ProcessWire Weekly #71

On the processwire.com blog this week: guest post from Antti Peisa of Avoine Oy

With Ryan on a well-deserved vacation this week, we had Antti Peisa – known as apeisa at the ProcessWire Forum and on Twitter – take the stage instead. In his guest post Antti discussed the ongoing collaboration between ProcessWire and Avoine, showcased their latest SaaS product Sense, and introduced a new ProcessWire module called IftRunner.

Avoine and ProcessWire

Avoine is a Finnish company specialising in SaaS products and custom-built websites for organizations, unions, and associations. Not only do they use ProcessWire for their projects, they have also sponsored ProcessWire on multiple occasions, resulting in new core features (PageTable, the new notifications system, and sub-selectors, just to name a few) and modules (such as Dynamic Roles and the newly released IftRunner).

More about the history and collaboration between Avoine and ProcessWire »

Building a large-scale SaaS product on ProcessWire

Avoine Sense is a large-scale SaaS product built on top of ProcessWire. Developed for a year and a half by a group of in-house developers and some outstanding contractors, it looks downright awesome. Behind the scenes this application makes use of the Amazon AWS platform, giving it some serious benefits in terms of scalability in the long run.

More about Avoine Sense and building a complex web application with ProcessWire »

Introducing the IftRunner module

The rather obscure name of IftRunner is closely related to what it does: "if this happens, then do that" (If-Then Runner). In a nutshell it's a module that allows you to define rules, and when those rules are matched, a specific action is executed. These actions, which are actually built as modules, can do a variety of things, such as sending an email, publishing a related page, or sending a request to an external API.

More about the IftRunner module »

For more details, including screenshots of both Avoine Sense and the IftRunner module, check out Antti's guest post at the processwire.com blog. Big thanks to Antti for sharing his thoughts with us – ProcessWire is lucky to have both you and Avoine in its corner!

An early look into the Plyr Media Player for ProcessWire, developed by Orkan Alat

Markup Plyr Media Player is a new module that integrates the Plyr HTML5 media player into ProcessWire. Please note that this module is still under development, and should be considered beta; in other words you can start using it already, but just don't expect it to be fully polished yet.

Both the Plyr media player and the Markup Plyr Media Player module allow embedding three separate types of media players: video, audio, and YouTube. The video player has support for poster image, captions, and both webm and mp4 formats; the audio player, on the other hand, has support for ogg and mp3 formats.

Embedding a player on your site is as simple as loading the module and calling the appropriate render method, depending on which player you want to embed:

// load the module
$plyr = $modules->get("MarkupPlyrMediaPlayer");
// embed a video player
echo $plyr->renderVideoPlayer($poster, $mp4, $webm, $captions);
// embed an audio player
echo $plyr->renderAudioPlayer($mp3, $ogg);
// embed the YouTube wrapper
echo $plyr->renderYoutubePlayer($id);

The module has an automatic mode which, if enabled, will embed required JavaScript, CSS, and image resources into your templates. You can also fetch those directly from a CDN service, which makes setting the player up a very trivial task indeed.

Congratulations to Orkan Alat for your first public module; we're really looking forward to seeing it in full swing!

Introducing the lightweight Front-End Edit Lightbox for ProcessWire – FEEL

FEEL, an acronym that stands for Front-End Edit Lightbox, is a nice little tool providing lightbox editing support for front-end of a ProcessWire site.

The cool thing? FEEL is just one JavaScript file with few external dependencies: jQuery is required, and internally the script makes use of the Magnific Popup shipped with ProcessWire's core, but that's just about it.

For more advanced needs a module based solution like Fredi might be preferable, but if you're happy with the way FEEL looks and feels like, by all means go for it. Getting started is just about as simple as it can get, and only requires embedding the FEEL JavaScript file and an edit link in your template files:

<?php if($page->editable()): ?>
<script src="<= $config->urls->templates ?>path/to/FEEL.js"></script>
<a href="<?= $page->editUrl; ?>" class="feel feel-inline">Edit</a>
<?php endif; ?>

For more details and instructions, check out the GitHub repository. For questions and support, visit the ProcessWire support forum thread.

Big thanks to Roland Toth for sharing this neat tool with us!

Site of the week: Schuhhaus Walder AG

This time our site of the week is a co-project of update AG and Leo Burnett Schweiz AG, and belongs to Schuhhaus Walder AG, a Swiss company specialising in the retail sale of footwear.

Schuhhaus Walder is a big player in their line of business, and the site does a great job showcasing their impressive collection of goods. The product catalogue includes footwear for men, women, and children, with each product portrayed on its own page with zoom-enabled high-quality photographs. The Ajax user interface makes things feel smooth and quick, which is a big bonus for a site like this – and probably beneficial for conversion rates too.

From what we can tell so far, behind the scenes the site makes use of at least AIOM+, Form Builder, Email Obfuscator, and the wonderful PageImage Manipulator. In a recent forum post Philipp 'Soma' Urlich of update AG has also shared some insights about the project and both its current and upcoming features, so don't forget to check that out if you're interested in hearing what makes a site like this tick.

Thanks to Soma for sharing this site with us, and congratulations to all parties involved – it's a wonderful site, and hopefully we'll be hearing more about it once the remaining features are implemented!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 71st issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 26th of September. 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!