ProcessWire Weekly #615

In the processwire.com blog this week: handling photo heavy sites in development

This week we've got a new blog post from Ryan, in which he covers a topic that is admittedly quite specific, but also touches something that a lot of us have run into at one point or another: how to handle the local development version of a photo heavy website, when fetching all the data is not ideal, or perhaps even feasible at all.

The post is essentially a collection of tips and tricks that can make the process more bearable:

• Loading images automatically from a remote (production) server, using either ProcessWire hook(s) or some .htaccess rewrite rules.
• Replacing real images with a single placeholder on the go, so that the layout itself behaves properly — just without actual images.
• Making the admin interface think that everything is fine, when in reality you don't actually have the images available locally.

Both replacement methods are quite flexible, and you could easily adapt them to do something else as well. Want to use a placeholder image service? Go for it. Got a collection of locally downloaded stock photos? Sure, why not. There's a lot you can do with just these simple tricks, so feel free to experiment... and definitely let us know if you come up with something neat!

That's all for our core updates section this week. Be sure to check out the blog post for handy tips and tricks, and keep on reading for other ProcessWire news and updates. Thanks!

New module: Inputfield Radios Image Labels

Inputfield Radios Image Labels is a new third-party ProcessWire module created by Eduardo San Miguel Garcia. This is actually a two-module bundle, as there is also another module bundled in the same repository, called Inputfield Checkboxes Image Label.

These modules, intended to be used with the core Options field type, render radio buttons or checkboxes as either selectable images, or styled labels. In order to use images as options, you can simply map existing files to Options field values:

1=/site/templates/img/small.png
2=/site/templates/img/medium.png
3=/site/templates/img/large.png

You can customize how images are displayed by defining desktop and mobile image widths separately, defining image aspect ratio, and deciding if a text label should be displayed below each image.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download it from the InputfieldRadiosImageLabel GitHub repository, install it via the built-in modules manager in the admin, or install it via Composer: composer require elabx/inputfield-image-label-options. If you need help or have suggestions for the author, head down to the dedicated support forum thread.

Big thanks to Eduardo for creating this module and sharing it with us!

Site of the week: Capitol Kino Plauen GmbH

Our latest site of the week belongs to Capitol Kino Plauen GmbH, a cinema theater located in the town of Plauen in Germany. They have eight auditoriums with state-of-the-art projection technology and unique ambiance, and their program also includes specially themed movie nights and other events.

A break from everyday life. Each auditorium offers a unique ambiance, state-of-the-art projection technology, and outstanding sound for your movie experience.

Created by Unico, the Capitol Kino Plauen website is features a very nice design that is rather straightforward, with plenty of dark colours, nicely contrasted by the colourful movie posters. The overall look and feel of the site is classic, stylish, and — in a purely positive sense — old-fashioned. The movie pages make up the bulk of the content on this site, together with various lists and filterable sections for current and upcoming showings.

As for some behind the scenes details, the front-end of this site is powered by the Bootstrap front-end framework, along with some familiar JavaScript utilities, such as jQuery and Flickity carousel plugin. When it comes to ProcessWire modules, there seem to be some custom-built ones here (such as a custom cookie management banner), as well as at least one that we are quite familiar with: the commercial all-in-one caching and minification utility ProCache.

Our congratulations to both the client, Capitol Kino Plauen GmbH, and the team behind this project at Unico — great work from everyone involved in this project!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 615th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 28th of February. 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!