ProcessWire Weekly #98

In the ProcessWire blog this week: Adrian Jones introduces Tracy Debugger

In the latest guest post at the processwire.com blog, we've got a long and elaborate introduction to the Tracy Debugger module by none other than the author of said module, Adrian Jones.

We introduced Tracy Debugger shortly in our 93rd issue back in February, but in his post Adrian goes much deeper into the details and inner workings of the module. Whether or not you've already made Tracy a part of your workflow, we urge you to check it out now.

Tracy Debugger in a nutshell

In a nutshell Tracy Debugger integrates Nette's Tracy debug tool into ProcessWire and adds a whole collection of ProcessWire specfic tools and views on top of it. If you've ever struggled with cryptic and obscure errors while working on your templates or modules, trust me: Tracy Debugger probably could've saved you a lot of headache.

We're not going to discuss the module in too much detail here – that's what the guest post is for anyway – but just to give you an idea what Tracy can do, here's a very brief summary of some of it's features:

• Debug bar with a lot of useful information is available for both front-end and back-end of your site; this is your one-stop interface for most other features
• On-screen debugging with expandable call stacks, arrays, and objects; console logging via separate browser plugins; file logging and email notifications
• Built-in support for timers and performance tracking (CPU and memory usage combined with optional breakpoints, etc.)
• General diagnostics panel and ProcessWire specific info panels with a wide array of useful details available at a glance

This was just a brief introduction to Tracy – for the real deal don't forget to check out the guest post at the processwire.com blog. Big thanks to Adrian for providing us with both an exceptionally useful module and a great introduction to it!

Template Parents module by BitPoet

Template Parents is a relatively new module by BitPoet, based on an earlier feature request on the support forum. This module was designed to allow more fine-grained control over the structure of your site by adding a whole new way of defining where pages using a specific template can be added.

By default you can specify allowed parent templates, but with Template Parents enabled you can also specify allowed parent pages. Via module settings you can specify whether this setting should be inherited, i.e. if a page is an allowed parent, does that also make it's children allowed parents.

Once again big thanks to BitPoet for sharing this module with us. This is a need that comes up every now and then, and your module provides an elegant solution to it!

Weekly links and resources

​Here we've got once again a collection of support forum highlights and other useful and hopefully interesting resources. As always, please let us know if we've missed anything important so that we can include it in one of our future issues. Thanks!

• The Significate Journal has been updated and is now a responsive, mobile-first site. Peter Falkenberg Brown has posted a detailed writeup discussing both the process of updating the site and some of their experiences with ProcessWire so far. Both the site and the article are definitely worth checking out.
• Front-End Edit Lightbox, a module we introduced back in September 2015, has just made it's way into the modules directory. FEEL is elegant, widely configurable, and compatible with both ProcessWire 2.7 and 3.0 – in other words a nice alternative approach for the native front-end editing features found from the 3.x branch.
• Since the addition of multi-language support in ProcessWire 2.2 we've received a considerable amount of community-contributed language packs. Thanks to some hard work by Asbjørn Ness, we now have a Norwegian language pack available!
• If you've planned starting your own podcast site, you should definitely check out the brand new pw-podcast site profile by Ben Byford. Big thanks to Ben for yet another great contribution for the ProcessWire project!

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

Site of the week: Swiss Made Shop

Our latest site of the week belongs to Swiss Made Shop, a gift shop specializing in high quality, authentic, Swiss made products. The shop itself is located at the car-free town of Wengen, but they are currently planning to open an online store during autumn 2016.

The site, built by novu GmbH, looks and feels great on all screen sizes and, behind the scenes, makes use of the AIOM+ module for caching and combining static resources. On the front-end side there's also quite a bit going on in regards to fonts, libraries, etc.

It's worth mentioning that the Swiss Made Shop site is properly encrypted using a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. Let's Encrypt is a relatively new certificate authority backed by some of the most influential players on the web today – such as including Cisco, Mozilla, Facebook, and EFF – and their certificates are 100% free.

Thanks to novu for sharing this site with us – great work, once again!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 98th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 2nd of April. 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!