ProcessWire Weekly #630

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.265

As Ryan explains in his latest weekly update at the processwire.com forum, the biggest update to the core this week — or at least the most visible one — is an update to the bundled icon set: the core now includes Font Awesome v6, while v4 remains primarily for backwards compatibility and for older themes (Uikit admin theme defaults to v6).

AgentTools module updates

In addition to the core, Ryan has also been busy improving the AgentTools module. This work has, once again, resulted in both new features, as well as improvements to the existing ones:

• New scheduled tasks feature that makes it possible for AgentTools to run tasks automatically at scheduled times or intervals.
• Improved Agents/models management screen.
• New tabs navigation for improved user experience.
• New debug and traces feature to track what agents are doing behind the scenes.
• New persistent memory feature that makes it possible for agents to save a permanent memory across all sessions — when you ask them to.
• New guards on agent behavior, in case one goes rogue and decides to go places where it shouldn't.

That's all for our core updates section this week. For more details and screenshots of the new AgentTools module features and utilities, be sure to also check out the weekly update from Ryan at the support forum. Thanks!

New module: PageCarbon

PageCarbon is a brand-new third-party ProcessWire module created by Maxim Alex. This module tracks per-request resource usage and estimates the resulting CO₂ emissions based on Sustainable Web Design Model version 4. Each page gets a rank from A to D, and the module has an automatic aggregation method that prunes old data while keeping hourly statistics for longer-term use.

Here are some highliths from the long list of features provided by this module, based on the module's directory entry:

• Bot sampling: only 1-in-N bot requests get recorded, while human requests are always recorded in full.
• Hourly CO₂ bar chart for the last 24 hours — bars coloured A/B/C/D by average CO₂/request, so optimisation gains are immediately visible; tooltip shows avg mg/request and Grade; SVG fallback if Chart.js unavailable.
• Real-world analogies: all-time CO₂ total translated into 12 everyday equivalents (car km, espressos, kettles, phone charges, Netflix hours, emails, trees, LED bulb hours, subway trips, songs streamed, flights, Google searches).
• Top 50 pages table: CO₂ average, range, exec time, response size, hits, rating, and last seen.
• DOCX export: one-click formatted report via bundled pure-PHP PageCarbonDocx.
• Frontend API: getStats($page) and renderBadge($page) for template use.

For a full list of features, be sure to check out the PageCarbon module's directory entry, which also covers the front-end usage in more detail.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can install it via the built-in modules manager in the admin, or clone or download it from the PageCarbon GitHub repository. If you have any questions for the author, head down to the PageCarbon support thread.

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

Site of the week: Areal Nord

Our latest site of the week is that of Areal Nord, a Freiburg, Germany based sustainable development project aiming to transform a former industrial brownfield site into a hub for high-tech companies and research facilities.

The project is both a prototype and a proof of concept, and it was started by Freiburg-S-Wirtschaftsimmobilien GmbH & Co. KG in 2020. The plan is to develop the site gradually by 2030, and once finished, it is estimated that 2,000 people will work in the area. The goal is also to keep things ecological, and one way this is achieved is through vertical densification, e.g. building upward rather than outward in order to save ground space.

The Areal Nord is part of Freiburg’s Green Industry Park and is located in the immediate vicinity of the convention center and the airport. The 21-hectare site repurposes a long-abandoned area into up to 14 development lots, where high-tech companies from various industries will establish themselves.

— Areal Nord introduction in the processwire.com sites directory

The Areal Nord website was created by designconcepts GmbH and features an easy to grasp yet really nice-looking design and layout with a decent amount of content and various visual features, including maps of the area and video demonstrations. The site is multilingual, available in both german and english, and as a nice little touch has a toggleable high-contrast feature built-in.

As for some behind the scenes details, the front-end of this site is powered by the Uikit front-end framework, with barba.js added on top of it for some undeniably smooth transition and animation effects. Meanwhile, the one and only non-core ProcessWire module that we could spot in action is the commercial all-in-one performance, caching, and minification utility ProCache.

Thanks to the team at designconcepts GmbH for sharing this project with us, and our congratulations to the Areal Nord development project for their new, ProcessWire powered website!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 630th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 13th 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!