Weekly update – 3 September 2021

[ryan]

Last week we released the new ProcessWire 3.0.184 master/main/stable version. This is our biggest version release in a year. It's been a very smooth stable version launch with no major issues so we're keeping the version number where it is this week. If you haven't upgraded yet, it's an easy and worthwhile upgrade. For full details see the blog post that covers it all. 

This week I have 3 new Textformatter modules released in the modules directory. These are modules that I developed earlier for recurring needs that I had, but this week decided to finish them up and release them. I hope that you might find one or more of them useful sometime. 

TextformatterFindReplace

This module applies find/replace patterns to formatted text or markup at runtime. The patterns may be simple text or more complex regular expressions.

This module can be handy if you perform a text replacement on all output from a particular field, without having to manually make the change on all instances where it might appear. For instance, maybe you need to insert a trademark symbol ™ after every appearance of a brand name, or maybe your website hostname has changed and you need to replace all references to it, or perhaps you need to replace all <h1> headlines with <h2> headlines. These are just a few examples of any number of possibilities.

Read more / Usage / Examples

TextformatterMarkdownInMarkup

Enables you to use Markdown formatting codes in CKEditor (or HTML). 

A significant amount of content that is populated into the “bodycopy” field of websites is not actually written in the admin and instead originates from text editors, word processors, and other tools outside of the CMS. It then gets pasted into CKEditor, and then manually formatted into HTML using tools in CKEditor. This process of manually converting links, lists, headlines, bold, and italic text and more can be sometimes very time consuming. 

This module provides a time saving alternative, enabling use of markdown formatted text in CKEditor (or any HTML/richtext editor). It remains as markdown formatted text in the editor, but as soon as it is rendered on the front-end it is automatically formatted as HTML. This means that text like **this** gets converted to this, links like [this](https://processwire.com) get converted to this, and so on for most types of markdown formatting.

This enables markdown formatted text to be written anywhere and the formatting to be rendered properly in your bodycopy when viewed on your website. Using this module means that you can mix richtext and markdown in the same copy. No longer do you have to manually convert all of the links, lists, bold/italic, and so on in pasted in text. 

This module saves me quite a bit of time when writing blog posts like the one last week. Much of the formatting in that post was markdown based, since I wrote the post in my text editor over a period of a couple weeks. Once I got it into CKEditor, I did some formatting with that too, but when it came to other formatting (especially links and inline `code`) it was a big help to have them just work, and not to have to re-do all of them manually with CKEditor tools. 

So why not just work exclusively in Markdown? Well I don't like working with just markdown most of the time, I much prefer CKEditor. But I also can't deny the convenience of markdown for a lot of cases too. So being able to use Markdown within CKEditor is the best of both worlds, to me at least. 

Read more / Supported markdown / Configuration options

TextformatterEmoji

This module converts more than 800 named shortcode emojis in ProcessWire text or textarea fields to the corresponding UTF-8 emoji character. ?

This can be especially useful if your ProcessWire database uses the utf8 character set rather than utf8mb4, as it enables you to use emojis on an installation that typically would not be able to save them. This is because emojis usually require utf8mb4 (4 bytes characters) to be used by the database in order to store them. Though when you want to specify an emoji by name, this module will be useful regardless of your database charset. 

Read more / Supported emojis reference

[Ivan Gretsky]

I do not know how you do this magic ?, Ryan, but it happens once again. I do need emojis in utf8 db this week. And bang ? - now I have it))

[HMCB]

It’s been a great two weeks in Processwire land. Thanks Ryan and community.

[nbcommunication]

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[Robin S]

Wow, a triple-whammy of modules, thanks @ryan!

I noticed that two of these new modules don't have support threads in the forum and the Support button in the modules directory listing isn't functional. That situation also applies to your Login Register module which I believe used to have an entry in the modules directory but no longer does. (Edit: after doing a quick scan through your modules in the directory it looks like the majority don't have support threads in the Modules/Plugins subforum)

It's inevitable that users of these modules will have questions/issues that they will want to raise here in the forums, so it would be good if every module that's shared with the community has a dedicated thread in the forums. Otherwise people open multiple new topics so it's harder for users to look through the history of discussion about a module.

If the reason some of your modules don't have support threads is that you're not able to spend time responding to support requests (which is totally legitimate IMO) then the opening post could explain the support status of the module, maybe something along the lines of "this module has been shared with the community but the author is generally not available to provide ongoing support". Then people can still post questions or issues with the understanding that they are not guaranteed to get support from the module author but that other members of the PW community may offer advice.

[Mikie]

Hey @Robin S I think there is some confusion with the original non-pro version of the module. LoginRegisterPro has a support forum like the other pro modules, accessible with an active license like usual. It is also has a modules directory listing.

Edit: or is that what you are talking about, support thread and listing for the original module?

[Robin S]

On 9/4/2021 at 2:15 PM, Mikie said:

Edit: or is that what you are talking about, support thread and listing for the original module?

Yes, the original module which is a completely separate thing to LoginRegisterPro. There is no support thread so people create lots of separate forum threads for questions. And also there are quite a lot of GitHub issues and it's not clear what support or future there is for LoginRegister, and people need to know that before they start using it.

[wbmnfktr]

In regards to the TextformatterEmoji ... is there something planned or already existing to allow content authors to input those shortcodes from within CKEditor?

While I know a few of those shortcodes some or most of the clients I work with (probably) don't.