ryan

This week I was back to focusing on the core and got quite a lot done. A lot of GitHub issue reports were resolved, plus several minor tweaks and additions were made in 3.0.156 as well. But the biggest update was the addition of the $pages->parents() API, which is something that I think you’ll likely have zero use for (and why I’m not putting it into a blog post) but something that the core itself will use quite a bit, and is a really nice improvement for the system and its scalability. So if you don’t mind some technical reading, read on. Whenever you call a $page->find() method ($page, not $pages) or use a “has_parent=“ in a selector, ProcessWire joins in a special table for the purpose called pages_parents. It uses this table to keep track of family relationships that aren’t otherwise apparent. For instance, let’s say we have page “g” that lives at path /a/b/c/d/e/f/g/. Page “g” only knows that it has page “f” as its parent. It doesn’t know that page “e” is its grandparent unless or until page “f” is loaded. Once “f” is loaded, then “f” can reveal its parent “e”. It works the same for every relationship down to the root parent “a”. So the pages are like a linked list or blockchain of sorts, where only 1 relationship forward or backward is known per page. The “pages_parents” table fills in this gap, enabling PW to quickly identify these relationships without having to load all the pages in the family. This is particularly useful in performing find() operations that you want to limit to a branch started by a particular parent. It’s the reason why we have both $pages->find() that searches the entire site, and $page->find() that limits the search within the branch started by $page. I haven’t paid much attention to the code behind this pages_parents table because it generally just worked, needing little attention. But I came across a couple of cases where the data in the table wasn’t fully accurate with the page tree, without a clear reason why. Then I became aware of one large scale case from a PW user where it was a huge bottleneck. It involved a large site (250k+ pages) and a recursive clone operation that appeared to involve hundreds of pages. But that operation was taking an unreasonable 10 minutes, so something wasn’t right. It came down to something going on with the pages_parents table. Once I dove into trying to figure out what was going on, I realized that if I was to have any chance of keeping track of it, we needed a dedicated API for managing these relationships and the table that keeps track of them. So that’s what got a lot of attention this week. While still testing here, it does appear initially that the 10 minute clone time has gone down to a few seconds, and everything about this relationship management is now rewritten, optimized and significantly improved. It was a lot of work, but absolutely worth it for PW. Rebuilding the entire table from scratch now takes between 2-3 seconds on a site with 250k pages and 150k relationships. The new API can be accessed from $pages->parents(). This API is really useful to the work that I do here (maintaining the core) but I’ll be honest, it’s probably not useful to most others, so I won’t go into the details here, other than to say I’m happy with it. But if you are interested, there are methods finding all the parents in a site, or a particular branch, and methods for rebuilding the pages_parents table, among others. Maybe more will be added to it later that actually would be useful in the public API, but for now I’ll likely leave it out of our public API docs. The $sanitizer->selectorValue() method also got a full rewrite this week (actually, one the last few weeks). It’s now quite a bit more comprehensive and configurable (see the new method options). The previous version was just fine, and actually still remains — you can use it by specifying [ ‘version’ => 1 ] in the $options argument to the selectorValue() method. But the new version is coded better and covers more edge cases, plus provides a lot more configurability for the times when you need it.

Beluga, I'm not much into carousels either, but also wouldn't claim there's no place for them. There's 1 small carousel on this entire site, and there was also one on the previous iteration of the site—the client has always liked it, and the customers react well to it. I really like this client for a lot of reasons, but one is that they are much more involved than most, know their technology, their product and their audience better than anyone I've worked with. The carousel is not my idea, but I trust and am certain the client knows their customers better than any self proclaimed experts online. I got a kick out of that linked anti-carousel site because it's a bit of a self own by whoever made it—it uses a carousel to make points that we likely would not have bothered to read if they weren't in a carousel. ?

