Introduction

Craft Down Cold
If you're a regular reader of CLL, you'll know I like puns and word play. Craft Down Cold sounded good to me on the bitter cold January day that I'm writing this to you. If my Northern-hemisphere-centric POV doesn't work for you, please enjoy this newsletter as you relax under your beach umbrella. :)
It's been a surprisingly active month in the Craft community. We've got 50 links this month to check out: podcast episodes, great plugin updates, and loads more.
Let's get to it. I've got snow angels to make.
-John
Top Stories
The State of Craft: End-of-2015 Edition
As the year-end CLL went out last month, Pixel and Tonic posted their 2015 State of Craft post which revealed that "20,000 licenses that have been deployed on public domains." Impressive. It also sounds like 2016 is going to be a great year for Craft CMS.
News
Keeping Up With Craft
Last month introduced an addition to Craft Podcast: shorter conversations with Michael Rog and Andrew Welch talking about Keeping Up With Craft. Be good to you ears and give it a spin on your Podcart device.
Intermediate Twig: Logic, Macros & More
Andrew Welch joins the Lea Alcantara and Emily Lewis and talk about Twig and Craft. More for your Podcart!
Craft Services
Pixel & Tonic introduces "technical consulting, custom development, and CMS implementation assistance."
Tools, tips, and fundamentals
Craft CMS Introduction
Introduction #1: Jérôme Coupé has written an extensive introduction to Craft CMS in English and French.
That makes me want to buy a hamburger.
Introduction to Craft CMS on Sitepoint
Introduction #2: Ryan Irelan (sans "d") has written an intro to Craft CMS on Sitepoint. You probably know this, but your friends may not yet.
Craft Twig Snippets for PHPStorm
Do you use PHPStorm for working with Craft? Check out these Craft Snippets. There is a comment at the end of the page on how to install them or check out the documentation on the JetBrains site.
You can also just "Copy The Code > PHPStorm settings > live templates > add a new group > right click > paste".
Craft Twig Snippets for Atom
Do you use Atom instead of PHPStorm? This is the Atom package that inspired the PHPStorm snippets above.
A Craft CMS user manual for clients
Rye Agency tweeted a link to a handy PDF they use to help clients get familiar with using their new Craft CMS site.
Get structure top ancestor
In Slack someone was trying to find the top ancestor of any given entry. This was posted as the go-to link. Handy.
Filters in Twig and Craft
Mijingo wants to teach you more Craft fundamentals. Today's topic: Twig filters.
Slack keyboard shortcuts
Did you know you can press the up arrow to edit that typo you just made in Slack? (Hat tip, Lindsey!)
Perfecting your technique

Manipulating Craft's ElementCriteriaModel objects with Twig
This post was mentioned as a must-read in Slack last month. It's a "simple but powerful technique" that will serve you well, young Jedi.
yo craftplugin
If you use Yeoman you'll be happy to hear you can now use yo craftplugin
from your command line to scaffold a new Craft CMS plugin tailored to your liking.
Automated Build To Order Craft CMS plugins
If you like the yo craftplugin above but aren't a Yeoman convert (yet) then you should check out pluginfactory.io. It generates a Craft CMS plugin scaffolding for you by automatically generating the bits you need to get you started. Sweet!
Add lazy cache rebuilding to the cache tag
There's an interesting feature request for a lazy cache to "immediately return the cached version, but off in a task on the backend, it’d be rebuilding the data in the cache tag pair if it was invalidated due to an Element contained within it that changed."
Check it out and vote if you would find it useful.
High Performance Craft Caching with Fastly
One Design Company has built a plugin for using using Fastly, "a service built on top of Varnish".
Nginx FastCGI caching NO PROXY
This one is deep in the weeds, but if you're dealing with caching issues on an Nginx server not actually serving your cached files on Craft CMS you might need to reorder things in your vhost file.
Dedicated “Structured” Menu Section
From Craft Cookbook: There are many ways to build dynamic navigation using craft, but often you want to combine entries across sections into one universal menu. Using this method makes a dedicated menu section that behaves like Nav-ee or Taxonomy in ExpressionEngine (but built in of course)!
Programmatically update entry field
This link was mentioned in Slack last month and is worth checking out. The conversation started with a bug report here about a saveEntry
call not working. It's a fairly specific topic, but you might find it helpful.
RetconHTML
Ever have a client put 4 MB PNG files in their Redactor fields, failing to apply any of your meticulously crafted image transforms? Writers consistently using the <strong> tag for headers? Have you ever needed to implement lazy loading of images embedded in WYSIWYG content, or wanted to remove pesky inline styles without breaking a sweat? This is for you.
Retcon HTML is a small Craft CMS plugin offering a series of easy-to-use Twig filters for manipulating HTML content.
Get draft content in front end form
If you find yourself needing draft content on the front end of your site, this is the link for you.
Plugged In
Updated: Reasons
If you haven't checked out Reasons yet, you've got yet another reason to. (See what I did there?) It lets you add conditionals to your field layouts to give your users a better control panel user experience.
The plugin has seen a significant update since it was mentioned here in Issue #6.
It now supports Assets sources, Category groups, Tag groups, Global sets, User, and all native element types.
Updated: Mailchimp Subscribe
Mailchimp Subscribe has received a major update. It now uses MailChimp API 3.0 with its refactored code base. It's also got some new features and bug fixes.
Updated: Sprout Reports
Sprout Reports, which got a load of updates last month, makes it easy to create custom reports to view in the browser using the spreadsheet-style report interface or export as CSV to use as you wish.
SEOmatic
A turnkey SEO implementation for Craft CMS that is comprehensive, powerful, and flexible. (You want people to find your site, right?)
Pending User
Pending User is a simple user moderation plugin for Craft. It will set users to pending when they sign up, unless their domain is on the approved domains list.
Placid
Placid makes it easy to use REST services in Craft, whether that's getting a Twitter feed, showing off Dribbble shots or getting the weather.
Focal Point Field
Choose the focal point of an image. Click on the point where you want the focal point to be. Click again, or drag the circle, to move it.
Tip: Use it with Imager and its position transform parameter.
Craft Relabel
Override field labels and instructions. This lets you reuse a field without having to create another (essentially identical) field simply for labeling purposes.
QQ: A null coalescing Twig operator for CraftCMS
Until Twig support null coalescing natively, this plugin lets you replace expressions like...
{{ thing1 is defined and thing1 is not null ? thing1 : thing2 }}
...with something nicer, like...
{{ thing1 ?? thing 2 }}
You know, a null coalescing operator. (I didn't know what that was either.)
Craft Currency
Convert currencies in Craft CMS. It's free so it doesn't even cost a penny, peso, or what-have-you.
RedactorClips
Adds Redactor’s “Clips” plugin to Rich Text fields in Craft letting you insert predefined code snippets.
CacheFlag-Craft: Flag and clear template caches
The native {% cache %}
tag is great, but in some cases the element queries Craft creates to clear the caches can become too complex, which can bog down your system. Cache Flag provides an alternative (and in most cases, more performant) way to have your caches clear automatically when your content changes.
Search Plus
Search Plus is Algolia search for Craft. Brilliantly simple, amazingly powerful, crazily fast search.
Overheard
0.1%
Craft has broken into W3Techs’ CMS usage table w/ 0.1% market share which "puts #craftcms ahead of Ghost, Sitecore, MODx, LightCMS, October, Bolt, ProcessWire, Jekyll, tons more."
It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.
Bootstrap-drawer
Do you like the off-canvas menu in the mobile view of the Craft control panel? Check out this project.