Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

Updating to 3.5, the release schedule, Nitro 1.0, and more.

Hello, Craft friends. Welcome to another issue of Craft Link List. This issue covers a lot of topics specific to Craft 3.5: upgrading tips, new features, and more. What else is in store for issue 118? Nitro has been officially released. Piort has an email templating solution to share. Plus, there are other Craft tips, plugins, and web dev goodies.

If you've been a CLL reader for a while, you may know each issue has two sponsors that help keep this newsletter going. For the first time, both sponsors have plugins that overlap in what they offer. I view this as a sign of a vibrant Craft ecosystem. Thank you to both sponsors.

Formie: Client-focused forms plugin for Craft. Learn more.

Freeform: Effortlessly build beautiful forms in minutes. Learn more.

Let's hit the links.

-John Morton

News

Craft 3.5 with Brandon Kelly | CraftQuest

Brandon joins Ryan and Andrew to discuss Craft 3.5, including how 3.5 caches templates and GraphQL requests, updates to project config, a variety of user questions, and more.

Craft 3.5.5 released

Along with bug fixes, notable additions since the initial 3.5.0 release:

Lightswitch fields now having an “ON Label” and “OFF Label” setting.
You can now hide field labels from within the field layout designer.
Input fields in the control panel now use the inputmode attritube (learn more here).
You can now easily see and copy field handles.

Read the full changelog for details.

Introducing the new Craft Documentation

The Craft documentation has been getting a lot of attention. The content has been improving steadily, and now it has an updated layout and URL. Update your bookmark to the Craft documentation: https://craftcms.com/docs

Nitro 1.0 Released

Nitro, the official "best way to develop Craft sites locally," developed by the Craft team, has officially launched. "We’ve added Windows support, fixed some bugs, and added several new commands that make working with Nitro a joy."

Commerce 3.2 Released

Craft Commerce 3.2 has been released, with a few improvements for store managers. At the time I write this, we're now at 3.2.2.1. See the changelog for all the details.

Redactor v2.71 released

The Redactor fieldtype received several new features with the 2.7 release, including the ability to select image transforms within the field.

Feedback requested on the Craft release schedule

Craft 3.5 was released a couple of weeks ago after over three months of being in beta and then a two-week release candidate phase. That didn't mean the 3.5 release went smoothly for everyone. Brandon and the Craft team want your feedback on how future Craft releases happen. Below are links to two Tweets from Brandon. Reply with your thoughts or reach out to the Pixel and Tonic team directly. There's also been an ongoing discussion in the #extending-craft Discord channel starting on August 16, 2020.

Featured Sponsor

Formie: Client-focused forms plugin for Craft

It might be the new kid on the block, but Formie's carefully crafted user-experience means creating forms are a joy for your clients. Packed full of features with 25+ fields, multi-pages, custom field types, bundled CSS/JS, Freeform/Sprout Forms migration and much more. Read more about why we created Formie in our blog post, or download it on the plugin store.

Tools, tips, and fundamentals

Project Config Caveats ⭐️

In the Upgrading to Craft 3.5 Knowledge Base article mentioned above in the "Top Stories" section, there is an area on the Project Config Workflow. Here's a quick excerpt:

The useProjectConfigFile config setting has been deprecated. Craft will now always store a copy of the Project Config in a config/project/ folder for safekeeping, regardless of whether you want to actually keep your database in sync with its changes.

That link is supplemental reading to the actual link to the Project Config Caveats, which is part of the official documentation. It's essential reading, but the basics are that you should be aware of is that sensitive information could leak into your project config file (and into your Git repo), so use environment variables for that type of info. Also, know how to do that properly, as shown by this example:

// Bad:
'secret' => getenv('SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'),

// Good:
'secret' => '$SECRET_ACCESS_KEY',

Another highlight is the change from a single project.yaml file to a folder of multiple files.

There's more important stuff to be aware of, so be sure to read this article.

Lastly, Team Workflow with Project Config in Craft CMS 3, mentioned previously in issue 88, might be helpful to read or read again.

Resolving "Access denied; you need (at least one of) the PROCESS privilege(s) for this operation"

Have you run into the error above when using MySQL 8.x? This article might help you out.

Switching from Craft Local Assets Volume to S3 | CraftQuest

Do you need to switch a local Assets volume to remote? Here's how you do it using Amazon S3. These steps will help you make a clean cutover from local to remote without any missing images on your site. This lesson does require a free Amazon Web Services account.

