#php cms

Elefant 2.2.5 has been released with a number of improvements and one bug fix.

Click here to download or update.

New environment variables

You can now set your site name, domain name, transactional email address, a default password for automating new installs (used by the ./elefant install command), and your job queue's Beanstalkd connection info from environment variables. In all, these are the new variables introduced in 2.2.5:

ELEFANT_SITE_NAME

ELEFANT_DOMAIN

ELEFANT_EMAIL_FROM

ELEFANT_DEFAULT_PASS

JOBQUEUE_BACKEND

JOBQUEUE_HOST

JOBQUEUE_PORT

This release also introduces Envconf, which makes it easy to integrate custom environment variables into your custom Elefant apps. Envconf is a wrapper around Appconf that first checks for a matching environment variable based on the app, section, and setting names, for example:

Envconf::myapp ('S3', 'access_token');

Will map to the following environment variable:

MYAPP_S3_ACCESS_TOKEN

Click here for more information on using environment variables with Elefant.

Other improvements

Added Model::prefetch_field($id_list, $fieldname) to reduce database calls on repeat uses of Model::field()

Added exception handling to Redis cache connection failures

Added example setup of custom styles for blocks, introduced in 2.2.3, in the default theme under layouts/minimal/blocks.css

Bug fix

Fixed forms not submitting when skip_if_empty is specified but the field isn't found in the HTML of the form

Elefant 2.2.4 has been released with a number of bug fixes and improvements.

Click here to download or update.

Introducing JobQueue

This update adds a new JobQueue class which is powered by Pheanstalk/Beanstalkd. This makes it very easy to setup background workers and send tasks to them for processing.

Setup

To set it up, install Beanstalkd via your package manager of choice (apt/yum/brew/port), for example:

$ apt install beanstalkd

Next, after upgrading Elefant to 2.2.4, run Composer update from the root directory of your website to install the Pheanstalk library:

$ cd /path/to/www && composer update

Lastly, edit the [JobQueue] settings in your conf/config.php file to point to your Beanstalkd server:

[JobQueue] backend = beanstalkd host = 127.0.0.1 port = 11300

Usage

Sending a job to be done by a background worker is as easy as:

JobQueue::enqueue ('tube-name', ['data' => '...']);

Writing a worker in Elefant looks like this:

<?php // apps/myapp/handlers/worker.php if (! $this->cli) exit; $page->layout = false; $worker = JobQueue::worker (); $worker->watch ('tube-name'); while ($job = $worker->reserve ()) { $data = json_decode ($job->getData ()); // Process job with $data $worker->delete ($job); }

The above worker can be run via php index.php myapp/worker and can be initialized using your system scheduler, such as systemd.

Note that workers can be written in any language that connects to Beanstalkd and listens for jobs to process.

Other improvements

Added User::require_verification() which extends User::require_login() to require email verification too

Added Auto-include Composer autoloader to Site Settings form so you no longer need to include it manually in a bootstrap.php file

Elefant 2.2.3 has been released with a number of bug fixes and improvements.

Click here to download or update.

Simpler request data validation for REST endpoints

The Restful class has a new get_params() method that makes it easier to parse and validate request data parameters while also improving the conciseness and readability of your code.

Previously, you might write code like this in order to parse and validate request data:

$data = $this->get_put_data (true); if (! isset ($data->id)) { return $this->error ('Missing parameters: id', 400); } if (! isset ($data->name)) { return $this->error ('Missing parameters: name', 400); } // etc.

Now you can write this to do the same thing:

$data = $this->get_params (['id', 'name']); if (! $data) return; // Validation failed

If $data is false, Restful will automatically send an appropriate error response, so you can simply return without having to write any additional error handling logic.

When you pass it an ordinary array, get_params() considers all fields specified to be required, and omits all others. Note that you can still get the full, unvalidated list like this:

$data = $this->get_params ();

However, you can do much more with get_params(), including using booleans to specify required versus optional fields:

$data = $this->get_params ([ 'id' => true, // required 'name' => false // optional ]);

And you can take it one step further by specifying an array of input validations that will be sent to the Validator class like this:

$data = $this->get_params ([ 'id' => true, 'name' => false, 'email' => [ 'email' => true ], 'age' => [ 'skip_if_empty' => true, 'type' => 'numeric', 'range' => '1-150' ] ]);

This also makes it easier to see the expected parameters and their validation rules all in one place at the top of your endpoint methods, using the same validation rules that forms and models also use.

Custom CSS class selector for content blocks

The blocks editor now provides a way to select and set custom CSS classes on individual blocks via a dropdown menu.

The editor looks for a layouts/your-theme/blocks.css file in your layouts and reads that for custom CSS classes. If not found, it reads all layouts/your-theme/*.css files and parses them for custom CSS classes.

It looks for any CSS class of the form .block-outer.custom-class-name, for example:

.block-outer.dark-background { background-color: #222; color: #eee; }

It then turns all unique classes found into selectable options in a dropdown list (the above would appear as "Dark Background") so you can offer your site editors more customization options without sacrificing control over the look and feel of your sites.

This is especially powerful coupled with other recent improvements to the blocks/group helper.

Other bug fixes and improvements

All Elefant-related cookies are now marked with SameSite=Lax

Changed $cache->delete() to use unlink() for asynchronous deletions on newer versions of phpredis

Improved the display and usability of tables in the wysiwyg editor

Fixed a MySQL error at a text field with default value

Fixed custom site styles affecting the Elefant toolbar heading colours and embedded button styles

After several failed attempts at upgrading Vanilla Forums, we now have a new home for the Elefant CMS community forum - GitHub Discussions!

Click here to visit the new Elefant CMS community forum.

Elefant has been receiving some nice updates recently, including turning the blocks/group helper into a Swiss army knife for page layouts, a new Wires app for simplifying SPAs, PHP 7.4 opcache.preload support, Open Graph and SEO improvements, and a much improved page/blog post editing experience.

However, without a working forum community activity has suffered. Hopefully this is the first step in turning that around.