Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

The past and the future of #CraftCMS, loads of Craft tips, plugins, and more.

Hello Craft friends. I hope this finds you doing well. We've got another collection of interesting posts. I haven't said it recently, but this is due to people just like you creating and sharing great tips, posts and plugins for Craft. Do you have something to share with the Craft community? Head over to the link submission page.

This issue starts with the present and near-future of Craft with Brandon and Leah on devMode. We’ll look further into the future with milestones for Craft 5. In the title of the issue I hinted at "the past"; that was my attempt at being clever with the Craft docs now getting a changelog, which will be helpful as the docs continue to grow and evolve.

We've also got Ben Croker on devMode talking about Sprig and cool things it enables you to do in your Twig templates. There's a new Craft Coding Challenge, and, as usual, there are Craft tips, plugins, and other webdev goodies.

Thank you to the sponsors of this issue.

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Let’s hit the links.

-John Morton

News

Craft 3.5.7 released.

😅 More helpful CLI warning when Craft “isn’t installed yet”
⚙️ Query sharing for GraphiQL
⌨️ Improved keyboard controls
🐪 Improved project config workflow + new comparison view
📎 Include CSS/JS files with the {% css %} and {% js %} tags
💾 New autosaveDrafts config setting

Craft 5 Milestones

You heard me right, Craft 5. (h/t Piotr!)

Laravel in a future version of Craft?

To access the link above you'll need to be part of the Craft Discord community. The message you see there is just a single message in a larger conversation in the extending-craft channel about the unlying framework that Craft is built on. As you probably know, Craft is built on Yii 2. What about going forward? Always in motion is the future.

Craft documentation has a changelog

We've mentioned the improving Craft documentation previously. Another sign of the care the docs are receiving is that they now have a changelog. You’ll easily be able to see the news stuff you should check out.

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Tools, tips, and fundamentals

devMode.fm // Sprig brings Reactivity to Twig ⭐️

Ben Croker from PutYourLightsOn joins the devMode crew to talk about his new plugin for Craft CMS, Sprig. Sprig brings reactivity to your Twig templates, by allowing you to do what are effectively dynamic includes of familiar Twig templates.

If you're into Sprig, Ben wants to find out what sort of resources will make Sprig even more useful. Head over to his Twitter poll today to cast your vote. ☑️

Imager X Effects Playground

Play around with the 28 built-in effects in Imager X.

3 Craft tips from Piotr

A handy little twig Macro that makes a URL pretty - Why would you use this? An example: "Buttons where users only need to input the target url. Button text = pretty, anchor = full url."
Use the Verbb Navigation plugin multi-level menu structure as URL structure for your entries
Make Neo plugin fields more readable when working with "matrix within a matrix"

Browsersync Proxy URL from DOTENV file | Caffeine Creations

Sean Smith shows how to get BrowserSync to pull the proxy url from your dotenv file using Laravel Mix.

Custom Favicon in the Control Panel

This is a tip, straight from the documentation.

Using Local Volumes for Development | Craft CMS

If your assets are stored in remote volumes, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or DigitalOcean Spaces, you may wish to use a local volume for your development environment.

This is possible using Yii’s dependency injection container, a powerful tool that can give you fine-grained control over how each system component is initialized.

Organizing Fields

Lindsey Diloreto shared a control panel organizational tip recently. If you've organized your fields by section and still lost track of them in a large site, Lindsey suggested organizing them by the type of field instead. He suggested that this organization also "sheds some light on how the fields can be reasonably reused." 😮

Lindsey told me that this tip originated in some past DotAll presentation - cheers to whoever that person was! 🍺

Jason Lee wants to help you...

Jason shared this very specific tip on Discord. It's definitely going to help someone sometime somewhere.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but for the person searching this thread for keywords phpSessionName or CraftSessionId or phpsession:

Your session cookie isn't getting set because your php session.save_handler and/or session.save_path are wrong. Could mean they are set to redis and you don't have redis installed, for example.

See Andrew's The Case of the Missing PHP Session for more info.

Perfecting your technique

Challenge #9 – Roman Numerals

The Craft Coding Challenge is back! Given a number, calculate its corresponding Roman numeral using a twig macro. (I think you get a bonus point if you know why Edna Krabappel is on the challenge page.)

Craft CMS Docker images

These images are provided as a starting point for your Docker-based Craft CMS deployments. They’re discrete, lightweight, and preconfigured to meet Craft’s requirements in production and development environments.

nystudio107 | Creating a custom field in Craft CMS

Learn how to create a custom field in Craft CMS, writing as little code as possible by leveraging the platform.

Terminal application on macOS | Multipass documentation

How to make Multipass (and Nitro) use iTerm instead of the default Terminal on a Mac.

Warmer

David Kerns shared a solution "for pages with some form of lazyloading / async content pulled from a CDN or a CMS where the first request can take an unacceptably long time to fulfill."

Matrix within a Matrix - possible solutions for Craft CMS | Craft Snippets

In this Craft Snippets article, Piotr explores options for how to use the Matrix field within other Matrix fields.

Prism Syntax Highlighting for Craft CMS

John Henry Donovan has written a tutorial for using Prism syntax highlighting on your code blocks in Craft CMS.

Why you should forget about SEO and focus on HEO instead

This article is a short primer on enhancing people’s understanding of your business by creating better content.

How to best design large queue jobs

This Craft CMS Stack Exchange post from about a year ago came up in Discord last week. It's an evergreen 🌲 question.

Making backups a part of your Forge deployments | Feral

Timmy O'Mahony shows how to make a database backup when you deploy Craft (or anything, really) using Forge. The API and Backup features apply to business plans, not the basic plan.

Indianapolis Public Library

TrendyMinds posted about the Indianapolis Public Library site they recently completed, built on Craft. The article includes a list of the plugins they used.

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Plugged In

Turbo

This plugin adds some boost by using the Yii2 framework's PageCache. On the first load of the page, it stores the most used pages as static HTML. No extra code needed. Just install, turn it on and enjoy the speed.

Router

A Craft CMS plugin for using URL segments as filtering criteria on an entry query. (This problem this plugin is trying to solve is a little tough to summarize. Read the full description on the plugin page for a more complete description.)

Jokes

Jokes is a simple Craft CMS widget to start your Dashboard-day with some jokes using the JokeAPI.

Avataaars

With Avataaars you can create avatar icons by combining clothes, hair, emotions, accessories, and colors.

Imager X Rounded Corners Effect

This plugin adds an effect to Imager X for rounding image corners. It's also an example of how to make a custom effect for Imager X.

Youtube Channel Feed

This is a Craft CMS plugin for outputting a Youtube channel feed as a widget, or in your templates via a variable.

The Craft Advantage

WP loses another one

Yii, Twig, PHP & More

PHP precedence: "and" and "&&" walk into a bar...

Overheard

Craft Services

h/t Matt Stein

Craft Ice

h/t Nevin Lyne

The content-visibility property, launching in Chromium 85, might be one of the most impactful new CSS properties for improving page load performance.

How to Use AVIF: The New Next-Gen Image Compression Format

AVIF offers significant file size reduction for images compared with JPEG or WebP; ~50% savings compared to JPEG, and ~20% savings compared to WebP.

Chrome 85 now supports AVIF.