Last week I told you guys about how I was working on development of a client’s site and deep diving into the details. Well this week was the same, except perhaps more so. Yesterday we finally launched phase one. There’s still more to do, and still working out some small bugs and such. This is a site I’ve been developing since back in the early versions of ProcessWire 2.x, which I think was nearly a decade ago. In fact, this was one of the first sites running ProcessWire 2.x, if I recall correctly. We’ve been keeping it up-to-date over the years, but this is the first time we’ve done a full front-end redo of the site, essentially starting from scratch on that, and spending a few months on it. But the admin side (fields, templates and page structure) remains roughly the same from where it was 10 years ago, and that’s what we’re going to redo in phase 2 (this year). There’s a lot of fields in this site, so I’m looking forward to really simplifying it with ProFields, repeaters and more — none of these existed when the original site was built. One thing really great about this iteration of the site is that it’s a ProcessWire community collaboration. Pete (our awesome forum administrator) did the design, as well as most of the front-end markup/css for the site. Jan (our awesome system administrator) setup the servers that it runs on, with AWS load balancer setup and everything related to that (he’s also one of the owners of the site). I did the other development stuff (the ProcessWire API side of things), making all the content fill all the markup in the right places, structure and organization, markup regions, search engines, optimization, etc., basically the stuff needed to get it all working in PW. This is the first time that I’ve developed a site where we can run new and old site side-by-side off the same ProcessWire installation. During development, the client could click a checkbox in their user profile and then they’d be using the new site. Behind the scenes, it does this using a fairly new feature in ProcessWire which is: $config->setLocation(‘templates’, ‘site/tpl’); So we had site/tpl/ having the new site templates, while site/templates/ had the old version. So one limitation for this phase 1 is that the old and new sites had to deliver the same exact content, even if the resulting output was very different. This site also uses custom page classes (another new feature), Markup Regions, and ProcessWire’s Functions API, and the Uikit 3 front-end framework. Pete also wrote a nice custom PW module for this site to handle localized weather forecasts — I ran out of time to get it in place yesterday, but that should be there next week hopefully. Yesterday we launched the site and we were finally able to start running it through its paces with live traffic. I thought I was going to be working on the PW core today, but you know that as soon as you launch a new site you always find things that need adjustment and can’t wait, so that was all of today. There’s more optimization work to do, and then there’s phase 2, where we start using ProFields and Repeaters to better isolate a lot of data and be able to implement the rest of Pete’s design in the parts that we weren’t able to in phase 1. This is where things like the current pricing tables (one example of a weak point) start to look really sharp. But I’m also looking forward to taking a little breather and catch up on some serious PW core work, issue reports and module updates over the next few weeks before diving into phase 2 of this site. I didn’t want to share the site quite yet because there’s still some details to take care of and such. But here it is Friday and I’ve got no other ProcessWire news to report, so was feeling a little guilty that I didn’t get more ProcessWire core work done over the last week, due to being focused on developing this site. But this was one of the first sites running ProcessWire, so it's an important one to me. And here it is about 10 years later, still the same installation (templates, fields, page tree) but with a brand new design and running the latest PW, and lots more to come. Tripsite.com

I hope that you all are having a good week and staying healthy. I’ve been very much focused on preparing a new ProcessWire-powered client’s website for launch, hopefully sometime next week. This is a site that’s already pretty well established with the search engines and such, so I’ve been going through all of the pre-launch QA in terms of optimization, SEO accessibility, mobile testing, getting the multi-language translators everything they need to translate, adding ProCache to the picture, and so on. For me this is one of the most fun parts of development, with relentless optimization and having it all come together… but also one of the most time intensive. This is where all the little details surface, things that need improvement become more apparent, and new ideas keep popping up. It’s also where lots of the bugs are discovered and fixed, and where I sometimes have to slap myself on the head for missing one thing or another, but then of course taking care of it. So that’s been most of this week, and I think likely at least half of next week too. But then it’s back to work on the core and modules, covering issue reports and more. I’ve actually been at work on some parts of the core and ProCache this week as well, but not to the point of finishing anything major. So you’ll see some updates on the core this week, and there’s also lots of stuff pending that’s not yet committed, and it’s all work in progress, so stuff to review later. With kids at home I’m still moving at a little slower pace than usual, but starting to get the hang of it, doing well and building momentum. While I don’t have much new to offer in this update, thanks for reading anyway, and I hope that you have a great weekend!

