ProcessWire weekly #6

Issue #6 of ProcessWire weekly is here with latest ProcessWire news: core changes, module and admin theme additions and some noteworthy articles.

First of all, we're celebrating Midsummer here in Finland this weekend (and today, to be more specific) so.. happy Midsummer, everyone! I hope it's as sunny and warm where you're at as it is here right now.

This issue of ProcessWire weekly contains some pretty big news regarding latest core and module additions. I've also included a short list of articles that are highly recommended, so keep on reading.

Latest core updates: improvements to bootup speed, caching and a lot more!

This week we got a ton of upgrades instead of just one or two huge ones, so I'm going to have to rely on a list here. I'm probably forgetting something, so please leave a comment if you can think of something important I've missed.

  • Bootup speed of ProcessWire was improved, Fieldtypes are now loaded on demand instead of always during startup and a new Timers section was added to debug mode tools
  • New API variable $cache was added, at the moment mainly providing simple text caching capabilities (see WireCache.php for more details)
  • Non-ASCII characters in filenames can now be automatically translated to ASCII equivalents instead of simply replacing them by underscores
  • ProcessWire now ships with latest jQuery (1.11.1), jQuery Migrate plugin and jQuery Cookie plugin
  • New property "modified" was added to templates, reflecting latest change to template or it's file

Those should be the most important upgrades, at least. There were two pretty huge commits during this week, so if you're using dev branch of ProcessWire (> 2.4.0 at the moment) on a live site, please be cautious during your next upgrade, git pull etc. The quality of Ryan's commits is always high, but dev branch is still dev branch.

Update: though jQuery 1.1.11 is included, it's not actually used by the core yet. Transition from jQuery 1.8.3 to 1.11.1 is a work in progress. See Ryan's comment below for details.

New admin theme by nikola: Modesta

Nikola – author of quite exceptional admin themes Moderna, Futura and Futura Remixed – has just published new admin theme called Modesta.

This admin theme is built for ProcessWire 2.4 and utilizes new "admin themes as modules" concept. It also includes some handy tools for content editors, such as lists of latests edits and new pages, and a ton of configurable options, such as site name to be displayed in the header of Admin pages.

The overall style of this theme is clean, flat and very modern, as you can see from the many screenshots included in the forum thread introducing the theme. The title of the thread describes this theme as "modest", but apparently "modest" can be interpreted in many ways. In my eyes this is one of the best looking – if not the best looking – admin theme I've seen so far!

Amazon S3 / CloudFront integration provided as a Processwire module

This module fulfils a need brought up multiple times on the ProcessWire forum by providing an integration with Amazon S3 and CloudFront. In a nutshell it uploads files added to ProcessWire site to S3 bucket and dynamically alters file URLs to point to CloudFront. When files are removed from ProcessWire, they can either be removed from S3 too or kept as backups.

The module is quite new and probably shouldn't be considered "production ready" quite yet, but it does seem functional and very promising. If you feel like you could contribute to this module, please join the discussion at ProcessWire forum or post your ideas and suggestions via Github.

Readworthy articles and posts: what are others saying about ProcessWire?

In case you haven't yet read these, there are quite a few very good posts about ProcessWire and especially why people have chosen it as their main CMS.

Whether you're a long-time ProcessWire user or just trying to find out what it could do for you, these are well worth checking out:

Some of those posts are old and some new, there's one common theme: realizing how flexible ProcessWire is to work with and what kind of benefits that can bring into your own workflow, regardless of what kind (and size) of projects you work on.

Site of the week: designsatu.com

The site of the week this time is one that represents fashion collection SATU by Finnish fashion designer Satu Jaakkola-Chiari.

Whether or not you're into fashion for women doesn't really matter here – the site itself is a stunning display of craftsmanship, which is something we can all relate to. I'm sure we can also agree that it's a perfect fit for the fashion items it promotes.

Built by Nokikana (Ville Saarivaara), the overall style and of the site represents the kind of values that many Finnish designers hold in esteem: clean, functional and minimalistic style with references to elements of nature wherever applicable. Fantastic work indeed!

Stay tuned for our next issue

This issue was kind of a milestone for ProcessWire weekly, actually. It marked first full month of these weekly posts. For anyone who's been reading and commenting and sharing these: thank you, you guys are awesome.

I'm hoping to continue posting these weekly updates for as long as there's a need for them – and right now I can't see that need going away anytime soon. Our next issue will be out Saturday, 28th of June. Until then, happy hacking with ProcessWire!

This post has 5 comments:

Ryan Cramer on Saturday 21st of June 2014 12:55 pm

Great edition Teppo! One thing I wanted to mention about the jQuery version mentioned above– it's been included in dev for testing purposes as an optional component that can be turned on. I found that some things simply weren't working with that version of jQuery so have put it in there for further testing and work, but the core itself isn't actually using it unless enabled by some debug settings. So officially we're still using jQuery 1.8.3, but working towards 1.11.1.

teppo on Saturday 21st of June 2014 19:07 pm

Thanks for the clarification, Ryan. Looks like I browsed through that commit too hastily.. :)

Tom Reno on Saturday 21st of June 2014 20:02 pm

Great write as always Teppo! I look forward to these each week - there is always something I didn't know about. Hard to believe all the great additions to ProcessWire this year, and we're only half way through.

David Preston on Saturday 21st of June 2014 22:29 pm

Yet more great progress on PW and another great summary. Thanks Teppo.

mary on Sunday 22nd of June 2014 1:22 am

thanks Teppo. Useful info as always

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