Introduction
Craft CMS 3.4 Beta 5, top links from 2019 and more
2019 is a wrap, and we’ve got a look-back post from the Craft team. We’ll also review the most popular links from the year from this newsletter.
There are quite a few new plugins for Craft since the last issue plus other interesting Craft specific links and webdev tips as well.
Thank you to Solspace for sponsoring this issue.
Solspace is growing and is hiring a full-time developer. Are you the one? Start the new decade with a new job!
Let’s hit the links.
-John Morton
Craft Link List
Top Stories
2019 Year in Review | Craft CMS
Brandon gives an overview of a momentous year for Craft CMS. If you've been reading the newsletter for a while, you know the story: GraphQL, many new releases of Craft and Commerce, plus a growing team at Craft itself. This post also discusses the new release cycle for Craft to help deal with big release headaches. I'll let you read the details in the actual post.
About the release changes, Brandon mentioned this is Discord:
craftcms.comHistorically there hasn’t been any consistency – 2.0 came less than a year after 1.0, and 3.0 came out 4 years later. 4.0 will end up being 2.5 years after that. But from that point on they will be one year apart.
Since the major releases have been so far apart, it has caused us to release a lot of “minor” updates that were really closer to major in scope (3.1, 3.2, etc). So switching to an annual major release cycle will help A) not be tempted to rush major changes into minor releases, knowing the next major release is always less than a year away, and B) keep the major updates smaller in scope as well, which combined with their predictability will make it easier to keep your Craft sites running the latest version (compared to the 2 -> 3 upgrade process).
Top links from CLL 2019
It's time to look back on 2019 in terms of the newsletter. Of the 1078 links featured in Craft Link List in 2019, here are the top 10 most clicked on links:
- New in PHP 7.4
- Craft 3 plugins - Logging in a separate *.log file
- Google Analytics Measurement Protocol library for PHP
- General Config Settings: maxRevisions
- Nested Matrix support coming in Craft 4
- Front-end Developer Handbook 2019
- Milestones for Craft 3.4 and Craft 4.0
- Tags & Categories going away in Craft 4
- ?: operator aka the Elvis operator
- Upcoming Craft 3.4 control panel improvements
The most popular category of links is the Tools, tips, and fundamentals section with 18,026 clicks in 2019. The next most popular categories were It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting (12,231 clicks) and Perfecting your technique (11,925 clicks).
Craft Link List
News
Craft 3.4.0-beta.5
Craft 3.4 beta 5 added nuance to how assets of "other users" were dealt with in the control panel. The GraphQL API got addition query parameters for finding single elements. There are more updates in this release. Check the changelog at the link above for more info.
github.com
Craft Demo now uses v3.4
The Craft demo site now uses version 3.4. That indicates we're probably getting close to an official release.
craftcms.com
Featured Sponsor
Now Hiring: Software Plugin Developer
The Solspace team is expanding! If you’re looking for an exciting full-time position working on Freeform and Calendar plugins for Craft and more, we’d love to hear from you! Check out our job listing for more details.
workwithcraft.com
Tools, tips, and fundamentals
Using the Null Coalescing Operator in Twig |CraftQuest
In this CraftQuest lesson (subscription required), follow along as Ryan walks through how to use the Null Coalescing Operator to simplify some conditionals.
craftquest.io
Filtering/searching for entries by category in the control panel
You can achieve this type of filtering via the search box by using this syntax: myCategoriesField:"some category title"
Perfecting your technique
Using SEOmatic to make automatic unique meta descriptions
Piotr shared a tip for making unique meta descriptions using SEOmatic in Twig templates. Andrew followed up, showing how to do the same from within the control panel.
twitter.com
Tuple pair stream - GraphQL with Craft CMS 3.4.0-beta.4
Watch Andrew Welch and Matt Stein live code using Vue JS with Vuex, Axios, GraphQL, and Craft CMS as a data provider for a faceted search frontend website.
youtube.com
TTFB before / after implementing FastCGI Cache
Andrew shares some stats on using static caching with Craft.
twitter.com
Plugged In
Fulfillments
Fulfillments is a plugin for Craft CMS to let you create "Shopify like" fulfillments for Craft Commerce orders. Fulfillments can be configured to update your order statuses and send notification emails automatically.
craftcms.com
DB Snapshot
Store Craft CMS database backups in an S3 (or compatible) bucket. It also supports loading those backups for local development, etc.
craftcms.com
Worldpay Business Gateway for Craft Commerce
Worldpay Business Gateway integration for Craft Commerce 2
craftcms.com
Static File Manager
Static File Manager lets you keep your static files list in PHP configuration file and output them into a template and cache-bust them.
craftcms.com
Live Preview with Craft CMS and Gridsome
This post by Ben Sheedy is a walk-thru that accompanies this Craft CMS source plugin for Gridsome.
bensheedy.com
Notifications
Send notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including mail and Slack.
craftcms.com
Spreadsheet Translations
This plugin enables non-developers to access static translations via a Google spreadsheet.
craftcms.com
It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.
devMode.fm // Framework Agnostic Web Components with Stencil
The devMode crew is joined by Adam Bradley & Manu Martinez-Almeida to discuss how Stencil, a build tool that allows you to create framework agnostic components that work with all of the major JavaScript frameworks, including no framework at all as Web Components.
devmode.fm
Optimizing images for the web - an in-depth guide
This article aims to cover most of the tools and approaches for optimizing images for the web.
dev.to
PDF Bot 🤖
A Node queue API for generating PDFs using headless Chrome. Comes with a CLI, S3 storage and webhooks for notifying subscribers about generated PDFs
github.com
Easy ways to add design flair, user delight, and whimsy to your product.
A Git repo with loads of handy tools and sparkles to make your digital creation a bit zingier.
github.com
Solved by Flexbox — Cleaner, hack-free CSS
github.ioThis site is not another CSS framework. Instead, its purpose is to showcase problems once hard or impossible to solve with CSS alone, now made trivially easy with Flexbox.
Convert HTML to PDF online, Web/HTML to PDF API
This service was mentioned in Discord as a reliable PDF creation service. It's a paid service.
pdfcrowd.com
html2pdf.js: Client-side HTML-to-PDF rendering using pure JS.
html2pdf.js converts any webpage or element into a printable PDF entirely client-side using html2canvas and jsPDF.
github.com
How TypeScript Makes You a Better JavaScript Developer
sitepoint.comWe know TypeScript will make you a better JavaScript developer for several reasons. You’ll feel confident when writing code. Fewer errors will appear in your production code. It will be easier to refactor code. You’ll write fewer tests (yay!). And overall, you’ll have a better coding experience in your editor.
Low-Cost VPS Testing
Rasmus Lerdorf, he is the father of PHP, has shared tests on a bunch of low-cost VPS offerings.
lerdorf.com