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Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/15/2012 in all areas

  1. Just as a short note (sites are not much more than standard PW installations) www.grahm-anderson.de (lawyer, responsive layout) www.factoring-pool-mittelstand.de (Factoring means selling bills which are overdue to a bank) The latter uses the redirect url module for relocating old urls and Soma's navigation module. More to come soon.
    2 points
  2. That's a good idea! And it's already there. But you have to be logged in to see it. See the sidebar, it says "create new blog post". You always have great suggestions, but sometimes it takes me awhile to get it. After sleeping on it and thinking more on the intended audience here and want it to be as broad as possible. So while I want this to be something that people don't have to touch any code, I also don't want to introduce any unnecessary barriers for people that do. Given what you've suggested, I'm thinking I will tear into it and make it less nice on the code side, but simpler for someone to figure out without having to invest much time in it. Here's the strategy: $markup, $output and $blog will get moved into 1 API variable just called $blog. That API variable will be moved to a module and won't be something that people ever have to look at the code for. The functions in it are: findPosts($selector) getPost($selector) findComments($selector) findRecentComments($limit) setOutput('content|sidebar|whatever', $value) renderPosts($posts) renderComments($comments) renderCategories($categories) renderSubnav($items) renderArchives($year) renderAuthor($author) renderWidgets($widgets) render() // main Rather than having the Markup class, all those render functions map to PHP "views": renderPosts() uses view file: /site/templates/blog/posts.php renderComments() uses view file: /site/templates/blog/comments.php ...and so on: subnav.php archives.php author.php widgets.php main.php Those view files are basically like WordPress templates. Though with no classes, functions or logic. Just markup, loops and variables. The render functions figure out the logic and then just hand the views data that's ready to be output. Not quite as flexible as before (though still flexible), but there's nothing to figure out, so I like that. The template files in /site/templates/ will remain largely the same, other than that they'll be calling on $blog rather than $markup and $output like they are now. What I think this leaves us with is a minor compromise, though one that has a much lower development barrier to entry. People can get in there and adjust the markup output without having to know anything about the system. So I think it's a good compromise. Structurally I think it may be better too because it's much easier to see the scope of a theme: the entire /templates/ dir (and other dirs in it) is it. This setup is kind of similar to the approach some of us use in having common render functions as modules. Like having a PageArray::renderVillas() that is used by multiple template files. The main difference here is that the render() functions are taking care of any needed logic and then letting really simple "view" files handle generating the actual output. So now the "theme" has good separation and hopefully encourages people to create new themes. It's not an approach I'd use on one of my projects, but it should be a perfect approach for this blog and encouraging people to customize it.
    2 points
  3. PageListImageLabel Marty requested and sponsored a new module little while ago. http://processwire.c...t-image-option/ I just wanted to create a separate release thread. Many thanks to Marty for sponsoring and making this possible. This just shows how great this community is. So here it is the Page List Image Label module. It enables you to add thumbnails of images from the pages in the admin page tree. Download: http://modules.processwire.com/modules/page-list-image-label/ Github: https://github.com/somatonic/PageListImageLabel A screenshot of it in production. (old version)
    1 point
  4. Ajax Search 1.1.0 There was a request for a ajax live search. So I went and created a simple module. Added in 1.1.0 * added key support for browsing results with arrow down and up. * added escape key to close results. * added close results on click outside http://modules.proce...es/ajax-search/ From the readme: This module progressively enhances the search form to an ajax live search. It will perform a search like you would use the form normally, and returns the output of the search page. So the search will still work without js enabled. There's some basic styling attached to this module in the "styling-example". You can use it to get started. See readme in there. Setup the search.php So it works almost out of the box with the basic install profile of ProcessWire, you only need make a minor change to the search.php template file to only return the content part (results) on a ajax request. To get the ajax search only return the content, open search.php and change the output on the bottom to this: ... if(!$config->ajax) include("./head.inc"); echo $out; if(!$config->ajax) include("./foot.inc"); Module Settings It comes with some module options to define various settings regarding the search form. Following a list with the defaults. Minium length = 3 min length for starting ajax request Close button text = 'close' close button text ID of searchform = #search_form if you have a different search form id,class ID of input = #search_query if you have a different search input id,class Query name = 'q' this is the default param name as_query_url = '' if left blank the script will take the action of the form Any help testing this module is appreciated. If you have any questions or problems setting this up feel free to ask here. Also feel free to use this as a starting point for your own, or take out the script to implement it differently. It's quite simple and can be adapted really quickly.
