PW 3.0.168 – Core updates

[ryan]

ProcessWire 3.0.168 contains 16 commits relative to 3.0.167 and is focused largely on minor issue fixes and improvements, with 8 reported issues fixed and 8 improvements. This week the larger focus was on the ProcessWire modules site. I finally got some serious work done with that this week, and am building good momentum. 

The front-end of the modules site is being moved into the main ProcessWire site, though the back-end will remain an independent ProcessWire installation. The main ProcessWire site uses multi-instance support to boot the modules site whenever it needs to pull or update data from it. Here's a simplified example:

$site = new ProcessWire("/htdocs/modules.processwire.com/"); 
$items = $site->pages->find("template=module, sort=-created, limit=10"); 
echo $items->each("<li><a href='/module/{name}/'>{title}</a></li>"); 

The nice thing is that I’m finding performance to be excellent here, about the same as if I weren’t booting multiple ProcessWire installations. I’m sure there’s some overhead if measured, but it sure isn’t felt. One thing I did learn is that when it comes to pagination, if you want your separately booted site to be aware of the current site’s pagination, you need to tell it the page number. Otherwise the bit of code above will always return the first 10 modules, regardless of pagination number. It seems obvious now, but it took me a minute to realize why. So if pagination is being supported, you'd add this before the $site->pages->find(...) in the example above:

$site->input->setPageNum($input->pageNum); 

For front-end work like this, it's also a good idea to tell your booted site if you want output formatting enabled, so that page titles and such come out entity encoded, for example: 

$site->pages->setOutputFormatting(true); 

...or if you prefer the shorter alias:

$site->pages->of(true);

One big difference with the new modules directory is on the management side for module authors. This part is powered by LoginRegisterPro so that now you have an account to manage all of your modules within. Further, you have the option of maintaining your module author public profile and protecting your account with PW’s two-factor authentication. That's just for starters. All of this is in the early stages of development, but if the development schedule remains as planned, I’ll be following up with more info over the coming weeks, in addition to the regular core and module updates. Have a great weekend!