This post covers a few of the bigger updates in ProcessWire 3.0.154 and 3.0.155 on the dev branch. This includes a new function for live replacement of text in core and modules, a new method for creating canonical URLs, and some major upgrades to our $input->urlSegment() method that I think you’ll like! This continues from last week’s post in the ProcessWire support forum about 3.0.154 core updates and includes several new details— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.155/

@Pete From this side, my wife's job is one that requires her to be on phone/video meetings most of the day, so she's got to lock herself away from us to focus on that, and the kids are mostly with me during the day. I'm good at focused attention, but not great at changing gears, so I'm still learning. My days used to be just coffee and code. Now things are much more diverse, here's a typical day: wakeup, breakfast, coffee, code, kids wakeup, resolve dispute, make breakfast, coffee, code, hear that TV is on, check in to make sure kids are doing school work, turn off TV, say “get back to school work”, try to figure out something with google classroom, worry about whether I'm doing enough to keep kids focused on school, code, get icloud request to approve download of some game on iPad, tell kids to “get back to work”, explain why several times, answer questions about school work, hear music from some game and decide to let it slide, 1 email, cycle power on router because wife says she can't connect to important video call, code, resolve kids dispute, put 1 kid in timeout, legos, clean up spill, 1 email, slack message, cook lunch, coffee, code, worry about whether kids are spending too much time on screens, phone call, reset wifi because daughter says Roblox won't connect, then work a little more, click the "snooze" button on a dozen emails so they return tomorrow, take kids outside to play while I work on house or yard, ride bikes, cook dinner, eat, netflix, cleanup dinner, go to bed, feel thankful to be healthy, sleep well. I'm definitely still adapting here, but I can't complain about the new normal because having everyone under one roof is comforting, especially at times like this. And while it's harder to get work done, it's mostly still getting done and I just feel thankful to be staying busy. Also, knowing there's nowhere to go but home, life is simpler in many ways.

Here’s a brief update on what’s new in the core since last week. Next week I’m going to compile a more complete overview of everything that’s in 3.0.154 (and more) and put it in a blog post. I wanted to do that today, but my kids have needed a lot of help with various things today (and this whole week actually) with all of this online school stuff and I’ve run out of time. We're a few weeks in and school is cancelled for the rest of the year due to the coronavirus (likely the same around the world). I'm still learning how to adapt to kids around all day and needing attention, but overall it's nice to have the family around more even if it is sometimes hard to get work done. So I’ll keep this sort of brief, and get into more details next week. Several updates were made to the core/LanguageFunctions.php (language functions) file, with biggest being the option to programmatically replace translation text (whether multi-language support is installed or not), useful for very easily updating core/module output to say exactly what you want, and without needing to install multi-language modules. No longer do you need to use various hooks to change text in one module or another. Also moved the __('text') configuration options to dedicated functions which makes it more clear to use, as well as much better for documentation purposes: wireLangEntityEncode(), wireLangTranslations(), wireLangReplacements(). You'll see these new functions in our docs by next week. More details and examples of these in action in next week’s blog post. The CKEditor version has been upgraded from 4.12.1 to 4.14.0. To see what’s changed, see the release notes for CKEditor 4.13.0, 4.13.1 and 4.14.0 here. There’s actually quite a lot here in terms of additions and fixes. Note especially the two security related fixes in 4.14.0 (though I think only the first may be applicable to us). While it looks like a rather unlikely combination of factors needs to come together, and with just the right person, it’s good to be aware of nevertheless. Of note is that these particular cases are entirely client side, before PW ever gets to see or filter the content, so this is something that only a CKEditor upgrade can fix. Updated the core Debug class to use PHP 7.3’s recommended hrtime (high resolution time) for debug timers, rather than microtome. This is only available in PHP 7.3 and newer. As far as I can tell it produces identical results to microtome (as far is our timers go) but the PHP documentation page indicates hrtime is what we should now be using, so that’s what we’re going with. I also did a little refactoring and minor improvements in the Debug class as well. Updated ProcessWire’s Inputfield rendering system so that you can customize markup by matching a field by name, and without hooks. This essentially takes part the Inputfield customization system developed for LoginRegisterPro and brings it into the core. This opens up a lot more customizability for those that want it. Various resolutions of GitHub issue reports, with more on the way. The above are just updates from the last week, but there’s plenty more in 3.0.154 as well. See ProcessWire Weekly #309 for details on Image and file field updates, new $database->columnExists() method and new Selectors::getOperators() method, and more. There are also the new expanded file and image properties, as discussed in #308 and the last blog post. Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a great weekend!

