whole lot of new control over how site content is managed (or viewed, for that matter).

New overrides tab vastly improves the manageability of per-template changes (or overrides)

Another new addition this week also affects fields. When editing a field, there's a new tab by the name of "overrides", and what this tab contains is a list of all the per-template changes made to the settings of current field. Per-template values are displayed right next to global ones, making this view very easy to read and understand.

Not only does the overrides tab allow you to see changes made to field settings, it also allows you to remove them, if you so choose. Especially considering the new per-template field level permissions and the potential security implications they might introduce, this new tool can really come in handy!

For more details on both the field permissions, and the new overrides tab, please visit Ryan's latest weekly blog post, "Field permissions, overrides and more (2.6.2)"!

Module highlight of the week: Markup Simple Navigation

The modules we usually introduce in our weekly posts are ones that have just hit the modules directory. In our 51st issue we did something a bit different and introduced a module that had been out there for quite a while already. That module was AIOM+, and as we mentioned back then, it was (and still is) one of our all-time favorites.

This time we'll take a quick look at another all-time favorite, which would be the Markup Simple Navigation module by Philipp 'Soma' Urlich. This particular module was published back in 2012, making it one of our earliest public modules. This doesn't mean that the module would be outdated, though – quite the opposite. In addition to being tested by a whole lot of users by now, the module has seen a whole bunch of great improvements since then.

The features of this module are extensive – there's a long list of options listed at GitHub, and with hookable methods there's very little you can't make it do – but at it's core it's still an easy-to-use markup module for building navigation menus. Below you'll find couple of basic use cases, based on examples taken from the README.md file at GitHub:

// load the module
$menu = $modules->get("MarkupSimpleNavigation");

// render the default menu starting from the site root
echo $menu->render();

// render a menu starting from given parent
$rootPage = $pages->get("/blog/");
echo $menu->render(null, null, $rootPage);

// render a menu with custom item markup
$rootPage = $pages->get("/blog/");
$options = array(
    'item_tpl' => '<a href="{url}">{title} ({publish_from})</a>'
);
echo $menu->render($options, null, $rootPage);

Unless you prefer to re-invent the wheel on just about every site you ever build, Markup Simple Navigation is a module you really should be using. Huge "thank you" to Soma for making this module available for us, keeping it up to date, and thus saving us countless hours of unnecessary work. You rock!

Site of the week: Schouwburg Venray

Schouwburg Venray is a theatre located in the center of the town of Venray, in the province of Limburg, Netherlands. Their responsive e-commerce site is built with ProcessWire, and more than meets the criteria to be our latest site of the week.

Based on the sites directory entry and a quick look around the site itself, there seems to be quite a lot going on behind the scenes. A ticketing software integration has been mentioned, an e-commerce implementation is built-in on the site and looks downright seamless, and there's also a customer registration and login feature available.

While we can't speak much for the implementation details here, what we can say for sure is that it's a very good-looking site, and a real joy to use. The site, built by X-com, is just bursting with great design, bold content, and neat little front-end tricks that give it a fun and lively vibe.

Great job by X-com and anyone else involved – keep up the good work!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 55th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content next Saturday, 6th 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!