Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

Craft CMS events, tips, plugins, and one broken heart 💔.

Hello, Craft friends. Welcome to issue 107 of Craft Link List.

As this issue hits the internet, we're just one day from Dot One in Melbourne. The sessions for the event looks really interesting. If there are links to slides or videos, they'll end up in a future issue.

The big Craft event of the year, Dot All, has been announced for Amsterdam on September 23-25; check the link below for early bird pricing. Plus, there are more posts on making you a better Craft developer, plugins and more.

If you have a link to share, head over to the submit a link page. It helps with putting each issue together.

Thank you to the sponsors of this issue.

Fortrabbit is looking for someone who loves Craft. Read what future-you could be doing, working at fortrabbit.

Freeform is the feature-filled form plugin for Craft CMS that includes ready-to-use templates to quickly get you up and running. Learn about the power of Freeform.

Let's hit the links.

-John Morton

News

Craft 3.4.9 released

There have been 4 releases of Craft since the previous issue. Craft 3.4.8 added the withTransforms argument to asset GraphQL queries. Check the changelog for all the updates.

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Tools, tips, and fundamentals

10 Things To NOT Do In Your Craft CMS Twig Templates ⭐️

Matt Gray, the creator of Servd, knows a few things not to do and is here to tell you about them. Great stuff here. Bookmark this one.

Query for elements that have "non-empty" related element fields

Piotr, frequent tipster, shared this tip about the keywords :notempty: and :empty.

Cleaning up a cluttered fields list

Piotr shared another Craft tip that can help you make a cleaner control panel for your users with a well-placed Matrix field in your settings area.

Running out of disk space?

Andrea shared a tip on Discord recently about a server that had suddenly run out of disk space. She suggested logging in via your terminal and “running ./craft clear-caches/all.“ In her case, that freed up 13 GB.

A list of free Craft plugins

This list all of the free Craft plugins is updated every 3 hours. As of the moment I write this, there are 516 free plugins for Craft.

How to list entries by category, including uncategorized entries

Where there's a will, there's a Stack Exchange post.

Perfecting your technique

Flat Multi-Environment Config for Craft CMS 3 ⭐️

Andrew has a post that dives into the Craft configuration as it comes “out of the box” and then goes deeper to show how you can make your settings exist solely in a single easily-maintained file.

Saving Matrix Fields in Entry Forms

As of Craft 3.4, it is now possible to save partial Matrix data as part of the new delta save feature. The Craft documentation has been updated to add, well, documentation on how to do it. In discussing it on Discord, Brandon shared this example.

How to find all entries that use a particular matrix block type

James Smith shared a handy SQL query when you're refactoring matrix blocks and need to find all those entries using a particular block type:

SELECT DISTINCT title, craft_content.elementId, enabled
FROM craft_content
INNER JOIN craft_matrixblocks 
ON ownerId = craft_content.elementId
INNER JOIN craft_elements 
ON craft_content.elementId = craft_elements.id
WHERE typeId = ‘123' 
AND title IS NOT NULL 
AND revisionId is null 
AND draftId is null

Using MySQL 8 with Craft CMS 3

Matt Gray is here to make your life a bit easier if you're eyeing MySQL 8. He says it offers "performance improvements along with a with a few new pieces of additional functionality," but there's a potential issue that appears to be an "access denied" error. Matt's post will help you get this fixed.

Debugging database size, searchindex and revisions table bloat in Craft CMS 3

Nils Norman Haukås has written a case study on debugging database bloat issues in Craft CMS 3. Beyond the general approach, it also contains some database debugging tips and tricks.

nystudio107/devmode: Website for the devMode.fm podcast

This new release of the source code for the devMode.fm site is now built on Docker. If you're looking for a Craft CMS running on Docker example, check it out.

Fine Tune Your Craft Performance

Justin Holt's presentation at the Charlotte Craft CMS Meetup Group was on optimizing Craft performance. He shared the slides of his presentation at the link above.

Site backup options

The topic of backing up your site was recently discussed in Discord. For Forge users, backups were recently introduced into the control panel, but only for the "Business" level plan. There were several options mentioned that your fellow Craft devs use.

Here's a list of the services mention:

If you're of a "roll your own" developer, check out these options:

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Plugged In

Super Filter

Build your search page with search filters from your element fields and filter element entries by categories, tags, element relations, products (in Craft Commerce), and other fields.

Tarteaucitron

Handle GDPR in your Craft CMS project the easy way with tarteaucitron.js.

Relationship Editor

Relationship Editor provides a new action specifically for adding and removing elements from an element relationship field without having to resubmit all of the existing selections.

Membership

The Membership plugin helps set up rules for granting access to your platform's Subscribers.

Patron

An OAuth2 Client for Craft CMS.

Views Work

Register pageviews and show popular content to your users with this Craft CMS.

The Craft Advantage

Charts of server load comparing Craft 3.3 to 3.4

⏩

Overheard

❤️

💔

It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.

Sizzy

The Sizzy app allows you to see multiple viewport sizes of your site simultaneously, synchronize scroll positions, take screenshots, and more. This was a free app that moved to paid to support continued development.

(Note: There was a free Chrome plugin mentioned in Discord when this topic came up that offers some of the same basic features as Sizzy. It's not listed in the Chrome plugin store and is sparsely documented. I chose not to include that link in the newsletter. You can find it in Discord if you're interested though.)