    1 point
  5. This case study relates to the topic here: http://processwire.c...ndpost__p__8988 about creating an archive of 'stories' about how PW has helped in relevant real life scenarios. Website: http://www.ray-dale.com RayDale Multimedia Ray Dale is a multimedia designer. His portfolio website was 2 years old as of March 2012 and in need of a refresh. He found that the content management for his website was more time consuming than he wanted and the website was generally slow in performance and complex to update. Ray needed: A website that could showcase his latest work with separate portfolio content types The ability to show lots of images and videos in each section Complex interlinking between each portfolio item - where each item would belong to a number of simultaneous categories To be able to publish a number of pages under various sections on the website To have a condensed navigation structure - not over-facing the user with navigation A blogging space that was easy to update To gain complete control over the HTML, CSS & JS markup and therefore the design of the website The ability to take more control over the admin experience - without using a host of plugins - so that the CMS could be used for clients to make their lives easier Speedy performance - even if a shared hosting platform were used Good site security The previous solutions Ray was previously using Drupal as a content management system. Drupal is a great system, it’s incredibly flexible, it can be made faster and using template overrides, almost complete control can be taken of the HTML and CSS output. However, the process to achieve any of this is time consuming and clunky from a web designer / front end developer perspective. Drupal was also going to require a number of plugins to be installed to achieve a lot of the required functionality. Ray tested migrating his website over to WordPress. WordPress is another fantastic blogging system with light CMS functionalities. WordPress is generally easier to use than Drupal and a lot of control over the HTML & CSS markup can be delivered - in a much easier manner than Drupal. However, WordPress is still light on CMS features in the admin system. This means that it is difficult without either using a lot of plugins or custom php development (using the WordPress API) to have custom content types and fields. The decision to use ProcessWire Having searched around for an alternative to Drupal and WordPress - revisiting other CMSs that Ray had also previously used - Ray eventually landed on ProcessWire having read about it on a forum. Right from watching the initial video produced by Ryan Cramer (the creator of ProcessWire) Ray was intrigued by the possibilities that ProcessWire seemed to offer - effectively solving all of the issues currently faced. To summarise ProcessWire offered: Custom content types in the admin Custom field types in the admin Good control over media uploads A simple to use admin system A neat and simple API for custom frontend / backend development A customisable admin experience The ability to have a custom admin url Complete control over HTML markup Good security with flood control A powerful and flexible templating system (that was also simple) Ray was extremely impressed by the features that ProcessWire offered, however, many CMSs look great until you actually start using them - where the unnecessary complexities, weak architecture and terrible, bloated functionality often start to appear. The functionality seemed so promising that a gamble was taken to build the Ray Dale Multimedia website - with very little time now available - to ProcessWire and test how it performed. Building the website Having built the original Ray Dale Multimedia website in Drupal, then converted to WordPress before deciding to gamble on ProcessWire - Ray now had very little time left to build his portfolio website. As a testament to the ease and speed of using ProcessWire - he was able (with a little help from articles in the forum) to rebuild the Ray Dale Multimedia website in two days of effective full time development. This included all of the content creation and learning the new system - with the inevitable (but surprisingly smooth) learning curve. Enabling complete control over output ProcessWire allowed Ray to write HTML and CSS without any of the interference you get from other CMS systems. So, Ray was able to use the following frameworks of his choosing: HTML5 boilerplate jQuery Modernizr Masonry A customised version of the 960 fluid grid system PrettyPhoto for lightbox images Less - to create minified CSS Though it must be said that literally anything can be used as ProcessWire makes no assumptions on the frontend - even on the Javascript framework. Quick and easy API One really pleasant surprise was the jQuery influenced API that ProcessWire offered. For example you can use php queries such as: $pages->find("selector"); $pages->get("selector, path or ID"); to find content in the system - you can even filter your queries by template type, fields attached to that item, etc. You can even use a range of selector operators. The API effectively works as a super powered and infinitely more flexible alternative to the WordPress loop. Cross referencing pages easily Complex cross-linking between portfolio items was needed so that capabilities, technologies and services could be linked to each item. It was easy to create a taxonomy system that worked the exact way required once the fundamental concept of how pages work in ProcessWire was understood. Building navigation that works Unlike a lot of CMSs that work effectively as ‘bucket systems’ - meaning that content is separate from any kind of structure or hierarchy by default in the system - whereas everything in ProcessWire is a page and arranged hierarchically. Whilst this may seem strange and restrictive to some used to the aforementioned ‘bucket systems’ - it works incredibly well and enables you to build navigational structures that are easy to plot a current location in. It is also something easy enough to break away from if you want a more ‘bucket’ type system. For example, in Drupal and WordPress it can be very difficult to highlight the navigation on a website if you are using custom content types. Try using custom post types in WordPress and keeping your navigation tracking which page the user has landed on - it’s extremely difficult without a fair bit of custom development (this is true as of the time of writing - WordPress 3.3.1). Because ProcessWire uses a structure and hierarchy by default - this structure makes building navigation that can track the current page very simple. Easy / flexible admin system The admin system in ProcessWire was easy and fluid to use, logical and stable. The admin system can also be overridden with templates (there are already some great community contributed templates). Modules used Whilst ProcessWire has a number of contributed modules from a thriving and helpful community - absolutely no additional modules were needed. All functionality on the website was achieved from a vanilla version of ProcessWire. Performance Another area of importance was the performance of ProcessWire. Again, Ray found this aspect to be well covered with built in caching capabilities that were thoughtfully included ‘out of the box’. The caching was simple to enable on templates and fields. The memory footprint of the Ray Dale Multimedia website was a third of that of Drupal on the same website without using addon caching plugins. Challenges The only real challenge faced was understanding that ‘pages are everything’ in ProcessWire. You build categories, taxonomy, articles, blog systems with the ‘page’ (and any fields it contains) being the basic building block for all of this. ‘Pages’ in ProcessWire can be attached to templates and injected with fields to enable the creation of literally anything conceivable. However, understanding this concept takes a little work for people used to other CMSs such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla. However, in context - and compared to other systems - this learning curve is still fairly easy. There are so many other time savers that this learning curve becomes negligible. The other area that Ray had to understand about ProcessWire was that there aren’t any template system paradigms that exist in Drupal and WordPress. Other systems have parent and child templating systems with default parent templates that can be leveraged, however, because ProcessWire makes no assumptions on how you are going to build a project (being a true framework) you currently need to create your own template files. This is made easy by good documentation on the ProcessWire website and a decent set of ‘starter’ template files that come as part of the default install. Conclusion ProcessWire was an absolute dream to work with. Ray found it to be very stable, well thought out and hugely flexible. So much so in fact, that Ray has decided to standardise on using ProcessWire for upcoming web design projects. The flexibility and simplicity of the admin system, combined with power in frontend development that ProcessWire provides is something that Ray found to be liberating and more importantly ‘best in its class’.