Last week I posted in the blog about current projects in progress, and consistent with that, this week I’ve been working primarily on the upgrades to our file/image fields. To start, this focuses on storing additional info in the DB table, including file size, created/modified user info, and for image fields: width and height. This is useful in making these properties searchable from page-finding selectors, but also a necessary pre-requisite to supporting external file systems. A “ratio” floating point property is now available on image fields as well (and also stored in the DB) and this value reflects the width divided by the height. This is a searchable property and will be useful for quickly finding portrait images, landscape images, square images, or any proportion you need to find. If you want to find images that are at least twice as wide as they are tall, then you’d be looking for a “ratio” of 2.0 or larger (“ratio>=2”). If you needed to find perfectly square images (i.e. 300x300) then you’d be looking for a ratio of 1.0. If you needed to find portrait images, then you’d be looking for images with a ratio under 1.0 (or twice as tall as wide would be 0.5). You can figure out what ratio you are looking for just by taking your target width and dividing by your target height. Longer term, combined with the other added properties, the goal is that this will help with finding pages that have images suitable for specific placements, proportions and dimensions. These new properties won’t be useful at first on existing sites because the data just isn’t present in the DB, even if the columns to store them are. They are populated over time whenever the page is saved. But I’m going to enable an option to have it populate all of this automatically whenever the field is even loaded. It’s actually there in the core right now, but I’ve got it disabled so I can test it out on a few more of my installations before others start using it. There were some other upgrades to the core as well, including improvements to the Selector and Selectors classes, addition of a $database->columnExists() method, lots of new (mostly internal) methods in FIeldtypeFile/FieldtypeImage, and some refactoring of the FieldtypeMulti class, among other minor updates. While there were a lot of changes and additions this week, it’s not stuff that you’ll likely be using right away, so I’m going to hold off on bumping the version till next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

This week we’ve got a few new and interesting core updates in progress, though none quite ready to release just yet. So rather than releasing version 3.0.154 today, I thought we'd instead take a brief look at what’s coming over the next few weeks… https://processwire.com/blog/posts/processwire-updates-and-additions-in-progress/

If one's goal is to get an up or down from an API call, then zero vs. non-zero is functionally and effectively the same thing as boolean. If there's an opportunity to make a method more useful by taking advantage of that fact, then I'll always do it. So yes, you'll find many examples of this in PW. That's always the strategy I've tried to embrace in the PW API and plan to continue going forward. To reiterate what I stated above, the primary purpose of the has() method is not to get an ID—it is instead to check if the system has a page matching the criteria or not, without actually loading the page. Whether the method returns 0 or false makes no difference in telling the caller that the system has no page matching the criteria. Likewise if the page does match the criteria (true vs 1+). Now if you are specifically looking for a getID() function, then yes of course the name "getID" is preferable. I'm happy to add getID() as an alias for times when one might be specifically looking for that particular need. But that's not what I was looking for here. And if anyone else's experience is similar to mine, we will more often be looking to see if the system has any page matching some criteria (whether we want the ID or not). Basically replacing instances where we might have used count() before, with a more efficient alternative. So I feel pretty strongly that the has method name and return value are optimal and consistent here.

I hope everyone here is doing well, staying in, and staying healthy. Our town here is under a “stay at home” order, and it’s now the law that you can’t get within 6 feet of any other person when out walking. So haven’t left the house (other than for walks and bike rides) in about 2 weeks now. Though with the whole family home all the time, it admittedly feels a lot busier than before this Coronavirus stuff, I think because there’s now a lot more people to attend to during the day (especially kids). Not much silence compared to before. ? Not a bad thing, just very different. If we’ve got to spend a few months, or even a year this way, it’ll be alright, so long as the internet keeps working. I’m just thankful to have a job where I’m already used to working this way, as I know many of you do too. It seems that this whole situation is going to move a lot of activity online that previously wasn’t, so I anticipate it’s going to be potentially a very busy and important year for web development. Online communication and content delivery is going to be that much more important for the world, making reliability, scalability and security every bit as important. These are always our focus, but just want to emphasize this even more as we look forward. With a world in temporary disarray, you can count on ProcessWire to be an especially stable and reliable tool that gets even better every week, and our community always a friendly and helpful place. I’ve got several things in progress in the core, but nothing far enough along to write about just yet. I’ve also been putting a lot of work into ProCache this week, which is long due for a version update. The module still has quite a bit of PW 2.x architecture that I don’t think is needed anymore, so I’m refactoring and improving quite a bit, in addition to feature updates. Thanks for reading and I hope that you have a good and safe weekend!

