ProcessWire Weekly #80

Latest core updates – and the release of an official ProcessWire coding style guide

In his latest blog post, Ryan explains how during the past week several minor fixes and tweaks were pushed to the dev branch of ProcessWire, which will likely be merged into the master branch next week as 2.7.1. For anyone still holding back with the 2.7 update, it's worth noting that there hasn't been a single major issue reported so far.

While that's all good to hear, the really interesting news this week is something entirely different: the launch of an official ProcessWire PHP coding style guide!

ProcessWire PHP Coding Style Guide, version 1.0

ProcessWire PHP Coding Style Guide v1.0 is a comprehensive guide on best practices and formatting guidelines. As of this writing, it's already available from the developer API section of our site.

Based on the widely acknowledged PSR-1 and PSR-2 standards, our own guide discusses many similar topics, but also extends the scope of those standards in various ways – some of which only apply to us, such as API usage, and some that we consider important in other ways, such as code comments.

The scope of the coding style guide: what about 3rd party modules?

While the guide is mainly intended for potential core contributions (pull requests) and such, it would be considerate of 3rd party module authors to also take a look at the guide and, perhaps, see if they could benefit from it in their own products.

It's obvious that there are differences, both minor and major, in our coding practices, and it's not our intention to force anything on you. With that being said, having some common guidelines can make sharing code – and working on shared code – a more pleasant experience for everyone involved.

As always, more details can be found from Ryan's weekly blog post, so don't forget to check it out. Don't forget to check our coding style guide out either, it's a good read whether or not you're planning to implement it yourself!

Support ProcessWire by voting for us on the Critics' Choice CMS Awards

It's that time of the year again: the Critics' Choice CMS Awards nominees have been decided, and the voting for the best of the best of the best CMS products can begin.

This year we're one of the three candidates for the Best CMS for Developers category. Other two competitors in our category are Contentful and Craft CMS, so we're definitely in good company here.

This is a good chance to show your support for the project. Cast your vote for ProcessWire, and let the world know that we're still the best of the best of the.. uh, I'm sure you get the point.

Thanks for your continued support, and sorry for the Men in Black references. That's what Netflix does to your brain.

New module by Adrian: Admin Restrict Branch

Admin Restrict Branch is a brand new module by Adrian, one of our most active module authors. In fact the module is so new that it's still in alpha, so consider yourself warned: if you intend to use this module, test responsibly, and don't forget to report issues to the support forum. Thanks!

Anyway, the gist of this module is restricting users to a specific part of the admin page tree. This way the only thing they can edit, or see when opening the page tree, is that exact branch and it's children. There are a couple of different options for connecting users with branches: role names, per-user setting, or custom PHP code.

It's also possible to define exceptions from said rules. While pages falling under these won't be visible in the page tree, they'll still be editable, which is useful for PageTable fields and certain other use cases.

The module is already looking awesome, so big thanks to Adrian for sharing this with us early on! It's a very handy tool, and we hope to see a stable version soon.

Site of the week: Greenform

Greenform is a Los Angeles based company that offers "a cohesive line of planters and furnishings that enhance the spaces where people live, work and play." Their products are made in Switzerland from fiber cement, which is a light-weight and durable material – or at least that's what I just learned from their site.

The site, built on top of ProcessWire by Jonathan Lahijani and designed by Durre Design, has a clean and light-weight look and feel to it. The already smooth experience is nicely highlighted by the transitions, apparent for both in-page and page-to-page navigation. The latter, for the record, are powered by the awesome Animsition jQuery plugin.

As always, ProcessWire doesn't reveal too much of the back-end on the outside, but what we can gather is that the site makes use of FormBuilder and ProFields Table. The latter we only know because it was mentioned by Jonathan himself in a recent forum thread, while explaining how ProcessWire excels, and I quote him on this, "for these heavy catalog type sites, among many others."

The end client and designer love the ease at which they can update the website. Training beyond how to log in wasn't even necessary since ProcessWire's default interface is straightforward.
— Jonathan Lahijani

Thanks to Jonathan for sharing this site with us, and also: thanks for all the awesome stuff you've built using ProcessWire so far! As always, we really enjoy your handiwork, and hope to see even more of it in the future.

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 80th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 28th of November. 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!