ProcessWire Weekly #90

Latest core updates: improvements to the subselectors and the $pages API variable plus an all-new link abstraction feature

ProcessWire 3.0.6, the latest version of the 3.x branch available for testing via the devns branch, brings in some pretty amazing new features.

For a more comprehensive summary you should check out Ryan's latest blog post, but here's a summary of the most important parts:

• Subselectors now support nesting, meaning that you can now use subselectors within your subselectors – a tremendously useful feature for streamlining especially the more complex queries you'd otherwise have to do in multiple steps.
• Additionally, subselectors have received a speed optimization. According to Ryan, they're now modestly "hundreds of times faster", though this should mostly be noticeable when you're dealing with a large quantity of pages.
• $pages API variable has been extended with new methods: getPath() for fetching the path or URL of a page, getByPath() for fetching a page (or just its ID) efficiently using its path, and touch() for updating the modification time of a specific page.
• Built-in link abstraction is one of the biggest additions in a while, both in terms of code and significance. When enabled via settings of a textarea field, link abstraction makes sure that internal links stay up to date even if a page has been moved or renamed.

There were also some purely technical improvements this week, perhaps most importantly the Pages class being split into multiple smaller chunks for clarity and efficiency. Anyway, don't forget to visit the processwire.com blog for more details!

New module: PrevNextTabs adds prev and next tabs to Page Edit

PrevNextTabs, the latest module by Macrura, adds new prev and next tabs to Page Edit. The intention is to make moving between sibling pages a one-click action, but the tabs also display the title of the target page in a tooltip when hovered.

The module's README mentions the development phase of a site as one potential use case: with tabs for prev and next pages, content editors can move around with ease without stepping into the page tree at all.

Either way, for certain use cases this seems like a very handy module, so thanks to Macrura for sharing it with us. You can grab this module from GitHub and any questions you might have should go to the dedicated support forum thread.

ProcessWire resources of the week

Here's the latest bunch of support forum highlights and other resources you folks might find interesting and/or useful. As always, please let us know if there's anything important we've missed so that we can include it in one of our future issues. Thanks!

• Cloudways recently interviewed our very own Ryan Cramer. If you'd like to hear what Ryan had to say about ProcessWire, PHP community, eCommerce and the CMS market among other things, this interview is worth checking out.
• Here's a quick flashback from previous week for those who might've missed these: there are two new and awesome ProcessWire tutorials at Tuts+, How to Install and Setup ProcessWire CMS by Ben Byford and 4 Reasons to Choose ProcessWire as Your Next CMS by Francesco Schwarz.
• ProcessWire is now featured at Product Hunt along with an awesome introduction from Diogo. If you can spare a few moments of your time, ProcessWire could use your vote. Thanks in advance!
• There's this new responsive image tutorial from DaveP at the support forum. We can never have too many tutorials, and this one is pretty useful too. Check it out!
• Finally, there's something new about @processwire at Twitter, can you guess what it could be? (Hint: it has something to do with the avatar image.)

If you're interested in ProcessWire news, discussions, and updates, there are always interesting discussions going on at the support forum. Since we're only able to include a tiny selection of those in our weekly updates, head down to the forums for more action.

Site of the week: Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music

Our latest site of the week, Roger Shapiro Fund, is a fund for commissioning, performance, and recording of New Music. Established in 2010 by composer/pianist Dina Koston, the fund was named after her late husband, psychiatrist Roger Shapiro.

This site was built by Nibiri Creative Services and introduced by Macrura in a recent forum post along with other recent projects. The quality of the site is very much in line with what we've come to expect from Nibiri: it looks great, works great on both mobile and desktop sizes, and the style fits the theme exceptionally.

Some noteworthy features of the site include a loading animation for pages, fade-in for certain content blocks, Facebook comments used for news items and jQuery DataTables used for representing tabular data. Behind the scenes the site apparently makes use of at least two pro modules, ProCache and FormBuilder.

Thanks to Macrura for sharing this site with us – wonderful work as always!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 90th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 6th 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!