PW 3.0.185 – Core updates & new module

[ryan]

ProcessWire 3.0.185 is the latest version on the dev branch this week. Relative to the current master (3.0.184) this is 9 commits ahead and contains various minor fixes, improvements and additions. Since our current master version is quite stable and no significant issues have surfaced since release, we'll likely be focusing on the dev branch for several versions before merging back to the master/main branch. For details on what's new in 3.0.185 dev see the commit log. ProcessWire Weekly #383 also includes some details on a few new selector features added last week that you'll find in this version, read about it here. 

Today I've posted a new module in the directory called Session Allow. This module enables you to configure whether to allow sessions for each request based on simple configured rules. Currently it requires ProcessWire 3.0.184 or newer. The reason I built this module is that I find the current $config->sessionAllow setting (where you define a custom function) can be a little complicated to work with, especially since it gets called before most of ProcessWire’s API can even be used. This module aims to make control of sessions a lot simpler than that. 

The benefit of being able to control when a session is allowed is that it lets you better focus your resources for sessions to just the requests where they will be needed, helping to reduce server overhead and improve performance. Currently it supports allowing (or disallowing) sessions based on page path matching rules and hostname matching rules. I also plan to add support for sessions allowed/disallowed per page template, which I think would be really useful. But it'll take some changes to the PW core to support that, as ProcessWire starts the session before determining what page has been requested (and thus what template will be used). So I'm going to make the necessary core updates and then save that feature for version 2 of this module. 

I'm releasing the module as "alpha" right now because I rushed a bit to get it out for today and feel it needs more testing before I can call it stable. So if you are interested in using it, make sure to test everything out in a development environment first. And if you do get a chance to test it, please let me know how it works for you. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!
 

[Zeka]

Hi @ryan Thank you for the updates and new module.
I have used $session a lot in custom modules in the admin area, but not so much on the frontend (except areas where logged-in users could interact with site and basic $session redirects); I just checked the 'assets/sessions' folder which contains 115711 files (462.92 Mb) on one of the sites that have 50k visitors per day and I think that I would benefit if I disallow session for the guest visitors on the fronted, but I'm not sure about what I should consider in this case. Will $session->redirect etc work?