Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

The Craft community reacts to COVID, plus Craft news, tips, plugins and more.

Hello Craft friends. I hope this finds you doing well.

The pandemic is affecting all of our lives, so of course, it impacts the Craft community. In Top Stories, you'll see updated Dot All timelines and offers of free licenses available to devs building projects to help out those affected by COVID. We've also got an issue full of updates, tips 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.

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Let's hit the links.

-John Morton

News

Craft 3.4.13 released

Craft 3.4.13 put some additional polish on Craft API calls. For example, the 400 error message for a GraphQL call now tells you when the Bearer token was missing. There are additional updates, so read the changelog at the link above.

Craft Commerce 3.1 and New TaxJar Integration Released

Commerce hit version 3.1 with improved ordering and GraphQL support. You can read about 3.1 in this post from the Craft team. You’ll find the TaxJar plugin mentioned in the article in the Plugged In section later in the newsletter. For a full list of the updates, heck out the changelog.

Podcast: COVID-19 Edition III with Brandon Kelly by Mitchell Kimbrough

Mitchell Kimbrough and Brandon Kelly talk about the current state of the Craft economy and discuss their predictions for where things are headed in the next few months.

The crystal ball for 3.5

Anticipation for 3.5 is growing. Take an official peek at what to come at the milestones for Craft 3.5 on Github.

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Tools, tips, and fundamentals

Migrating from Craft 2 to Craft 3 - Webinar ⭐️

This webinar is happening in just a few hours. Sign up now and join in.

Craft tip on checking for preview pages

Andrew shared this tip on why you need to still check for both isLivePreview & isPreview in your templates.

How to retrieve cookies in Twig templates

About Database Connection Settings in Craft

If you've been using Craft for a while, you're probably familiar with the database configuration being broken up into individual settings for the user, password, and the database name. As noted in the link to the Craft docs above, as of Craft 3.4, you'll have a DB_DSN instead.

What's a DSN? As mentioned on Wikipedia, a DSN, is a Data Source Name. A DSN is "a string that has an associated data structure used to describe a connection to a data source."

In your .env file, for example, it would follow this structure.

DB_DSN="mysql:host=<host>;port=<port>;dbname=<dbname>"

In other words, as mentioned by Andrew in Discord, it is "a combination of the settings in db.php turned into a string."

Can you do without Supertable or Neo?

Piotr has a tip on avoiding complexity in your field creation when you want to have a matrix in a matrix.

Login Form | Craft 3 Documentation

Need to log someone in from the front end of your Craft site? You can find out how in this page from the official docs.

Element API endpoints and caching

Jalen brought up an interesting question in Discord recently about Element API endpoints. If you cache them, is the cache automatically busted (i.e. refreshed) when an element changes? The answer is, no, they are not. Element API endpoints are all time-based.

In your element-api.php file in your config/ folder, you'd set it like this:

'cache' => 'PT1M', // one minute

Craft CMS Updates Twitter Feed

Do you need an easy way to keep up on the Craft releases in your social media newsfeed? The Craft team has created a Twitter account for releases of Craft and plugins. Click the link above and then follow the account.

API endpoints for Craft Releases

You may have seen the page on Github showing the Craft releases.

There is an API endpoint for this information that Brandon shared on Discord that you might find useful: https://api.craftcms.com/v1/package/craftcms/cms

Here are some examples of how you can query the endpoint.

What does the %5E mean in that last link? It makes the contents URL-encoded.

Perfecting your technique

An Annotated Docker Config for Frontend Web Development ⭐️

A local development environment with Docker allows you to shrink-wrap the devops your project needs as config, making onboarding frictionless

Creating map-based navigation for Craft CMS | Craft Snippets

Piotr shows how to use path elements inside an SVG to create navigation, specifically he demonstrates by using an SVG of a geographic map divided into regions where each region is a link. The links can be controlled through the Craft control panel using the Retcon plugin.

Element Exporter Types | Craft 3 Documentation

Craft 3.4 gives plugins & modules the ability to create custom element exporters.

Controllers | Craft 3 Documentation

If you haven't read the Controlllers section of the docs recently, they've been updated. Specifically, on how Craft's controllers extend the Yii controllers and included additional enhancements.

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Plugged In

TaxJar for Craft Commerce

This plugin provides a tax integration between Craft Commerce and TaxJar.

It replaces Craft Commerce’s built-in tax engine, offloading the work of managing tax rates, tax zones, and tax categories to TaxJar.

GraphQL Srcset

Adds the @srcset GraphQL directive for generating a comma-separated list of image transforms.

Content Security Policy

Content Security Policy (or CSP) generator using nonces.

Sidebar Toggle

Add the ability to toggle the sidebar on element pages in the control panel.

Seeder

Seeder allows you to quickly create dummy entries through the command line. And you can just as easily remove the dummy data when you're done building the site.

IBAN Field

This plugin adds a field type to store and validate IBAN codes. It provides a Twig extension to format IBANs in different formats.

Conditional Fields

Conditional field layouts are coming to Craft CMS version 4 core. If you can't wait for that though, this plugin offers a Craft 3 stop-gap solution.

Craft Cognito Auth

This plugin enables logging into Craft using an Amazon Cognito User Pool.

Bitbucket Pipeline Deployment

Uses the Bitbucket API to run pipelines and deploy to any number of services.

Cache Permissions

Plugin allows you to restrict who can clear each cache group based on their user group.

Imgixer

An extremely flexible plugin for generating Imgix URLs for responsive images.

Query string to Object

Craft CMS filter to convert Query String to Object.

{% set obj = craft.app.request.queryStringWithoutPath | queryToObj %}

Dimensions

The Craft Commerce dimensions field is great, but sometimes you need more than one instance or to add to other elements. This adds a standalone field type so it can be added like any other field.

Reactions Work

Let your users react with “likes”, “wow”, “amazed” or up to 5 of your own custom reactions to any Craft element.

Yii, Twig, PHP & More

Friendly Exception: An interface for an exception to be friendly

An exception interface that provides a friendly name and a possible solution. Error handlers may consider the interface to render additional information right at the error screen.

Overheard

8 out of 10

This is easy.

It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.

devMode.fm // Alpine.js is like Tailwind CSS for JavaScript

On this episode we have the author of Alpine.js, Caleb Porzio, on to discuss his very lightweight JavaScript library that just might be exactly what you need.

As Brandon mentioned on Twitter, something's in the air.

devMode.fm // Remote Working & Pair Programming with Tuple

The devMode crew is joined by Ben Orenstein to discuss Tuple, dubbed “The best remote pair programming app on macOS”.

devMode.fm // Bluetick.io's Mike Taber on Building your own SaaS

Thinking of staying at home and building a Software as a Service? Give this one a listen.

PingPing - Simple Website Monitoring

There has been at least one list of website monitoring services mentioned in the newsletter. PingPing, shared recently in Discord, is another option you can check out if you're looking for this type of service.

A Guide to Handling Browser Events by Sarah Chima

In this article, we will discuss how we can handle events that occur in a browser. We will also discuss how to prevent default actions and what event propagation is.

Lead Generation Emails

The topic of lead generation emails came up in Discord. There have been a few posts floating around talking about the "magic" emails. Here are links to the 3 that came up last week. Two of the links shared the same title. Whadda ya gonna do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