Issue 15: 39 Links of Craft

Introduction

Craft meet ups, Craft security and Craft know-how

There have been Craft meetups all over the world and now we've had one here in little ol' New York City as well. Last month was the first Craft Meetup at the offices of Vector Media Group. Can't make it to NYC? Find one in your area.

Among the 39 links in this issue you'll find one of the presentations given in the meet up. If your local Craft meet up has presentation materials posted online, please let me know.

There are also more security goodies this issue, including a page on security in the docs and a new plugin to help you batten down the hatches.

Lastly, you'll find some great Craft articles you won't want to miss.

Let's hit the links.

News

The Official Page on Securing Craft

Looking to secure your Craft site? Of course you are. Be sure to check the brand spankin' new page in the docs on the subject.

Craft CMS deep dive on YouTube

Brandon Kelly visited Drupal and Coffee to talk about Craft CMS (obviously) and "how to map ideas from Drupal to Craft and back."

Jaeger: Cross Platform Plugin Development

Jaeger allows for cross platform plugin development for various PHP CMS platforms. (Kris Kross development?)

Jaeger is best served for your primary business logic and does not serve as a replacement for the CMS plugin stub files. You'll still have to create plugins; it's just your internal design that's shared.

Featured Sponsor

Pic Puller for Craft

Instagram is back in Craft CMS with the updated Pic Puller.

Add authorized image & video feeds to your site. Plus use the Instagram Image Browser field type to add Instagram media into individual entries.

Tools, tips, and fundamentals

A Craft CMS Filter Demo

Sam Hernandez walked through this example site during the NYC Craft meet up last month which demonstrates how to implement content listing filters (facet filtering) in Twig templates.

Recommended hosting for a Craft site

Where to host is a regular question and it came up last month on Slack. The link above was referenced and has many good options for you to check out. One of the big things to look for is PHP 7.

Dark and oversaturated images in Craft?

There's a topic bouncing around lately regarding uploaded images that "end up being much darker and more saturated" than the original. If this is happening to you, or, maybe even if it is not, check out this new setting (added in Craft 2.5) that sets "whether the embedded color profiles should be preserved when uploading an image."

Matrix field input error from within the control panel.

A Craft developer was having some strange errors with one page in the control panel when trying to save a large Matrix field. The site went to a 404 page instead of saving. The solution lies in the server's php.ini file. Check the Stack Exchange post on the issue.

There's no place like home, or, home, that is.

Add home page to a structure?, a question from the Craft CMS StackExchange has some interesting tidbits on what makes the home page of your Craft site unique.

What’s the Deal with Craft CMS?

Brandon Kelly posted his presentation deck from Portland Designer News meetup. Since it's just the deck you can flip through it quickly. The most interesting part to me was the list of uses that Craft is not recommended for.

Perfecting your technique

Setting up a local dev environment for Craft CMS using Laravel Homestead

If you're looking for an alternative to MAMP, check this out. It's basically "a mashup of the official docs for both" Craft CMS and Lavavel Homestead.

Supercharge Macros in Craft CMS

Andrew Fairlie details how he builds macros that are "easy to read, incredibly flexible, and almost self-documenting."

Performance Optimization for Websites Built With Craft

Nebojša Vilus writes that "40% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load." He walks through many steps of optimizing a Craft site for speed.

Plugged In

Sherlock

PutYourLightsOn has simplified checking the security of your Craft sites with the Sherlock plug in. There is a free version for personal sites and a pro version for, well, professional sites. Hide your kids and hide your wife and secure your site.

Front-End Parts Kits in Craft

Tools of the craft.

Craft, fastly.

This plugin helps integrate Fastly caching with Craft.

ElementOptions plugin

ElementOptions fieldtypes function similar to the native Checkboxes fieldtypes, with the addition of a selected element to each option. Each element type is supported with it's own fieldtype: Assets, Users, Entries, and Categories.

Social Login plugin for Craft CMS

Allow your visitors to use a social login and register to your Craft website using their favorite web service. There are demo templates to get you started quickly.

Recaptcha Guest

Plugin to allow the use of the aberkie/craft-recaptcha when using P&T's Guest Entries for submissions.

Autologin

Automatically login a front-end user after they have successfully used the password reset functionality to set a new password.

CP Field Links

Inspect field handles and edit fields from element edit forms. (Nice for when you or I forget the name of the field you or I made.)

CraftCMS Generator

CraftCMS plugin to generate content models from JSON data.

Language Link

Easily switch between languages on any page of your website.

Craft Menus

A simple but powerful menus plugin for Craft CMS built with a custom element type

Craft Elixir

Craft Plugin that allows you to use Laravel's Elixir in Craft templates

Digital Ocean OAuth provider

This plugin helps you to build plugins that integrate with the Digital Ocean API.

Exclusive

Exclusive generates new tokens, shows who used each token, and provides template helpers for your registration form.

Calendar for Craft CMS

Solspace announced a powerful looking Calendar plug in for Craft late last month.

Retour

Another goodie from NYStudio 107. Retour allows you to intelligently redirect legacy URLs, so that you don't lose SEO value when rebuilding & restructuring a website.

Craft Neo

A Matrix-like field type that uses existing fields. Neo is built from the ground up, and in the classic style of Craft, so as to feel like it's native to the core product.

Incognito Field

A PlainText FieldType which can be disabled or hidden.

Auto Expire plugin for Craft CMS

Set entry post dates or expiration dates automatically on every entry save computed from predefined Twig code.

Auto-Assign User Group plugin for Craft CMS

Simplifies the process of adding new users, by skipping the step of manually assigning each user to a user group.

Stringy Craft

Craft wrapper for Stringy – a string manipulation library with multibyte support