ProcessWire Weekly #565

Latest core updates and a weekly update from Ryan

This week's update from Ryan provides a quick status update regarding the ProcessWire website refresh, and also contains very interesting news about another project that is, in fact, being worked on at the same time — a new look for our default admin theme:

The website and admin share a similar design language in some areas, and I’m confident you will love them both. When we use screenshots of ProcessWire in the new site design, they will be from the new admin look and feel. It is still admin AdminThemeUikit, but with a new face that is beautiful, modern and professionally designed.

— Ryan

Ryan also goes on to state that for those that do not want to update the look and feel of their admin panel, at least for now, for whatever reason, there will be an option to keep things as-is. Any customizations and custom styles added via admin.less will, additionally, continue to work regardless of this update.

What is likely going to change is that alternative admin themes, AdminThemeDefault and AdminThemeReno, will be removed from the core bundle and moved instead into the modules directory as separate, optional modules. This allows us to focus our core development efforts on one well supported admin theme, instead of dividing time and effort among three separate themes.

Latest core updates

This week there are a few relatively minor core updates in the dev branch at GitHub:

• Background colors for admin file and image inputfields were normalized, e.g. instead of using a secondary, "muted" color they now use the same default background color as most other fields.
• The login screen received some minor styling updates.
• A fix was pushed to ProcessPageLister, applicable to cases where a custom page class was expected for a page without an ID.

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 support forum. Thanks!

New module: Sync to S3

The Sync to S3 module was created by Rudy Affandi, and does exactly what one would expect based on the module's name: it syncs your files to Amazon AWS S3 bucket. Although, to be fair, it does actually go one step further, and also adds support for serving said files via configured CloudFront cache, which is a pretty big deal in itself.

Working with the Sync to S3 module is technically quite simple: just install it and configure your S3 credentials (and optionally CloudFront credentials), and you're good to go. That being said, there is one server side requirement: you need to have AWS CLI installed. As such, this module may not be everyone's cup of tea — but for those that have full access to their server it can provide an easy way to back up content, as well as serve cached content.

At the moment this module will automatically sync all common static files (e.g. .css, .js, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .svg, .webp, .pdf, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .woff, .woff2, .ttf, .otf, .eot, .ico, and .csv).

If you want to give this module a try, you can clone or download it from the processwiresynctos3 GitHub repository. Please note that this module is not in the ProcessWire module's directory, and as such extra caution is recommended — please test carefully before implementing it on a production site.

Thanks to Rudy Affandi for creating this module and making it available for us!

Site of the week: Simple Signature

Our latest site of the week is, in fact, a web application: Simple Signature. It is a service used for creating email signatures — or, as the site's tag line explains, "Minimal Email Signature Editor for signatures that work everywhere".

Simple Signature was created by Michael Ruckstuhl and Stefan Jandl with the goal of streamlining the process of creating consistent, good-looking email signatures for their clients. The service is free to use for individual users (single signature), and there is a pro plan available for those who need to create multiple signatures. Pro plan allows signatures to be shared via a link, making it a handy tool for e.g. design agencies.

The Simple Signature service was recently introduced by one of the authors, Michael, in a showcase forum thread at the ProcessWire support forum. In addition to explaining how the service came to be in the first place, this post also provides some interesting technical details — some of which we'll summarize here:

• The front-end is vanilla JavaScript with modular components, while the back-end is powered by ProcessWire.
• Signature configurations are stored as pages, and a custom user system was implemented for a simple magic link authentication.
• Images are processed server-side, using Imagick for creating different shapes (circles, squares, rectangles).
• Third party ProcessWire modules used on this site include MarkupCloudflareTurnstile and WireMailSmtp.
• Payments are processed using integrated Lemon Squeezy checkout overlay.

For more details check out the showcase forum post and give Simple Signature a try, their signature editor is very easy to use and produces exceptional results.

Thanks to Michael and Stefan for creating this project and sharing it with us!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 565th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 15th of March. 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!