@Robin S The purpose I was focused on for the method is to see if the system has any page that matches the given criteria. An example of the use case appears in the Template class updates here. It verbally makes sense in code for what it's intended for. Usually I'd use a get or count for that, I didn't need any of the extras that $pages->get() or $pages->count() provide, so thought we could eliminate some overhead. Plus I can think several other other cases where the same was true, so the need has resurfaced enough times that it seemed like good method for PW to have. The method returns the ID just because it already has that info either way, and it seemed potentially more useful (and 0|1+ communicate the same thing as false|true). I had also seen where you'd mentioned a getID recently, and since this method already has the page ID, I thought this also seemed like a good opportunity to accommodate that need too. So far I haven't come across a good use case for getID() in my own projects, outside of checking for existence of something (which 'has' seems like a better term for). But it certainly makes sense alongside the existing findIDs() method, though that method is more about accommodating a scale that find() can't. But it sounds like you've had use cases for it which means others likely have too, and that's plenty good reason for me. I'll go ahead and add getID() it as an alias of has(). Depending on what need you are looking to solve, I imagine this will help people to find what they are looking for more easily.

This latest version of the core on the dev branch focuses on comments field updates, significant refactoring/improvements to ProcessWire’s core Template class and PagesLoader class (which is used by the $pages API variable), and we introduce a useful new $pages API method— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.153/

@adrian There are two options when you initialize your CommentForm that let you define what you want to be populated, and whether or not you want it to be editable. These are the 'presets' (array) and 'presetsEditable' (bool) options. I'm initializing with the new CommentFormCustom class below, but the presets options also work with older versions of PW: $options = [ 'className' => 'CommentFormCustom' ]; if($user->isLoggedin()) { $options['presetsEditable'] = false; $options['presets'] = [ 'cite' => "$user->first_name $user->last_name", 'email' => $user->email, ]; } $form = $page->comments->getCommentForm($options); As for using a local image for avatar, or deciding whether or not to show cite and email, this is where the CommentFormCustom class comes in handy. It leaves you in full control of the markup, so you can render whatever avatar image in there you want (whether CommentFormCustom or CommentListCustom), and exclude fields in your markup when conditions dictate. In previous versions, if you didn't want to show specific fields in the form then you would hide them with CSS. @AndZyk Here's how you might do that with a hook. This looks for markdown style links, i.e. [text](url) and converts them to HTML links. The regex may need improvement still, but maybe it's a starting point. $wire->addHookBefore('CommentList::renderItem', function($event) { $comment = $event->arguments(0); /** @var Comment $comment */ $text = $comment->getFormatted('text'); $textOriginal = $text; // look for markdown style links: [text](url) if(strpos($text, '](') { $regex = '!\[(.+?)\]\((https?://[^)\s\r\n;"\']+)\)!i'; $link = '<a href="$2" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">$1</a>'; $text = preg_replace($regex, $link, $text); } // populate changed comment text if($text !== $textOriginal) { $comment->set('textFormatted', $text); } });

For logged in users, name and email are already filled in automatically and have been for awhile. There is also an option where you can make them non-editable, so that a logged in user can't modify them for each comment they make. But if you want to pull them from something other than "name" and "email" (which I think might be what you were looking for), then the new classes would definitely make it a lot easier to customize, and populate whatever you'd like in there. Likewise to render a custom avatar or hide fields, etc. The custom classes should open up a lot of new possibilities.

I hope you are having a good week and staying healthy with all that’s going on with this Coronavirus pandemic. Here in Atlanta, they have closed the schools indefinitely, so I’ve got my kids with me during the work days for awhile, which started this week. That might slow me down with work and development here, but hopefully not too much. It might also take me a little longer than usual to respond to messages temporarily, as I get used to the new schedule. It’s a nice change of pace to have the kids home during the day, even if it slows work a bit. Thankfully everyone here is healthy and we don’t yet know of anyone being sick. But then again, nobody is apparently able to get tested for it, so who knows. It sounds like the whole world is dealing with this, I hope you and your families stay healthy and safe. I’m still working on the same client project I’ve been working on here for months, and of course doing it all in ProcessWire. This week the client project needed to do a lot with user-submitted comments, and I had to make a lot of major upgrades to ProcessWire’s comments system in order to accommodate them. Most of these upgrades are related to API improvements and making the comments field able to better handle completely custom markup for both comments and the forms to submit them. (Commit details). A couple new classes were added, and existing classes went through major refactoring. While there have been some nice API additions as well, there aren’t any breaking changes to the existing API, so it should all keep working as it always has. I’m not going to bump the core version this week because, as major as the additions were, I don’t think they will matter much to most existing installations, so there's little reason to upgrade for most. So I’ll continue plugging away here and save the version update for when there are some more things to share as well, hopefully next week. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

