Craft Link List (Archive) - Issue 10

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

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.

How do you force Craft to regenerate assets transform?

Craft CMS Stack Exchange to the rescue.

Craft Requirements

Check your server for Craft requirements with a simple upload.

Choosing the Best CMS

Read the article then weigh in on Designer News.

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!

Install Craft CMS on CentOS 7

Centos? Yum!

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.

Craft New Relic

This plugin will name your transactions in New Relic based on the url segments.

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.

Migrating content within Craft

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.

Sprout Encode Email Plugin

Spam and Craft don't really go together that well.

SEOmatic

A turnkey SEO implementation for Craft CMS that is comprehensive, powerful, and flexible. (You want people to find your site, right?)

Cookies

A simple plugin for setting and getting cookies from within Craft CMS templates.

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.