ProcessWire Weekly #583

The 583rd 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! In this week's issue we're going to check out what's new in ProcessWire 3.0.250, the latest development version of the core, as well as highlight some recent ProcessWire resources — including some new modules, tutorials, and general PHP content.

As always we've also got a new site of the week to introduce. This week that site belongs to Mandrake, which is an upcoming farming and life sim game from Failbetter Games. More about this very interesting project in just a bit, so keep on reading.

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!

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.250

This week we've got a new blog post from Ryan, introducing ProcessWire 3.0.250 and the new Markup Regions features that it ships with. As Ryan explains right at the beginning of the post, said features are intended to make Markup Regions (the built-in output strategy bundled with the core) more flexible, more intuitive, and less dependent on HTML ID attributes.

What's new for Markup Regions in ProcessWire 3.0.250?

We'll let Ryan explain these features in more detail, as well as provide more background into why they are so nice to have around, but here's a brief summary of the latest Markup Regions features, supported as of ProcessWire 3.0.250:

For tags that are intended to appear only once per page, e.g. <title> and <body>, you can populate the value without specifying an "id" attribute: <title>Title for current page</title>, <head pw-append><style>background: rebeccapurple</style></head>, etc.
In case you have an element with a class name, instead of an "id" attribute, you can use that to target said element: <p class="summary" pw-prepend=".page-header">Hello world!</p>. Note that this will target all elements with that class!
In a similar manner, elements can now be targeted using just the tag name: <div pw-append="<footer>"><p>Powered by ProcessWire</p></div>. If you want to be more specific, you can specify class as well: pw-append="<footer.site-footer>".
Last but not least, a new attribute action pw-update has been added. This is similar to pw-append, but (as the name suggests) can be used to update the attributes of an existing element, as well as append new content into it.

That's all for our core updates section this week. For more details about aforementioned Markup Regions features, including more code samples and some notes about when and if to use them, be sure to also 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.

First of all we've got a new module from Robin Sallis, called PageActionIncludeFile. It is an action for Lister Pro with a simple (yet powerful) idea behind it: it lets you pick any existing PHP file stored under /site/templates/PageActionIncludeFile/ to do page processing. Handy when a new PageAction module would be a bit much.
Another new module comes from Christoph Thelen, and is called SmartComments. This module extends the options for StripTags in the input settings of text fields with an option to insert single or multi-line comments.
Next up is yet another new module, JavaScriptHooks by Bernhard Baumrock. This module, which Bernhard has additionally submitted as a proposal for the core, is a JavaScript hooks implementation much like our existing PHP hooks system.
We don't want to make this post all about new modules, so here's a tutorial video for getting more out of the Chrome dev tools. This tutorial video was created by @camelCaseDev, and shared by Bernhard Baumrock via the support forum.
PHP recently had its 30th birthday and JetBrains celebrated this special occasion with the free online event PHPVerse 2025. If you missed the event , you can now watch the recordings; some great talks there, so definitely worth checking 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: Mandrake

Our latest site of the week is that of Mandrake, an upcoming narrative and farm sim game from Failbetter Games Ltd. A new addition to a rather popular game category of (rural) life sims, Mandrake is inspired by British history and folklore, has plenty of interesting game features, and also features an absolutely gorgeous art style.

It’s a rural life sim, though with the kind of complex, playfully responsive narrative you might expect from us, and an unusual art style for the genre. You play the last of the Mandrakes, a sorcerous line of gardeners. Horticulture is a cursed and forbidden practice... except to you.
— Announcing Mandrake by Hannah Flynn

The Mandrake website was created by Ben Byford, and it is a rather straightforward single-page showcase website with basic information about the game, along with plenty of beautiful artwork from the game and its resources. The site also features a simple newsletter subscription form for those interested in staying up to date with the latest news, an embedded announcement trailer, and a carousel feature with some screenshots of the game.

As for behind the scenes details about this site, there's not a whole lot for us to say. The front-end of this site appears to be largely custom-built, so no full-blown front-end framework at play here, and the only third party dependency we could spot was GLightbox. It is a pretty simple site , so no need to complicate things any more than that, really.

If you'd like to know more about Mandrake the game, be sure to check out the Announcing Mandrake post at the Failbetter Games website. The game is not out yet and the release date is also yet to be announced, but in the meantime you can read more about it, and add it to your wishlist, at Steam.

Big thanks to Ben Byford for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the client, Failbetter Games. Mandrake looks amazing and I for sure can't wait to get my hands on it once it's released!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 583rd issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 19th of July. 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!