@Zeka Thanks, I think I tracked down the issue (caching issue that occurs only when multiple date fields) and have pushed a fix on the dev branch. @szabesz From your /site/init.php you can set the location with $config->setLocation('classes', 'path/to/classes/'); for example $config->setLocation('classes', 'site/templates/classes/'); You can also use the method mentioned earlier by adding your own directories to the $classLoader. However, the more potential locations there are for something, the more overhead, so I would recommend sticking to the $config->setLocation() and keep all of your classes in one directory. This keeps everything fast and efficient. If that's the case, then you would have to add locations with the $classLoader and accept the overhead of doing so (though it's probably negligible so long as things don't grow too much). But I also think with that kind of structure, things look isolated when it comes to reusability, limiting their usefulness. That may be fine for your use case, but as far as classes go, one of the primary purposes is reuse and extending one another where appropriate, so you ideally want to keep them together. @bernhard ProcessWire preloads a few pages on every request, since they always get used. Preloaded pages are loaded as a group rather than individually, enabling it to boot faster. This happens before the init state for modules, so a module will not have the opportunity to specify a class for these preloaded pages, but a file in /site/classes/ will. See the $config->preloadPageIDs setting for a list of what those pages are. But essentially they are the homepage, admin root page, guest user+role, and superuser role. For your case, it sounds like only the homepage is a consideration here. I would suggest just asking PW to uncache the homepage at your module's init() state. This should force it to reload (when it's next requested) using your custom class. $homePage = $this->pages->cacher()->getCache(1); if($homePage) $this->pages->uncache($homePage); You can also use $config->setLocation() for this, i.e. $config->setLocation('fieldTemplates', 'site/templates/my-custom-directory/'); I think this is fine if you are just doing it once or twice, but if you find you are repeating yourself, typing out "/articles/fields" or similar in multiple places, then you always want to abstract away stuff like that into a single location so that if you ever need to change it, you change it in just one place. PHP functions are ideal for this. This will be simple to do, but when it comes to the directory and file names that you are using, I recommend using the exact same names that you do with your templates and fields, which will make it a simple matter to abstract away repetitive code or locations into functions. "All these directories" are 3 directories, 2 of which are for optional features that are disabled by default — the absolute minimum number of directories necessary to support these things. ProcessWire is focused in what is the most simple, efficient, familiar (as it relates to the admin), and maximizes reusability. It's not opinionated about it outside of those factors. For something like field-templates, a primary purpose of having them is so that you can reuse them across different templates (to avoid repeating yourself); otherwise they aren't that useful. For the structure that you appear to be using, it looks to me like your intention is to isolate them by template, so why have them at all? If the purpose is code/markup isolation (which is still worthwhile) then I think just using an include() or $files->render(); would be preferable, more efficient and flexible for your use case. So that's what I'd recommend there. The same goes for the new page classes—if you are isolating these things in the way you've suggested, it'll be confusing for classes to extend one another or be shared across multiple templates, and it'll take more overhead for PW to find them. If you don't intend to use them like that, maybe they can still be useful, but not nearly as much so. So at that point I would reconsider whether you want/need custom Page classes. Basically, you are using a highly opinionated structure for your site files, and that can be a good thing because you've decided where everything goes and have a plan/system for how it will grow in terms of your file structure. ProcessWire is built to support a lot of different types of websites and applications, and at any scale. But it's not opinionated about this stuff beyond the bare minimum, precisely so that you can be as opinionated as much as you want with your own projects. That's why you are able to build a more complex structure for your files that suits your need, and also why it's also just as suited for others that might prefer a simpler structure in their projects. There's also no need to feel obligated to use things like field templates or custom page classes just because they are there. The point of these features is to reduce redundancy and prevent you from having to repeat yourself. But you may have your own preferred ways of doing that—whether it's with functions, file/directory structure, or anything else, it's all perfectly fine in PW. A template file receiving a $page is the only assumption needed in ProcessWire and everything else is optional. So use these things when they help you do that, and avoid using them when they don't. The reason these features are disabled by default is because not everyone needs them. Personally, the only time I use field templates is for multi-value fields with lots of properties, like repeaters, where I need to reuse the same output/markup across multiple template files. Though custom Page classes I'm already using quite a bit and likely will in most cases.

