Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

Let’s talk about Craft CMS, plugins and nerdy stuff for a bit.

Hello Craft friends. A lot is going on in the world, and I hope you are well.

This is a simple newsletter, typically filled with technical news and information. The most significant news I have to share with you is not technical. It’s honorable. Craft has donated its May profits to organizations fighting for justice listed below. Bravo.

We’ve also got news of the latest Craft 3.4.x updates featuring improved the loading of the control panel. Plus, there are multiple previews of what 3.5 is going to bring us. 3.5 is shaping up to be a great update.

Thank you to the sponsors of this issue.

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Let's hit the links.

-John Morton

News

GraphQL improvements in 3.5

Brandon teased in progress on updates to GraphQL queries coming soon to Craft Beta 3.5.

Craft and themes in 3.5

Piotr pointed to this Q&A in the GitHub issues area for 3.5 development. This means creating themes for Craft will be possible when 3.5 is released.

Nitro Beta 3

Quoting Jason McCallister, for the latest Nitro beta "there is a long list of changes, additions, and fixes! Most notable is the addition of nitro db with a lot of helpful database management commands. You can now add, backup, and import databases from the CLI. Oh, and sites are created in the home folder to help with symlinks!

"If you are running an earlier beta, please run the nitro refresh command to make sure everything is in the right place and order going forward!"

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Tools, tips, and fundamentals

Relations | Craft 3 Documentation

There was an interesting discussion in Discord last week about the relatedTo parameter on an element. The docs currently mention passing in an element, an element ID or an array of element IDs or element objects as parameters. But relatedTo accepts element queries as parameters as well.

See the following example where firstCategoryGroupQuery and secondCategoryGroupQuery are variables containing full queries.

craft.entries.section('posts') .relatedTo(['and', firstCategoryGroupQuery, secondCategoryGroupQuery])

This works, but, why does it work? Craft will call its ids() method internally on those element queries, so the code above is just like calling this:

craft.entries.section('posts') .relatedTo(['and', firstCategoryGroupQuery,ids(), secondCategoryGroupQuery.ids()])

That means you're not actually saving SQL queries by doing this, but you have typed fewer keystrokes. (Thanks to Brandon for helping me out with this.)

To read the Discord discussion yourself, start here.

Making a versatile Twig macro

The Craft Twig Primer has a Dry templating section on how to make macros. It will give you a good start on making a DRY macro, but an additional tip was shared in Discord by Ben Parizek. Sending in a general settings object which sets defaults for the expected values creates a versatile function.

{% macro button(settings) %}
    {% set width = settings.width ?? 100 %}
{% endmacro %}

{% from _self import button %}

{{ button({ width: 200 }) }}

Here's a link the Discord discussion.

How to prevent cache busting (preferably on a single section)?

The StackExchange post mentions the cacheElementQueries setting (see those docs) or the Cache Flag mentioned below.

London Craft Meetup Videos

London Craft CMS Meetup has a YouTube channel that hosts a series of videos taken of the live talks/ presentations carried out each quarter. Expect to see Ben Croker’s Templating for Performance in Craft presentation from the upcoming June 9 Meetup posted there soon.

Perfecting your technique

Using Gridsome with Craft CMS

Judd Lyon has a detailed and helpful post on understanding Gridsome and how you can use Craft as your data source.

Configuring Craft for Load Balanced Environments

The Craft team has posted a helpful article on setting up load balancing servers for high traffic sites.

CraftQuest : Creating a Boilerplate Craft Project

Join Ryan and Andrew as they cover how to build your own custom default Craft project and generate it using composer create-project.

This recording requires a free CraftQuest membership. Paid yearly memberships are now just $199 and include all every course on the site. It’s worth it, IMO.

CraftQuest: Localhosting Round-Up

In this livestream, Ryan and Andrew review the localhosting options, and Andrew shows Ryan that Docker really isn't that hard after all.

Like the previous link, this one viewable with a free membership to CraftQuest.

Craft with Next.js example repo

A statically generated blog example using Next.js and Craft CMS.

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Plugged In

Craft Blitz Recommendations ⭐️

The Craft Blitz Recommendations plugin will run in the background while is the site is navigated and provides templating performance recommendations for Craft CMS.

Dumper

Dumper gives you an easy way to inspect Craft objects in your templates. View entire arrays or individual entries or elements.

As pointed out on Discord, {{ dump(var) }} is also built into Craft, so there is no need for a plugin for that, but Dumper uses the Symfony VarDumper component which formats the output more nicely.

Oh Dear

Integrate Oh Dear, the uptime monitoring service, into Craft CMS.

Transient

Store variables in Twig code, which will be available to other templates for the duration of the page load to share values or states between multiple templates.

PageProofer

PageProofer is a website feedback tool that allows you to gather feedback, request content changes, reports bugs, and track issues directly on your website.

Level Entry Types

This plugin allows you to specify available entry types to the user based on the current structure level of an entry.

For example, if you have a structure made up of landing pages and tabbed pages, you can ensure tabbed pages are only allowed as a descendant of a landing page.

Cache Flag

Cache Flag adds a new {% cacheflag %} Twig tag to Craft CMS, which works like the native {% cache %} tag, except that it will not save element queries for automatic cache breaking.

The Craft Advantage

Impressed

Yii, Twig, PHP & More

Intro to Composer, with Jordi Boggiano

In this episode of The Laravel Podcast, Matt Stauffer talks with Jordi Boggiano, co-creator and co-maintainer of Composer, about the powerful tool's history, common use cases, and overall purpose.