Weekly update – 9 July 2021

[ryan]

While the version remains at 3.0.181 this week, there have been several core updates committed to the dev branch containing a mixture of issue fixes, new features, core optimizations and upgrades. This is likely to continue for another minor version or two while we prepare for our next master branch release. The most visible improvements this week can be found in ProcessField and ProcessTemplate (aka Setup > Fields, Setup > Templates). 

The main list of fields (Setup > Fields) has been improved with some new supported icon indicators that now identify fields that have template overrides/context settings, among others. All of the existing icon indicators have also been updated with contextual links so that clicking them takes you to the relevant part in the template editor. My favorite update here though is that the "Type" column in the fields list now indicates the Inputfield type in cases where it matters. For instance, rather than saying "Textarea" for the "body" field, it now says "Textarea/CKEditor". Likewise, Page and Options fields indicate what kind of input is used (i.e. "Page/AsmSelect" or "Options/Checkboxes"), as do some other types. Clicking on the "Templates" quantity now takes you to the "Add/remove from templates" field, rather than just showing you a list of templates. 

Similar updates were made to the ProcessTemplate main list of templates (Setup > Templates) though there wasn't as much to do there. Once you are actually editing a template, the instructions on the "Basics" tab have been improved to clarify what you can do on this screen. For instance, many don't know that you can click a field name/label to edit it in context, or that you can click and drag the percent indicator to adjust the field's width in the editor, all from this tab in the template editor. Now the description outlines these features. When you select a new field to add to your template, it now reveals a note that clarifies you must save before the field becomes editable in the context of that template. These are minor updates, but combined I think they add significant clarity, especially for new users. 

Stepping outside of the core, I've been working quite a bit this week on the PagesSnapshots module I told you about a couple of weeks ago. It lets you save or restore snapshot versions of pages, and it doesn't have any notable limitations in terms of fields. At this stage it is working fully with repeaters, matrix repeaters, nested repeaters, Page Tables and even paginated Table fields with thousands of rows. It can restore to the original page, to a new page, or to another page of your choice. And it is very fast. Eventually ProDrafts will use its API to handle saving and publishing of draft versions. Initially I plan to release it in one or more of the existing module sets (like ProDevTools or ProDrafts or both), and longer term it may be added to the core. I've got another week or two of work to cover with it, but at this stage the API is fully functional and working well, so I'm now beginning to focus more on the Process module (user interface) side of it. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

[Pete]

I'm very much looking forward to the Snapshots module ?