ProcessWire Weekly #74

On the processwire.com blog this week: Padloper, eCommerce for ProcessWire

Antti Peisa, the author of the previous guest post for the processwire.com blog – which, in fact, turned out to be one of our most popular blog posts in a while – is back again!

If you've read his previous guest post, you'll already know that Antti is the production manager at Avoine, the Finnish company that has (on multiple occasions) sponsored the development of ProcessWire. This time Antti is here to talk about a project of his own: an eCommerce solution for ProcessWire known as Padloper.

Padloper in a nutshell

Padloper is a commercial module with the rather ambitious goal of combining a full-fledged eCommerce solution with the ease of use – and ease of development – that ProcessWire is so well known of.

The final product has definitely reached its goals, proving that an eCommerce solution can be both easy to use and easy to set up. For those of us with prior experience from products like osCommerce, this is great news indeed!

That was also my original vision for Padloper: you can have the greatest product catalog built and released. Then any given day you just install Padloper on top of it. It doesn't care how you build your templates and frontend. All Padloper actually needs is a price field for your product template(s). — Antti Peisa

Oh, but there's more to it!

Some of the features that Padloper handles include payment processing, tax classes, country and state specific tax rates, #VATMOSS helpers for selling digital goods to the EU, digital downloads, reports, product variations, custom markup, customizable checkout process, and a JSON interface.

Check out the guest post from Antti for more details about Padloper – how it came to be, what it looks like at the moment, and where it's headed next. If you're in the need of an eCommerce solution, note also that there's a release sale going on right now.

Continents and Countries by Bea Dav

Continents and Countries is a new module built and released under the MIT license by Bea Dav. In a nutshell Continents and Countries provides an easy-to-use API for finding and displaying countries and continents:

<?php $countries = $modules->get('ContinentsAndCountries')->findByContinent('eu'); ?>

<select>
  <?php foreach ($countries as $country): ?>
    <option value="<?=$country->code; ?>">
      <?=$country->name; ?>
    </option>
  <?php endforeach; ?>
</select>

The module also includes multi-language support, meaning that continent and country names can be translated. At the moment the module provides following public methods for finding and listing countries:

• getContinents() for listing all continents
• getCountries() for listing all countries
• getByContinent($continent) for listing countries of a specific continent
• findBy($table = 'countries', $select = array(), $options = array()) for other search-related needs (see the module's README file for more details)

For more details and up to date usage instructions, check out the README file at GitHub. For support and general questions, head down to the Continents and Countries support forum thread. Big thanks to Bea for sharing this module with us!

ProcessWire support forum highlights

Here's a collection of various support forum highlights for the week. As always, please let us know if there's anything else you can think of that should be here.

• First of all, there's a handy new tutorial for setting up a dashboard for ProcessWire, brought to you by Macrura.
• Not all our support topics are strictly about ProcessWire; here's an interesting one about Google's AMP project.
• SimpleForms, the developer-centric form processor we introduced a few weeks ago, is under constant development. The latest addition to this great module is file upload support!
• Another module we've mentioned lately, Auto Content, has also received an update: now you can specify the number of randomly generated images, and images are also cached automatically, resulting in a big bump in performance.
• Calendar modules for ProcessWire is an older topic we've somehow managed to miss. While this module appears to be in a very early proof of concept state, in case you're looking for a full-fledged calendar solution, this could be a great starting point!
• Last but not least there's imagickal, a nice little function for making use of PHP's Imagick extension to programmatically alter uploaded images. Very handy indeed!

If you're interested in getting ProcessWire news, discussions, and updates in real time, there's always something interesting going on at the support forum. We're only able to include a tiny selection of all that in our weekly updates, so head down to the forums for more action!

Site of the week: Jump Inc

Our site of the week this time is Jump Inc, a UK based trampoline park opening soon.

Whether you're into some light bouncing or a hard-core cardio workout, this stuff does sound like some serious fun, and Jump Inc has a great site to match that active and dynamic image they're going for!

Just recently introduced in the showcase section of our support forum by Tom, the Jump Inc site makes use of the UiKit front-end framework, Slider Revolution, and behind the scenes the ColorPicker module by Soma. The site is also responsive, looks pretty neat, and has a great vibe to it – in short it has all the right ingredients.

Thanks to Tom for sharing this site with us. We're eagerly looking forward to seeing more of your ProcessWire work in the near future!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 74th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 17th of October. 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!