Introduction
Craft 3 Falling Into Place: News, Tips, Plugins and More.
Welcome to October. This is Dot All month, Oct 22-23, specifically. In case you're looking to join a bunch of Craft CMS people to learn and have some fun, you can still attend.
This issue has the usual mix of news, tips and plugins for your favorite CMS. I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you to fortrabbit and Freeform Pro by Solspace.
Let's hit the links.
-John Morton
Craft Link List
Top Stories
7 Reasons to Attend Dot All
Trying to convince yourself (or your employer) that Dot All is where you should be later this month? Give this a read.
craftcms.com
News
Craft 3 Beta 29 (and 28 and 27) released
Beta 29 moves Craft 3 closer to final with more fixes and the ASCII art you see above to make your terminal happy every time you install Craft 3.
Beta 27 included support for a CRAFT_LICENSE_KEY_PATH PHP constant so you can customize where your license lives. Beta 28 came out almost immediately after 27 and fixed a few loose ends.
Regarding the securityKey setting in Craft 3 beta 27
Also of note in Craft 3 beta 27 is the new securityKey requirement. Your newly created Craft 3 sites should automatically generate this key into your .env file. Why is this happening? "Soon we will start encrypting sensitive DB data with it (like email passwords) that will be rendered useless if you lose/change the security key." Security is good.
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fortrabbit.com
Tools, tips, and fundamentals
Craft 3 Composer Install Valet Driver
Do you use Valet with Craft? If you're writing a custom driver for Valet (instead of the default Craft driver included with Valet) check out this Gist on Github.
github.com
How do you add HTML attributes when using the markdown filter?
This StackExchange post suggests a few options.
stackexchange.com
explainshell.com
What does wget --mirror --convert-links --html-extension --wait=2 -o log https://site.com mean? That link above will explain.
As to what this command does, it generates a set of static html files for the whole website that you could put on a web server. I gotta write that down somewhere.
explainshell.com
What is a safe number of related entries before performance is hindered?
"It depends but..."
stackexchange.com
Extracting a YouTube ID from a URL with Twig
This is a post from my own blog. It shows how I extract YouTube IDs from a YouTube URL that my clients paste into their Craft control panel.
supergeekery.com
Perfecting your technique
Sass mixins for the Craft CMS Control Panel
Plugins that need to extend the Craft CMS Control Panel can use this library and import _mixins.sass into their Sass files, giving them the same mixins and variables used by core Control Panel templates.
Craft CMS — Create custom share images with your company logo
David Hellmann shows how to make Craft CMS jump through some hoops.
davidhellmann.com
Sponsor
Introducing Solspace Freeform Pro!
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solspace.com
Plugged In
Commerce Email Invoice
Superbig is out with another plugin to make your Craft adventure more productive. This plugin lets you attach Craft Commerce invoices as PDF to order emails.
superbig.co
GTmetrix
GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your entries load and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize them.
github.com
Spruce Lee
Scan and purge unused assets. Cole Henley, the author of this plugin, says to be aware this is only in the "alpha/beta" stage of release and to not use it in production yet.
github.com
Eager Beaver
Allows you to eager load elements from auto-injected Entry elements on demand from your templates.
github.com
Knock Knock
Password protect your entire Craft website with a single password. A fast and easy way to lock down access to your website, without worrying about Apache or Nginx configuration.
github.com
Table Maker
Let your users define their own table columns with this plugin from Supercool.
supercooldesign.co.uk
Order Navigation
Another Superbig plugin. Quickly move to the next or previous Commerce order in line.
superbig.co
The Craft Advantage
Overheard
It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.
Responsive Images 101, Part 5: Sizes
Since this is Part 5 there are other pieces to read too, but the “sizes” parameter is the one that seems the one that requires the most explanation.
cloudfour.com
Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers
You don’t have to be old school to benefit from this article. I do love the advice mentioned at the end of the article on learning anything new: “First do it, then do it right, then do it better.”
postlight.com
Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today — Philip Walton
Or, how to cut about 50% of JS code size for modern browsers.
philipwalton.com
Introducing Atom-IDE
GitHub, in collaboration with Facebook, are pleased to announce the launch of Atom-IDE - a set of optional packages to bring IDE-like functionality to Atom.
atom.io
The Revenue Growth Habit
There was a good discussion in Slack a couple weeks ago about keeping your business afloat. The book The Revenue Growth Habit: The Simple Art of Growing Your Business by 15% in 15 Minutes Per Day by Alex Goldfayn was mentioned as a good resource.
amazon.com