Leaderboard

This week I've been working on a combination of core improvements, optimizations, and fixes, plus a dozen pull requests have been added. Thanks for all of the great pull requests to the core that many of you have submitted. PR authors will appear in our GitHub contributors list once the changes are merged to the master branch (that's apparently how GitHub works). I do think soon we'll focus on getting a new master version out, as 3.0.165 is starting to feel old relative to the current dev branch. You can see all that's been changed and added this week in the dev branch commit log. Next week we'll be doing more of the same, though planning to get into some of the PRs that I didn't this week because they required more review and testing (those that involved more than a few lines of code changes). We're not going to bump the dev branch version till likely next Friday, since this week's work will continue into next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

You have a couple of options: You can create the required fields (and templates, if any) programmatically in the install() method of your module (see the documentation). Creating fields through the API is pretty straightforward, though you might have to dig a bit to find the properties you need if you want to customize the field's settings. In this case, you should probably also handle removing those fields in the uninstall() method so your module can be uninstalled cleanly (make sure to warn the user that uninstalling the module will remove all of it's data in this case!). The benefit of creating regular fields in your module is that your module's data can be managed through ProcessWire's regular interface, and you don't have to provide your own custom interface for simple CRUD operations. An approach that might be better suited if your module is targeted at developers is to make the fields to be used for storing data configurable. You can build module configuration options to let the developer select which templates and fields are used to store the data your module uses. Though this doesn't work for every use case. Finally, you can bypass regular fields entirely and store your module's data seperately. The advantage of that is that it's easy and quick. The downside is that you will have to provide your own interface for displaying and editing your modules data. Of course, that doesn't apply to every module – for example, you wouldn't need an editor interface to edit a user's cart. But if you store completed transactions, your module users will probably expect an interface to list (export, edit, delete, ...) all transactions, at which point you would have to build your own interface for that. Where you store the data is up to you: In the session or cookies (only for ephemeral data, like a cart). In a page's meta() data. I do that in some of my modules, see my post here. You can also use a custom database table for more elaborate storage capabilities. Again, you would use the install() and uninstall() methods of your module to create and (optionally) tear down your custom tables. See this post for some examples. Personally, I prefer modules that adopt best practices of the system they're build for – in the case of ProcessWire, I'd say it's best practice to create regular fields and templates instead of custom tables. But the ultimate answer is – as always – "it depends".

Store, collect and update oembed data from external sources. This module uses the great PHP Library Essence by Félix Girault and adds some processwire magic. It is inspired by Ryan's example module FieldtypeEvents and the TextformatterOEmbed module by felixwahner. Thanks! Download & Install Github: https://github.com/neuerituale/FieldtypeOembed Modules directory: https://processwire.com/modules/fieldtype-oembed/ Composer: composer require nr/fieldtypeoembed

I'm happy that Selectize.js is getting used more in the core. I should add that we've had the ability to use Selectize.js for page references (multi & single), image tags, and template & field tags since 2016. https://processwire.com/modules/inputfield-selectize/ https://processwire.com/modules/selectize-image-tags/ https://processwire.com/modules/selectize-template-field-tags/ Also if using the module for template & field tags, it tracks all of the tags in the system and provides a selectable list. And it has the option to selectize the icons as well, making it easy to search for icons for any field or template by entering the name of the icon. I've been extensively using all of these modules on all sites. And the inputfield has the additional benefit of allowing custom content for the selectable options as well as the selected options (separately configurable), meaning you can display various fields, icons, or even images on the selectable options. As Selectize.js has been more and more integrated with the core (for example with image tags), the modules have adapted. The Page Inputfields (single, multi) use the core selectize which has the benefit of being customized to work better with the admin. I'll have to see how the module interacts with the the template & field tagging. I think the best option is to allow admins to enable or disable the core init of the template & field tags, so that the module version can continue working, but I haven't tested the latest dev so don't know if it is an option.

I think you're better off not using FieldtypeCache. See this issue for some discussion: https://github.com/ryancramerdesign/ProcessWire/issues/1577 And I remember Ryan commenting somewhere that he's thinking of removing it from the core. The simplest thing if you want to merge multiple fields into a single field for search purposes is to use the SearchEngine module. Or if you want to go more hands-on it's not difficult to populate a hidden "index" textarea field from other field values using a Pages::saveReady hook. $pages->addHookAfter('saveReady', function(HookEvent $event) { $page = $event->arguments(0); if($page->template == 'your_template') { $index = $page->title; if($page->body) $index .= ' ' . strip_tags($page->body); foreach($page->tags as $tag) $index .= ' ' . $tag->title; $page->index = $index; } });

$sanitizer->text(nl2br($your_text), ['allowableTags' => '<br>']);