This week we have some major improvements to our core date/time Inputfield, as well as a new ability to specify your own custom classes for Page objects. Read on for all the details and examples— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.152/

@bernhard While that need hasn't often come up here, it sounds like it might be a common need elsewhere (?) per what you said, so I think it sounds worthwhile. Though I'm thinking maybe off the $files API variable as more obvious $files->diskPathToUrl() and $files->urlToDiskPath() type functions, but it would also be simple enough to have the $config methods respond to them too, so long as there's a at least one slash present in the value. Back to date/time API methods, were there any in particular that you thought were commonly needed but missing from PHP's built in set of tools? The two I found over time were the ability to produce relative date/time strings like "1 hour ago", and a common function that could accept different types of format strings (like those from date and strftime) so that's why PW's $datetime has those.

The focus of the InputfieldDatetime updates that this topic is about is purely about the Inputfield element and wouldn't affect anything about front-end API of date fields. Basically just the means by which users input dates into the system. When it comes to working with dates and times at the API side on the front-end, that's a different topic, but I guess I've always seen this as something that PHP does really well already, particularly the DateTime class can be very helpful. PW's always trying to work alongside PHP and with what PHP provides, as much as possible. Maybe some people encounter areas of working with dates and times that PHP doesn't cover well, but admittedly I haven't yet in projects here. Though there are a few specific cases that are covered in WireDateTime ($datetime API var) mostly for date/time functions that were needed by the core, but can also occasionally be useful on the front-end. But I see PHP's date/time classes and functions as being the tools a PW powered site would typically use when working with dates/times. Not only is there tons of documentation and examples out there, but these are tools that many PHP developers are already going to know before they know PW. I like it when people can take stuff they already know when keep using it in PW. I'm definitely open to expanding what PW's $datetime provides if there's a really common need that PHP doesn't cover well. Though I'm glad to see there are also quality modules like the ones mentioned above, as that seems like a great way to accommodate these needs too.

I’ve been working on some major upgrades to our InputfieldDatetime core module and they are just about ready, but because there’s a lot of new code involved, I just want to test things out more thoroughly before pushing to the dev branch. I’ll have more details on this for you next week, but here’s a summary of what’s new in our Date/Time Inputfield coming in 3.0.152: If you’ve used date inputs in ProcessWire before (whether in the admin, FormBuilder or elsewhere), you know that they consist of a text field with a configurable date format and optional jQuery UI powered date picker. On recent projects, I’ve wanted more options here. First off, I’ve wanted support for the HTML5 “date” and “time” input types, because on some browsers (mobile-based in particular) the browser implementation is quite good. On mobile clients (testing in Android Chrome at least), I find it’s actually pretty amazing, certainly preferable to the jQuery UI date picker. On desktop clients, I think the jQuery UI date picker might still be preferable, but the browser implementation is still quite good (though varies widely from browser to browser). So I’ve upgraded InputfieldDatetime to support both HTML5 “date” and “time” inputs as configurable options, as well as the ability to use them both together. Another thing I’ve often wished for when it comes to date inputs is the ability to have the Month, Day and Year isolated into separate selects. This is something that would work in any environment, and not require any particular feature support from the browser, nor would it require jQuery UI (like if you are wanting lightweight date fields in FormBuilder). This type of date selection seems to be the simplest, easiest and most portable way to go, and it’s something I’ve wanted for quite a long time. So support for this has also been added to InputfieldDatetime this week as well! Of course the order of month, day and year is completely configurable. Some other useful additions include support for HTML5 step values (date or time), minimum and maximum dates (and times), support for seconds in time selections, automatic localized month names in selects (via strftime), and the ability to ask for just month and year (when day is not applicable), or month and day (when year is not applicable). These updates—along with others—will appear in ProcessWire 3.0.152 on the dev branch within the next week.

