ProcessWire Weekly #577

Weekly update from Ryan: tips and tricks for customizing the admin theme

In his latest weekly update at the support forum Ryan has shared a bunch of tips and tricks for customizing the new admin theme style. Some of said customizations can be achieved just be tweaking values of CSS variables, while some are a bit more involved.

Please note that something being covered in the post as a quick fix does not mean that it won't find its way into the admin theme style itself as a new default (eventually). The real takeaway from this post should be that our new admin style was indeed built with customizability in mind. It'd be a shame if no one actually ended up utilizing this new-found flexibility.

What's covered in the post?

Here's a list of modifications covered in the post. Many — if not all — are based on questions, suggestions, or feature requests made by community members:

• How can I make the background and text colors more subtle, rather than pure black and white?
• In the light theme, I don't want black buttons. How do I make them use the main color instead?
• How can I make the <select> elements have the same background color as <input type=text> elements?
• How can I make the Page List action links look like buttons rather than text links?
• How can I make AsmSelect items, PageAutocomplete items, and PageListSelectMultiple items use the main color so that they are more contrasty like the Original theme?
• How can I make <input> elements show a :focus state, so that I can tell which input is focused without having to find the cursor?
• How can I optimize the appearance of FieldtypeTable/InputfieldTable in the new default theme?
• How can I make Repeater items more bold so that they use the main color for the item headers?
• How can I have rounded input elements?

The post also includes a CSS file with aforementioned modifications baked in.

In other news...

Additionally, the new admin theme style now has a config setting for enabling/disabling the toggle style for checkboxes. This part may be subject to change, though, as it seems to be somewhat controversial feature. Same goes for other miscellaneous details about the new admin theme style, but we'll keep you updated as things progress.

That's all for our core updates section this week, but be sure to check out the weekly update from Ryan for more details. 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.

• The new admin theme style has been very much the talk of the town among our users lately, so first of all we'd like to highlight this post from Diogo, one of the designers behind said admin theme style. It might shed some light into the process so far, and what to expect going forward.
• Moving on to module updates, we have a couple of those that we'd like to share:
  • Tracy Debugger, which probably needs no introduction, is now using a new tool for database management in the admin: AdminNeo. There are also a bunch of very nice improvements for displaying page and file details, so definitely be sure to check them out.
  • ProcessTranslatePage has recently reached a new milestone with the launch of version 1.0. This tool, which is used for translating page content using AI, is — among other things — now directly integrated into DeepL, instead of relying on the Fluency plugin, and more. Big thanks to Robert Weiss for his work on this very useful tool!
• Now, a highlights list wouldn't be complete without some tips and tricks, so here we go:
  • An example of a hook that one can use to provide custom validation rules for an inputfield in the admin. What a great contribution from Robin Sallis!
  • A heads-up and a nice little tip from elabx: using $files->render() in a loop is expensive, cache it! Very much agreed; you should always consider the performance footprint of your code, especially in the context of loops.
• Last but not least, we just recently learned that there is a showcase section on the PAGEGRID website, and it has a number of awesome projects already. PAGEGRID is one of those ProcessWire projects that do something different, do it very well, and perhaps even push the boundaries of the system, so definitely go check 'em out!

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: Julia Coers, Coaching & Supervision

Our latest site of the week belongs to Julia Coers, a coaching and supervision professional from Germany. Her services include supervision (e.g. for teams facing conflict situations or personnel changes), coaching (e.g. for managers, or career and life planning), expert advice on various subjects, as well as services supporting organizational development.

Julia Coers offers coaching and supervision. Every statement and every need is based on a good reason. The cornerstones of her work are recognising this and building on it to initiate new thought processes in order to see what emerges from them. She implements these with sensitivity and a good pinch of humorous lightness on the basis of a systemic-constructivist approach.

— Sites directory entry for the Julia Coers website

Her site, which was created by cbc|design, is a straightforward single-pager with key details about services provided and the expert providing them, along with her contact details. The design of the site is also simple, with quite a minimal visual style, keeping up with the overall no-nonsense approach of the site.

As for some behind the scenes details, it looks like the front-end of this site was built using the Bootstrap front-end framework. And when it comes to non-core ProcessWire modules, there's only one that we could spot in action: the commercial caching and optimization solution ProCache.

Thanks to cbc|design for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the owner of the site, Julia Coers, for her new, ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's all for the 577th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 7th 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!