Introduction
Craft focuses on accessibility, starter kits, tips, plugins and more.
Hello Craft friends. Welcome to another issue of Craft CMS news and links.
We kick off with good news on the accessibility front for the Craft platform. We've also got a few tips on making your own Craft CMS start kits, Twig tips, plugins, and various web dev goodies.
Thank you to this issue’s sponsors.
Campaign, from Put Your Lights On brings powerful email marketing and list management to your Craft site. Find out more about Campaign.
Freeform from Solspace is the intuitive form builder for Craft CMS informed by 4+ years of development and refinement. Learn about the power of Freeform.
Let's hit the links.
-John Morton
Craft Link List
Top Stories
Doubling Down on Accessibility | Craft CMS
Matsuko Friendland has joined the Craft CMS team as Lead Accessibility Engineer. This announcement is good for the platform as a whole. Matsuko's role is not just making accessibility a focus for the first-party products from the Craft team; her role extends to helping improve accessibility to the plugin ecosystem.
We will work to ensure that accessibility best practices are part of our ongoing development processes, and we’ll be sharing resources that promote best practices to the plugin ecosystem as well.
Bravo.
craftcms.com
News
Craft 3.5.9 released
Craft 3.5.9 was recently released with the following updates:
- 😍 UI improvements
- ⬇️ Dates now sorted in descending order by default
- 🔎 Settings → Fields page now identifies searchable & translatable fields
3.5.8 was also released since the last issue. It includes the following:
- 🏎 Faster CP
- 🎚 on/off CLI commands
- ⚙️ Full support for GraphQL over GET requests
- 🐳 Better Docker support
Featured Sponsor
Campaign Plugin
The Campaign plugin brings email marketing campaigns to Craft CMS, giving you complete control and personalisation of emails using Twig templates and all things Craft. Integrates seamlessly with Amazon SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc. with unlimited campaigns, contacts, mailing lists and sendouts.
putyourlightson.com
Tools, tips, and fundamentals
How to make a “starter” set of fields for Craft
The link above is to a discussion in the Craft Discord on making a "starter kit" for your Craft installs. As Brandon mentions, to make your starter kit, create the "sections/fields in a new Craft install, and then save the config/project/ folder and Composer files to your starter project.
Craft will automatically apply any project config changes in the config/project/ folder during installation."
Get Up And Running With Craft CMS — Smashing Magazine
Jonathan Kelley has written an introduction to Craft CMS for Smashing Magazine that serves as "a perfect jumping-off point for anyone looking to expand from their current CMS system, or make the leap from WordPress."
smashingmagazine.com
Testing if something exists: is defined, length, is not null, is not empty ⭐️
This link from Straight Up Craft was shared way back in Issue 20, but it's come up again recently in a Craft conversion so it's being shared a 2nd time in the newsletter.
straightupcraft.com
Takeout: a Docker-based development-only dependency manager that pairs with Valet.
Takeout is a Mac-based CLI tool for spinning up tiny Docker containers, one for each of your development environment dependencies. It's meant to be paired with a tool like Laravel Valet.
github.com
Before you start propagating project config changes...
The Project Config section of the docs begins with the phrase "before you start propagating project config changes." Yes, this is required reading.
craftcms.com
Perfecting your technique
MySQL, Stopwords, and You!
The link above illustrates why the knowing concept of ”stop words” in MySQL is essential. The topic of stop words came up in the Craft Discord last week. "Without fuzzy search on in Craft, MySQL (not Craft) will return no results for [the stop words in your MySQL installation]." Your installation comes with a default list of stop words. You can't edit the stop words for your site in Craft, but you can edit them in your MySQL installation. See this link for 2 options for editing them.
Brad Bell mentioned that another possible fix is to "swap the storage engine on the searchindex table to InnoDB, which has a much more reasonable stopword list."
Craft CMS - RollupJS Starter Kit
A Craft CMS + RollupJS starter kit using TailwindCSS and AlpineJS for clean, maintainable code.
github.com
Autogenerate SKU for Craft Commerce products - EaglePeak Consulting
Claudia Aguilar shared this tip for Craft Commerce 3. When generating product SKU's Commerce has an option in the Product Type settings that might help you generate the SKU's automatically. Check out the post for details.
eaglepeakweb.com
Adding Redis To Craft CMS | Servd
servd.hostAdding Redis to a Craft site can have a big impact on both its performance and scalability, but what is Redis, how do we integrate it with Craft and what does Craft actually store in there?
nystudio107 | Running Node.js in Docker for local development
You don’t need to know Docker to benefit from running local dev Node.js buildchains & apps inside of Docker containers. You get easy onboarding, and less hassle.
nystudio107.com
Sponsor
Carefully developed and meticulously refined over 4 years!
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 a wide variety of field types, and connect your forms to popular API integrations. Templating is easy and highly customizable. No other form plugin even comes close.
solspace.com
Plugged In
Stamped
This plugin provides integration with Stamped.io by pushing order information to Stamped.io, to be added to a queue to be sent to your customers.
craftcms.com
Animate
Looking for a simple plugin that is lightweight and has many different animation features? Animate takes care of animation so you won't have too! Just install and add to your templates and you'll be off to the animation races.
craftcms.com
Read Only
This plugin adds a simple read-only text field with basic click-to-copy functionality. When creating a field you can choose to hide the field from everyone or everyone except Admins. You can also control if Admins are allowed to edit the field value.
craftcms.com
QuickPay for Craft Commerce
This plugin provides a QuickPay gateway for Craft Commerce 3.
craftcms.com
Overheard
It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.
devMode.fm // Dynamic HTML with htmx ⭐️
Carson from Big Sky Software joins the devMode crew, along with Ben Croker, to discuss how the htmx library is designed to be an extension to HTML that brings needed dynamic functionality to the modern web without adding complexity.
devmode.fm
AVIF has landed - JakeArchibald.com ⭐️
AVIF is a new image format derived from the keyframes of AV1 video. It's a royalty-free format, and it's already supported in Chrome 85 on desktop. (It looks like a great addition to the web ecosystem.)
jakearchibald.com
Andrew shares an amazing GitHub tip ⭐️
In this short video, Andrew shares a GitHub tip on how to compare tagged releases. You’ll want to see this.
twitter.com
Security Newsletter ⭐️
Dieter Van der Stock has returned from a break to the security newsletter he curates and writes. Like Craft Link List, it’s a free subscription. Read the latest issue and sign up if you’re interested in security.
securitynewsletter.co