This week we’ve got a couple of really useful API-side improvements to the core in 3.0.151, among other updates. First we’ll take a look at a new $config setting that lets you predefine image resize settings, enabling you to isolate them from code that outputs them, not unlike how you isolate CSS from HTML. Following that, we’ll introduce and show you how to use a handy addition to our static language translation functions. If you’ve ever come across the term “abandoned translation”, you’ll really like what this adds— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.151/

@adrian @porl Since this post is in the ProFields board and you guys are discussing a Matrix Fieldtype (that's not related to ProFields), I'm a little worried people might get confused and think this had something to do with FieldtypeRepeaterMatrix (which I at first thought) but it appears you are discussing something different. And actually looks like maybe it would be useful for users outside of this board. Do you mind if I move the topic to one of the public boards, since it's not specific to ProFields, and may be useful others that might be using that Fieldtype?

Last Saturday we started getting hit with heavy traffic at the processwire.com support forums, and it soon became a full blown DDOS frenzy. This post describes all the fun, how we got it back under control, and what we learned along the way— https://processwire.com/blog/posts/driving-around-a-ddos-attack/

We’ve got several updates on the dev branch this week, but I want to finish one more of them before bumping the version to 3.0.150, so will likely do that next week. The biggest change this week is the addition of a new core class called FieldsTableTools. This will be used internally by the $fields API variable for manipulating field table schema in the database, and its methods are accessed from $fields->tableTools(); Though this is one you probably won't be using from the API unless developing Fieldtype modules, so if you just want to know what the benefits are, feel free to skip to the last two paragraphs. Initially these methods are primarily focused on managing unique indexes for fields, though will expand to manage other schema manipulations as well. An example of its utility is also included in this week’s commits—our email fields (FieldtypeEmail) now have the ability to enforce uniqueness at the DB level. If you edit an email field (Setup > Fields > email) and click on the Advanced tab, there’s now a checkbox there to enforce unique values, ensuring that a given email address cannot appear more than once (i.e. not appear on more than one page). The same ability will be added to text and integer fields (FieldtypeText and FieldtypeInteger) as well, but we’re starting with the email field because it’s needed for an update hopefully wrapping up next week: the optional ability to login to the admin with your email address. Having a unique index on a DB column is actually a pretty simple thing, but as it turns out, it takes a lot of code to support the ability in an existing installation. That’s because we have it as something you can toggle on and off (on that Advanced tab), and when you toggle ON a unique index, there can’t be any duplicate values in the existing data, or the index will fail to apply. So there’s a lot of supporting code in FieldsTableTools to do things like detect and warn about duplicate values, delete empty values before adding the index, identify when the index is present without querying the table, reporting error conditions in a manner that understandable and recoverable, as well as the actual schema manipulations that add or remove the index. I realize this sounds a bit technical (and that's partly why I'm not putting this in a more formal blog post), but I think most developers will at some point find it very useful in building sites and applications. Not only will it enable us to safely support login-by-email in the admin (coming next), but it’ll be useful in any situation where you need to prevent a value from repeating. Whether that is in preventing double bookings for a date, location, seat, etc., or preventing any kind of redundancy like post titles, author names, product titles, phone numbers, or codes (UPC, ISBN, ASINs, EIN, SSN, etc.), this feature can come in handy. And supporting it at the DB level is a lot more solid than supporting it at the code level. Right now it’s just supported in email fields, but all of the logic has been delegated to the newly added class so that we can easily support it in any other fields (with text and integer fields coming next). Following that, the $fields->tableTools(); will also be gaining methods for modifying other types of field schema. For instance, rather than just supporting the INT column type for integer fields, wouldn't it be nice to go to Setup > Fields > [some integer field] and select both unsigned and signed integers of different types: TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INT, BIGINT, for any new or existing integer field? MySQL also offers a similar array of size variations for other types that would be useful in our text and textarea fields, among others. So you'll be continuing to see ProcessWire offer more options for existing FIeldtypes in future core versions, enabling you to more efficiently store and manage content in PW. But of course we'll do it in a way that keeps it simple, ensuring that you don't have to think about these things unless/until you want or need them.