Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

Craft tips, plugins, stars and Berlin.

We're still a couple months away from the official Craft 3 release date, but the Github Craft repo is already over 1000 stars. Plus we've got a bit of news regarding the next Dot All, coming in September.

The tide seems to be turning here in link-land to favor Craft 3 content as well. Most of the news, tips and plugins have a Craft 3 focus to them. There are still Craft 2 goodies in here, but, thankfully, there is no mention of Craft 4. (Just keep swimming, my friend, we'll get there.)

Thanks to fortrabbit for sponsoring this issue!

Let's hit the links.

-John Morton

News

Craft CMS 2.6.3006

Also check the change notes from the previous update, v 3005, as well. Users’ field layouts can now have multiple tabs.

Top Shelf Craft acquires SquareBit's plugins: Charge, SearchPlus, Shortlist, and Maps

Fans of the Craft plugin Charge, SearchPlus, and Shortlist there is good news for you. Top Shelf Craft has got you covered for Craft 2 support and Craft 3 versions. Congrats, TSC!

Featured Sponsor

Craft CMS Hosting Partner

fortrabbit is affordable, easy-to-use, scalable, and super developer-friendly. Regardless of the size of your project, fortrabbit takes care of the AWS heavy lifting allowing you to focus on development.

Tools, tips, and fundamentals

How Craft License Enforcement Works

Craft Docs: About "aliases" in Craft 3 ⭐️

In addition to the Craft doc above, you may also want to check out the Yii docs on aliases as well:

“Aliases are used to represent file paths or URLs so that you don't have to hard-code absolute paths or URLs in your project.”

Docker Dev Stack

Bert Oost shared his Docker Dev Stack last week. It supports local development of Craft CMS projects via Docker images (with NginX, PHP7.1, MySQL etc.) using Traefik to register your project-domain. You have to do the DNS yourself.

About “Happy Paths” and Craft

In general the execution of a method should only make it all the way to the end if everything went as expected. That's a "happy path" and is part of the Craft CMS coding guideline. Check the link for some examples.

Module support added to pluginfactory.io ⭐️

pluginfactory.io now allows you to create Modules for Craft CMS 3 as well as plugins.

How can I set dynamic Base URL in sites setting in Craft 3?

Another option mentioned in Slack directly was:

// Set the environmental variables
'custom' => array(
        'basePath' => getenv('CRAFTENV_BASE_PATH'),
        'baseUrl' => getenv('CRAFTENV_BASE_URL'),
        'rootUrl' => getenv('CRAFTENV_SITE_URL'),
),

Soon after this issue went out, Andrew told me he's actually updated how he does this using an alias now that Craft 3 RC7 supports them. Check out this link of Github with the full details:

https://craftcms.stackexchange.com/questions/23440/craft-3-how-can-i-set-dynamic-base-url-in-sites-setting/

When Twig expects a string but you have a variable.

Imagine you are trying to merge a bunch of items into an array and tomorrowDate is a variable, not text. The following Twig would fail.

{% set groupedEventItems = groupedEventItems|merge({ tomorrowDate: eventItem }) %}

How do you get tomorrowDate to be read as a variable and not just text? Use parentheses to make Twig recognize tomorrowDate as a variable, like this:

{% set groupedEventItems = groupedEventItems|merge({ (tomorrowDate): eventItem }) %}

And Jake Dohm also mentioned this "works in other contexts, not just merge, where Twig expects a string and you have a variable."

Installing Composer on OS X

Perfecting your technique

How do I load composer dependencies for a Yii module that's in my site repo?

Structuring a React App for a CMS

Unlike a framework such as Angular, React does not impose any architectural constraints on you. I like the flexibility this allows. However, when building a large scale, app if there isn’t any form to the application it becomes even more difficult to modify the app. These ideas aren't just for React. They can be adapted for use with any frontend library or framework.

Sponsor

Pic Puller: The Instagram plugin for Craft CMS 2 & 3

Pic Puller brings your Instagram media into Craft CMS with one-click authorization. Full documentation and code samples get you up and running quickly. Learn more at picpuller.com or find it in the plugin store in your Craft 3 control panel.

Plugged In

Architect for Craft 3 (beta 1)

The architect can import and export just about anything in craft that needs to be configured by importing and exporting content models from Craft CMS using JSON. This the new version for Craft 3; it's still pretty fresh.

Craft 3 GTmetrix

GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your entries load and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimise them.

Entry Instructions for Craft 3

A simple fieldtype to add instructions.

Sidebar Toggle

Add the ability to hide the meta sidebar on element entry screens.

Serve Secret

Craft CMS plugin for downloading of secret files.

swordfish

Craft 3 plugin backwards compatibility and maintenance for 2.x

There's an interesting question in Stack Exchange about how "developers maintain two plugins where the core functionality is essentially the same code." If this applies to you, check out this SE discussion.

Craft Campaign

Craft Campaign is a plugin for Craft 3 that allows you to create, send, manage and monitor email campaigns, right within the control panel.

Craft3 Fallback Site

This plugin allows each site to fall back to another site when a requested element cannot be found. This allows multi-site installations (typically for multiple languages) to gracefully fall back to existing content if available.

There is also a version available for Craft 2.

Redactor Image Position

Craft plugin that adds position field to Redactor image edit modal.

Similar

Similar for Craft lets you find elements, Entries, Categories, Commerce Products, etc, that are similar, based on... other related elements.

Craft Notifications

Send notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including mail and Slack. Notifications may also be stored in a database so they may be displayed in your web interface.

Width Fieldtype

This plugin allows users to choose from predefined widths to give clients flexibility, but not too much.

The Craft Advantage

Part 1: Why we love Craft CMS

Electric Putty writes about why they use Craft.

It's not you, it (was) me.

In a discussion of CMSs in general, James Greig shared a link to his personal newsletter where he discusses "Exploring modern CMS options".

Wordpress is like stuffing all of your clothes into shoeboxes, and then stacking them up against the wall. It's a free solution, but you end up stuffing your clothes into spaces they don't belong.