The 566th issue of ProcessWire Weekly brings in all the latest news from the ProcessWire community. Modules, sites, and more. Read on!
Welcome to the latest issue of ProcessWire Weekly! For this week's issue we don't have new core updates to report, but we do have a weekly update from Ryan, we'll check out some recent forum and module highlights, and we've got a new weekly poll.
As for our latest pick for the site of the week, this week we're going to highlight a very unique combination of a site and progressive web application created by Millipedia — TapeLetters. Keep on reading for more details!
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!
Weekly update from Ryan
The latest weekly update from Ryan is a quick status update regarding the ProcessWire website, along with some personal notes about HVAC — Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning. The long story short is that Ryan is currently working on the new API reference, which should get mostly finished by next week, after which he can start working on the homepage and features section copy.
It will likely be at least a few more weeks before we have anything to see, but we'll let you know when it happens.
For more details, be sure to check out the weekly update from Ryan at the support forum. 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
- To kick things off we've got a new tutorial post from FireWire titled using .env files with ProcessWire. This post introduces an utility called ProcessWire Env Config, which is essentially a wrapper for phpdotenv with caching and some other very neat features baked in.
- Moving on to code snippets, BrendonKoz has just posted a very interesting Gist for automatically adding estimated reading time to ProcessWire pages — and it's quite simple, using just some hook magic and a few built-in features. Definitely worth checking out!
- Next up we've got a quick heads-up related to development environments: the DDEV newsletter from February 2025 announces DDEV 1.24.2, and also contains a mention of the ProcessWire quickstart that is now in main version. Thanks again for Bernhard Baumrock for his work on making this happen!
- Finally, there are a couple of recent module updates that we'd like to highlight:
- Version 2.1.0 of the Fluency AI translation module introduces bug fixes, general improvements to the module, and also some new features — including permanent translation cache, new hookable methods, and globally excluded strings that can be entered one per line or all on one line separated by a || (double pipe).
- Version 1.6.0 of the commercial RockCalendar module by Bernhard Baumrock adds a new and potentially hugely important new feature, making this already very useful module even more flexible: support for custom fields/values for recurring events.
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.
Weekly poll: what are your preferred JavaScript frameworks and libraries?
Inspired in part by some recent forum posts and ProcessWire projects we've come across, this week we'd like to ask our readers about the JavaScript frameworks and libraries that you find most interesting, useful, and/or just generally speaking end up using most for whatever reason.
We did a similar poll way back in 2018, and in that one the top 3 was jQuery, Vue.js, and React — but there are some new players now, including HTMX, and probably some that we forgot to add (please suggest new options if something is indeed missing!)
As always, big thanks in advance for anyone and everyone taking the time to answer!
Feel free to check out the poll archive for results of our earlier polls. All suggestions for future polls are more than welcome too. Thanks in advance for both your answer here and any additional suggestions or feedback you might have.
Site of the week: TapeLetters
Our latest site of the week is TapeLetters: a site and PWA (progressive web app) created by Millipedia for a project and exhibition(s) revolving around exactly what the name suggests: tape letters.
Tape Letters is a study about a unique and unorthodox communication method utilized by Pothwari-speaking members of the British-Pakistani community who migrated in the UK between 1960 and 1980. The project material, available online via the web sites and a purpose-built stand-alone progressive web application (PWA), consists of first-hand interviews of individuals taking part in this practice, as well as actual tape recordings.
If you want to chat to a far distant member of your family these days it's easy to fire up your messaging app of choice to get in touch with pretty much any part of the world. But in the past, before the days of smart phones and internet messaging, and if you were part of a community that didn't have a history of using written language to communicate, the way to get yourself heard would be to make a tape recording and pop it in the post.
— Millipedia
There's not a whole lot we can tell about the technical implementation of these sites, but what we can tell is that they appear to make use of the Bootstrap front-end framework, along with various custom tools and features created by Millipedia. Some of the third party front-end dependencies used include Swiper and Hammer.JS, and there is a simple service worker implementation running on each of the sites.
For more details about this project, be sure to check out the TapeLetters project introduction at the Millipedia website, and definitely also check out the stand-alone player, which is really quite awesome.
Our congratulations to the team behind this project for a job well done, and big thanks for shedding light into this very interesting phenomenon!
Stay tuned for our next issue
That's it for the 566th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 22nd 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!
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