Introduction
Best practices in Craft 2
Craft 2 is showing its maturity in a good way. It's a well-oiled machine with community-tested best practices. This issue has a number of links highlighting these best practices.
We'll also hit other topics, like Grunt, Gulp and general workflow stuff, some of which isn't Craft-specific but useful to most of us who have Craft CMS in our toolkit.
If you're wondering about the launch of Craft 3, there's no official word that I know of, but if you believe rumors on the Internet (and why shouldn't you?) we're looking at "end of the year".
Let's hit the links.
News
Redactor II, version 1.2.4 update
At the end of May the release of Craft 2.6.2789 updated Redactor II to version 1.2.4 which should make fix some irksome freezes in Chrome and Safari.
Featured Sponsor

Pic Puller for Craft
Add Instagram feeds to your site. Includes the Instagram Image Browser field type. NEW: Pic Puller version 2.2.0+ is compatible with Craft's built-in protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks.
Tools, tips, and fundamentals
Troubleshooting Email Errors in Craft
Craft 2.6.2788 has made tracking down email config errors easier. This new page in the Craft docs has the details.

A brain dump of learning resources for Craft
This StackExchange post has a link list for Craft. That makes this is a link list within a link list. My head is spinning.
Grunt Init Craft
Automate Craft things with Grunt.
- Downloads and installs Craft as a dependency
- Compiles SASS and Blesses it
- Concatenates and minifies all vendor JS
- Minifies main.js
- Compiles a gitbook in docs/
- Watches for changes and recompiles
- Makes automatic backups of the SQL database to data/cms.sql -Automatically imports data/cms.sql when the Vagrant server starts
Flexbox and Craft
Have you had it with floats? This Straight Up Hangout talks flexbox and how to take advantages of it with Craft's flexible templating approach.
A Very Flexible Title Field
Sometimes an entry having a "title" isn't semantically correct for all instances. 3 Red Kites has a short piece about dealing with that in Craft.
Perfecting your technique
Best practices for handling data migration and organization across development environments
On Slack last month, there was a discussion around best practices around "setting it all up". Ultimately this lead to 3 must-read Stack Exchange conversations. Here's the first one.
Best practices for upgrading a versioned Craft site
The next link in the "setting it all up" discussion was around best practices around upgrading Craft.
Best practices around Git workflow and multi-environment
The final link in the "setting it all up" exchange was this one regarding Git and multi-environments.
Matrix as a Layout Builder
This Straight Up Hangout shows how versatile Matrix can be. Whether you use this technique or not it's a nice demonstration of what you can achieve with the Matrix field type.
Building Email Forms Natively in Craft
Stephen Bowling documents the form building process he showed off in the "Matrix as a Layout Builder" StraightUp Hangouts.
AMP Project
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is a new open source initiative on how to build web pages that render with reliable, fast performance.
You can check the AMP Project Github page for the HTML source code, samples, and documentation. Also check out AMP By Example for, well, examples.
Plugged In
Cold Cache
Adds a new {% coldcache %}
tag to Craft, which works just like Craft’s built-in {% cache %}
tag, except that this tag won’t record which elements and element queries are active between its tags. The only way caches will ever get deleted is if they expire, or an admin clears them using the Clear Caches tool in Settings.
Craft Locale Sync
Locale Sync allows you to copy content from the current locale when saving an element.
Admin Bar V2
Version 2 of Admin Bar does what version 1 did: it's adds front-end shortcuts for clients logged into Craft CMS. But version 2 should "improve performance". Be aware that it's a breaking change from v1, so read the docs before you jump in.
Craft Helpers
This innocuously named plugin has loads of cool helper filters for Twig. Whether you need to truncate strings, convert integers to Roman numerals, convert strings to JSON, and other cool things, be sure to check this out.
Null Number
Ever wished the built-in Number
fieldtype supported a default value of null
, because zero has meaning in the system you’re building? Check out this extension of the built-in Craft CMS number field type, but with a default value of null.
Text Statistics plugin for Craft CMS
This plugin "allows you to measure the readability of your content, calculate the average reading time or access other text statistics like sentence count."
NavEE for Craft
Regarding this plugin's release, one Craft Slack user said, "my favourite EE addon comes to Craft." Worth checking out.
Delete All Entry Versions plugin
Have you ever wanted to deleted old versions on an entry in the control panel? Now you can.
The Craft Advantage
It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.
Certbot
Automatically enable HTTPS on your website with EFF's Certbot, deploying Let's Encrypt certificates.