Introduction

Craft on the ballot, ProPublica, tips, and more.
It's September and time to vote in the annual CMS Critic awards. This is a newsletter about a CMS, so this is a big deal!
What else do we have? The ProPublica site now built on Craft plus an article about the process. Tips for plugin developers, regular Craft users and more.
Thank you to this issue's sponsors. Solspace with Freeform Pro, the heavy hitter when it comes to forms in Craft, and Acclaro, the translation service built right into Craft.
Let's hit the links.
-John Morton
Top Stories
Craft CMS is up for 2017 Best CMS for SMB & Best WP Alternative
CMS Critic annual awards are now open for voting. Craft CMS is up in the Best WordPress Alternative 😜 and Best CMS for Small to Medium Business categories. Click here to vote now. (By the way, you can simply not vote in categories you're not familiar with.)
News
All About the New ProPublica Site built on Craft CMS
We worked with a group called Solspace to help us implement the new CMS. This is a complete replacement of the old CMS, we moved off of Expression Engine onto Craft.
Note: This isn't part of an ad, just a nice write up on Craft CMS that happens to include one of this issue's sponsors. Kudos to Solspace though.
Featured Sponsor

Introducing Solspace Freeform Pro!
Need more from Freeform? Freeform Pro includes all of the same features as Freeform, but includes support for popular API integrations, additional fieldtypes (confirmation, date & time, number, phone, rating, regex, website), flexible exporting options, and powerful widgets! Try Freeform Pro today!
Tools, tips, and fundamentals
Craft Twig Cheatsheet for Visual Studio Code
Sean Smith from Caffeine Creations helps VSC coders get their Twig on.
Sponsor

The plugin for professional Craft website translation
Launch multilingual Craft web content faster by eliminating manual copy and paste. Automatically submit Craft web content for professional translation and receive translated content right back into Craft for review and publishing.
Plugged In
GeoCookie
Collect information about a visitor's location based on their IP address and store the information as a cookie.
Craft3 Imageoptimize
ImageOptimize plugin for Craft CMS 3 got a big update last week. It now includes webp
support and a fancy looking field that helps you (and your users) create their image transforms.
It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.
Sublime Text 3.0 is released
I spend more time in Sublime Text than any other program. Version 3.0, after a very long beta, is finally released. (Yes, those are tears of joy.)
Beyond the Bubble
Check out this Speaker Deck by Ben Schwarz on understanding what the target environments for the sites we build really are. Good stuff here.
We must stop optimising for $3000 computers with fast connections.
PhpStorm 7 very slow and sluggish on netbook? Optimize IDE for responsiveness.
Many Craft developers use PHPStorm, but response time is the big complaint I see most often. Here's a link to check out if you're getting more beachball than you can handle.
CSS Weekly
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