    1 point
  6. Nice example in the "Wire" templating language
    1 point
  7. You're welcome. Haha, don't hurt yourself please! Just for throwing in when using php "Wire"-tag ( ) short notation the above could also be something like this. <? foreach( $pages->get("/about/")->children() as $pa ) : ?> <h2><?= $pa->title ?></h2> <? if( count( $pa->teasers ) ): ?> <ul> <? foreach( $pa->teasers as $rp ) : ?> <li><?= $rp->element_title ?></li> <? endforeach ?> </ul> <? else: ?> <p>No entries found</p> <? endif ?> <? endforeach ?> (short tags needs to be enabled on server, but only few hostings have it disabled. In near future it will always be enabled in php5.4)
    1 point
  8. digitex, look at the markup and you see a somewhat 2 dimensional list. That's always done using nested foreachs. foreach( $pages->get("/someparent/")->children() as $pa ) { // $pa is the page echo "<h2>$pa->title</h2>"; echo "<ul>"; // cycle the repeater field as if they are pages (they are) foreach( $pa->repeaterfield as $rp ) { echo "<li>$rp->info</li>"; } echo "</ul>"; }
    1 point
  9. Migrating changes to a live site is a big pain-point for me in Drupal at the moment - simply replicating changes by hand is not acceptable to me, not on a production-site, due to potential mistakes and "weirdness" during the repeat of changes, with features half-done or content missing in the interim. The root of the problem, is the idea of storing data (content) and meta-data all together in the database - treating it all as "one thing" makes for very efficient and elegant development, but makes it difficult (impossible really) to migrate changes incrementally. A couple of ideas to address this issue: 1. Separate data from meta-data. In my own CMF architecture that I've been dreaming up for some years now, meta-data is stored in flat files rather than in the database, which means you can check structural changes into a VCS, and deploy those changes easily. In the case of PW, this would mean you could check-in changes to meta-data along with matching changes to template-files, so that there is no chance of inconsistency between those. 2. Have a "recorder mode" that you can switch on during development. This would simply record all insert/update/create/alter SQL statements to a flat file, so you can repeat all the operations by just running that. Not quite as simple as it sounds though, due to primary keys possibly colliding with the same primary keys on the server you're deploying to - the only real way around that, as far as I can figure, is to not use numeric sequential keys, and use GUIDs instead. 3. Record (certain) form-submissions and controller/action, so you can repeat operations by simply running the controllers/actions again, essentially simulating the same sequence of requests that generated the original changes. Again, not necessarily as simple as it sounds, if for instance auto-insert IDs are posted via hidden-fields on a form, it wouldn't "just work". Clearly neither of these are a "quick fix", but I think it's something we should discuss - it's not a small problem that you can ignore, in my opinon.
    1 point
  10. Here's the first version of the blog site profile. I was wondering if anyone could help me test? To install, download a brand-new copy of ProcessWire (it must be the latest commit). Then remove the 'site-default' directory that it comes with, and replace it with the one in the attached zip file. Then load in your browser to begin installation as normal. Edit: see this message for the latest version. Thanks, Ryan
    1 point
  11. I just commited a fix to this module causing some issues with a not well formed span tag. I noticed when I got problems with it adding other markup using hooks to inputfields. I've seen some people using this module so I thought I'd make a note .
    1 point
  12. I think there are situations where this is useful, and I even had one recently. I used a repeater with a 1-image field and a checkbox called 'published'. When I cycled through the repeater items to output the images on the front-end, I'd skip over any that didn't have $item->published.
    1 point
  13. I always just copy the files, dump the DB, and import with phpmyadmin on the new server, then update /site/config.php to point to the server's DB. But if there's some suspicion about an incompatibility with the server, I'll try to install a blank/default-profile copy of ProcessWire just to make sure it works (and I'll delete it afterwards). Sometimes I have to do a recursive update of the permissions of /site/assets to make it writable, but rarely. I need to get this actually built into the TinyMCE module so that people don't even have to think about it. +1 on the todo list.
    1 point
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