How to load a file/CSS only in a specific page

Perfecting your technique

Universal email template for Craft CMS | Craft Snippets

Piotr Pogorzelski shows how to use the Postmark Transactional Email Templates "as a base for universal email Template for Craft CMS." He shows how to set up your template and then easily customize the content inserted into the emails.

The page builder dilemma

Last week there was a great discussion on the topic of clients and designers wanting "page builder" style control within their CMS, whether that was Craft, WordPress, something else. If you're a member of the Craft Discord, you can catch up by starting here. If that link gives you trouble, go to the #general channel on August 13, 2020, and look for "create a large number of bespoke pages with different layouts".

Can you call a controller method from within a plugin/module in Craft 3?

The short answer is, yes, you can call any controller's method from a plugin/module like this:

Craft::$app->runAction('users/save-user');

The longer answer is available by reading the full StackExchange post.

Using Twig Templates in the Field Layout Designer | CraftQuest

Ryan and Andrew discuss the new Template option in the field layout designer in Craft 3.5. I'll spoil it a little bit and tell you the following snippet plays a role.

{{ dump(_context | keys) }}

Running Gatsby.js Sites with Craft CMS | Aaron Bushnell

Aaron Bushnell shares his perspective on developing sites with Craft CMS and Gatsby.js after having built some himself. The post may help you decide if this solution would work for your next project.

Ephemeral File Systems and Exploits | CraftQuest

Matt Gray of Servd joins the livestream to talk about ephemeral file systems and how they can help you recover faster from an exploit.

devMode.fm // A peek behind the iron curtain of building a GraphQL API

Tim Kelty from Fusionary Media joins the devMode crew to discuss the origins of a GraphQL API for Craft CMS, how test driven development factored into it, and what it was like behind the scenes architecting this API layer.

Sponsor

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Freeform is by far the most intuitive and reliable form building plugin for Craft! The elegant form builder has been expertly designed to minimize mileage on your mouse. Effortlessly create simple or complex multi-page forms, choose from 27 field types, and connect your forms to over 22 popular API integrations. Templating is easy and highly customizable. No other form plugin even comes close to comparing!

Plugged In

Rename Multibyte Filename

When a file whose filename contains a multibyte character is uploaded, the filename will be renamed to ASCII character automatically. Three types of filename format are available.

Groupie

Assign users to specific user groups upon registration. Especially useful for front-end signup forms.

Connect

Connect allows you to connect to external databases of any format that Yii2 supports and perform db queries using a query builder, right from your Twig templates.

Element Index Relabels

This plugin relabels the following elements in the Element Index.

Overheard

Saturday

Another Saturday

It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.

Good Work webdev series on YouTube

Every Tuesday the good folks at Good Work are publishing new webdev videos. Check it out.

What I Learned by Fixing One Line of CSS in an Open Source Project

When something breaks, enjoy the journey of learning the system. You’ll gain valuable insights into why that thing broke and what can be done to fix it. That’s one of the awesome benefits of contributing to open source projects and why I’d encourage you to do the same.

Regular Expressions (Regex) Tutorial: How to Match Any Pattern of Text - YouTube

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

An open-source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites.

Heroicons

MIT open-source UI Icons.

Tip: Emulate vision deficiencies in Chrome Dev Tools ⭐️

See how users who experience color blindless or blurred vision might see your site.

Monokai Pro

Monokai Pro is a color scheme and customized user interface theme for code editors. It has been designed with beautiful functionality in mind. Carefully selected shades of colors are the foundation of an uncompromising, non-distractive user interface.

MonoLisa

MonoLisa is a font family designed for software developers. Font follows function.

How to clear HSTS settings in Chrome and Firefox

HSTS, HTTP Strict Transport Security, see the MDN article on the topic here. ells a browser "that an HTTPS connection should always be in place."

If your browser has stored HSTS settings for a domain and you later try to connect over HTTP or a broken HTTPS connection (mismatch hostname, expired certificate, etc) you will receive an error. Unlike other HTTPS errors, HSTS-related errors cannot be bypassed. This is because the browser has received explicit instructions from the browser not to allow anything but a secure connection.

This post will show you how to delete the HSTS settings in your local Chrome and Firefox.