ProcessWire Weekly #558

In the processwire.com blog this week: introducing ProcessWire 3.0.244

This week we've got a new post from Ryan at the processwire.com blog. Said post is an introduction to our latest stable, master, or main release, whichever term you prefer. It walks the reader through all the new features added in this release, of which there are quite a few. This version has been in the works for more than a year, after all.

What's new in ProcessWire 3.0.244?

Compared to our previous release, ProcessWire 3.0.244 introduces 306 new commits by 10 authors, 110 issue fixes, 15 minor releases, and 9 added pull requests. When it comes to feature additions, this release is a major one; here are some of the highlights:

• The PagesVersions module was added to the core, adding core level support for managing page versions, including partial saves and restores.
• Improved file and image handling, including new API methods (such as getFiles()), file contexts, disabling individual images, and the ability to interactively delete WebP extra images independently of an image's JPG/PNG variations.
• Admin updates, including a new Uikit version for AdminThemeUikit, a function for comparing PHP and database times and notifying superusers of inconsistencies, GUI improvements for adjusting fields widhts, a markdown aware README viewer for the Modules administration, and more.
• Installer updates, including both general purpose improvements, as well as some updates for defaults, making utf8mb4 charset and InnoDB storage engine our new default values.
• Various selector improvements, including OR group support for matching non-page content, and OR group and sub-selector support for in-memory selectors.
• Numerous API improvements, including new methods like $database->reset() and $page->preload(['field1', 'field2', 'etc.']); new hookable methods such as $pages->moveReady(), $pages->restoreReady(), and $pages->renameReady(); callback function support for $pages->save(), and new vars option for $page->editUrl().
• Repeater improvements, including custom page class support, support for forpage selectors in showIf conditions, and much, much more.
• Multi-language support improvements, including new methods such as $page->setLanguageValues() and $page->getLanguageValues(), new methods for the

  LanguageTranslator class ($t = $user->language->translator()), and more.

• Inputifeld updates, such as support for Inputfield header actions, new hookable methods, and various updates for specific inputfields, such as InputfieldTinyMCE.

• Fieldtype updates, including several new methods for FieldtypeOptions, and a configurable column type option for FieldtypeFloat (either 'float' or 'double'.)

... and more!

PHP compatibility updates, and a bump in required PHP version

As of version 3.0.244 we've officially bumped the PHP version requirement to PHP 7.1, and the recommended PHP version to 8.x. This is very unlikely to cause issues to our users, considering that prior versions have been EOL'd a long time ago, but it's still something to keep in mind.

3.0.244 includes various updates for improved PHP 8.4 support, so in case that's what you're running ProcessWire on, you should definitely consider updating to the latest master/main version.

That's all for our core updates section for this week. For more details, be sure to check out the blog post by Ryan. Thanks!

Weekly forum highlights, tutorials, and other online resources

For this week we've gathered a list of support forum highlights and other useful and hopefully interesting resources. As always, please let us know if there's anything important we've missed, so that we can include it in one of our future issues.

• Our first highlight is the forum thread for the Plates for ProcessWire module. We covered the module itself in weekly issue #554, but the thread has so much more information that it's definitely worth checking out, even (or perhaps especially) if you're not really certain about adding a templating engine on top of PHP.
• Next up we've got another forum thread, a tutorial sharing some helpful hooks and a couple of extras. This post is from FireWire, the author of aforementioned Plates for ProcessWire module, and it's another treasure trove of quality content: from creating an organized structure for a project with a lot of hooks, to example hooks for some interesting use cases, there's a lot of interesting stuff here!
• Moving on, an interesting case story was posted recently to the pub section of our support forum by someone working with ProcessWire, although this project is not built on it: developing an open source fraud prevention/user behaviour analytics platform Tirreno. Plenty of wisdom and some kind words about ProcessWire here.
• Finally, we've got a new module that appears to be on the experimental side, but looks interesting nevertheless: MillcoPush, a module allowing users to subscribe to push notifications, created by Millipedia and built on top of the web-push-php library. (We may eventually post a more detailed introduction for this one.)

If you're interested in ProcessWire news, discussions, and updates, there's always something going on at the support forum. Since we're only able to include a tiny selection of all that in our weekly updates, head down to the forum for more.

Site of the week: ID Studio Web Agency

Our latest site of the week belongs to ID Studio Web Agency, an award-winning, creatively driven web design agency based in London, UK. They are a proper full-service agency with an offering that covers web and brand design, front and backend development, eCommerce, search engine optimization, maintenance, and more.

ID Studio is a creatively driven web design agency that combines the skills of talented in-house brand experts, web designers and developers to deliver results-driven websites that elevate your brand and drive conversions. We use ProcessWire extensively for our client projects.

— Sites directory entry for the ID Studio website

The website of ID Studio Web Agency was created in-house by their team of designers and developers. It features a brilliant, vibrant, unique design, plenty of quality content, complete with splendid typography, various layout choices, and tasteful transition and animation effects to tie it all together. Content wise this site includes typical company details, extensive showcase section, and also has an actively maintained blog built-in.

As for behind the scenes details, the front-end of this site was custom-built, while the animations were implemented using canvas and the Three.js library. Some of the non-core ProcessWire modules used behind the scenes include very popular Pro modules FormBuilder and ProFields Repeater Matrix. If you're curious, more details about this project can be found from the showcase forum post for the ID Studio website.

Thanks to the folks at ID Studio Web Agency for sharing their own site with us — splendid work from everyone involved in this project — as well as for trusting ProcessWire for the bulk of their client projects!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 558th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 25th of January. 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!