ProcessWire Weekly #580

Latest core updates

This week we've got a single feature update in the dev branch, and it is a pretty interesting one for sure, considering all the discussions we've had about the new admin theme style recently:

Add AdminThemeUikit feature for testing all Uikit features with current theme (whether original, admin.less based, or themes/name/admin.css based). This is adapted from the /tests/ directory included with Uikit.

This is a superuser feature that can be accessed by opening the admin and adding a test parameter (?test_uikit=1) to the URL. Whether you're testing the built-in admin theme/style or your own customizations for it, this should make it very easy to spot and subsequently fix any inconsistencies.

That's all for our core updates section this week; we should have more updates to share by next week, but keep on reading for other weekly news.

Introducing ProcessWire Commerce

ProcessWire Commerce was introduced by the author Francis Otieno (Kongondo) via the ProcessWire support forum earlier this week, and to be frank we're quite excited about this particular project. For those not familiar with the background of this module, it is a rebranded and newly open-sourced version of Padloper 2 — a previously commercial e-commerce platform that has been around for quite a while already.

The idea of to open-sourcing Padloper was discussed on the support forum earlier this year. Yhere are various reasons why this decision was made, but the one that we'd like to focus for now is that this should give the community a chance to really explore this amazing module, and contribute to the development. We are excited to see how this project will evolve!

ProcessWire Commerce is a free, open-source fully featured e-commerce module (plugin) for building and managing fully function online shops (stores) in ProcessWire. It is flexible, extensible, highly customisable, scalable, robust, multilingual by design and battle tested.

— Kongondo

At it's core the ProcessWire Commerce module is a full-featured e-commerce platform. Here's a list of the core features provided:

• Product management, including support for product variations, different product types (physical with or without shipping, digital products, and services or events), and stock tracking.
• Order management, including processes for handling refunds, printing invoices, and communicating with customers. Orders can also be created in the back-end manually if needed.
• Shipping options with configurable shipping methods, rates, handling, and zones based on location and product type. Shipping rates can be tiered, based on weight, price, or quantity.
• Tax management, which covers automatically calculated and added taxes based on location and product type, and tax overrides based on product category or shipping.
• Analytics and reporting features that provide insights into sales, customer behavior, and product performance.
• Payment gateways, with built-in integrations for Stripe and PayPal (in addition to regular invoices), and of course the ability to add more payment processors as custom extensions.

There are also numerous optional features, such as customer management, discount options, and digital downloads — just to name a few. Be sure to check out the features post at the support forum for more details. Some features are still being worked on, and as of this writing the module's admin interface has some issues with the latest iteration of ProcessWire's admin theme, but that will get sorted out.

As of this week's release the ProcessWire Commerce module is completely free to use, no strings attached, but it has been a major development effort. If you'd like to show your support, consider donating or purchasing Pro Support or custom development. This module is also now a community effort, so code contributions and help on the support forum are welcome.

Big, hearty thank you to Francis for his work on this module, and for sharing it with the ProcessWire community — what an amazing contribution!

New module: Text Readability

Text Readability is a new ProcessWire module created by Robin Sallis. In a nutshell it is a tool for content editors to evaluate the readability of the text that they have authored, using various assessment methods. The module works with English language text, and currently supports following evaluation methods:

• Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease
• Flesch Kincaid Grade Level
• Gunning Fog Index
• SMOG Index
• Automated Reability Index
• Spache Readability Score
• Dale Chall Readability Score
• Coleman Liau Index

Behind the scenes Text Readability makes use of the PHP Text Statistics class, and the results of each test are displayed right next to each textarea field that this feature is enabled for. You can choose which evaluation methods to enable via module config, and also choose whether the results should be visible right away, or after a book icon is clicked.

By default, Text Readability is available for all of your textarea fields. If you'd like to disable it for one or more fields, you can do that using a hook method:

$wire->addHookAfter('TextReadability::allowReadabilityResults', function($event) {
    $field = $event->arguments(0);
    $page = $event->arguments(1);
    // Disable readability results for the "body" field on the "home" page
    if ($field->name === 'body' && $page->template == 'home') {
        $event->return = false;
    }
});

For more details, check out the module's directory page for Text Readability.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download it from the TextReadability GitHub repository, or intall it via the built-in modules manager in admin. If you have any questions or suggestions, head down to the Text Readability support forum thread.

Big thanks to Robin Sallis for creating this very useful module and sharing it with us!

Site of the week: SOOL

Our latest site of the week belongs to SOOL, Teacher Student Union of Finland, which is a national umbrella organization of all teacher students in Finland.

With over 6,000 members, representing all the different student groups from the field of education, SOOL aims to promote the co-operation of future professionals of education in order to improve teacher training, and provides a variety of direct benefits for their members. They are also hosts to one of the largest (and oldest) student events in Finland, Talvipäivät ("Winter Days"), which has an unbroken track record dating way back to 1947.

The SOOL website — which is based on an earlier iteration of the same site — was designed and developed by Vitec Avoine. This site features a modern visual style, and has plenty of content about topics such as the union and their services for members, and the topics that they are advocating for. The site also includes lists of membership benefits and member associations, along with news, events, and announcements.

As for some behind the scenes details, the front-end of this site is largely custom-built, with some help from Tailwind framework, and JavaScript libraries such as Bartender.js and GLightbox. The back-end is powered by ProcessWire, Wireframe output framework, and various third party / non-core modules, such as Repeater Matrix, Form Builder, ProCache, SearchEngine, MarkupMenu, Markup Metadata, and Tracy Debugger.

Our congratulations to SOOL for their new, ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 580th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 28th 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!