Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

You learn something new every day.

To write this newsletter I check out what you and the rest of the prolific Craft community are talking about in Slack, posting on your sites and linking to on Twitter. There are so many ways to approach working with Craft. There are a load of great links waiting for you below.

You'll see there is a sponsored link in this issue. This is the plugin I write and sell. If you're interested in sponsoring a future issue, please get in touch.

Let's dig into issue #6.

-John

News

5 plugins that can help you build better Craft CMS sites

Media Surgery has started a video series on Craft. Episode #2 covers 5 great plugins including Reasons which is featured in this issue in the Plugged In section.

I missed Episode #1 when it came out, but check it out too. Its topic is email and Craft.

Geek Talk: Interview with Developer John D. Wells

John D. Wells talks about e-commerce, frameworks and his favorite CMS. (You probably know the one he's talking about, right?)

Why We Use Craft CMS

Cosmic tells why they use Craft. (That's probably why they titled their post "Why We Use Craft CMS." Smart.)

"With all of the platforms that we’ve worked with - including WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine, Jekyll, Middleman, and Statamic - we’ve always had to make sacrifices between content management, design, and development in one way or another. Then, one day in our never-ending search for something better, we discovered a new CMS from Pixel & Tonic called Craft."

Featured Sponsor

Pic Puller for Instagram

Pic Puller easily integrates Instagram into Craft.

Add automatically-updated image and video feeds for your site. Use the Instagram image browser field-type to add Instagram images to individual entries.

Tools, tips, and fundamentals

Retrieving entries based on lightswitch setting

If you haven't checked out Craft Cookbook, here's a nice little example of the useful topics you can find there. Handy stuff.

CraftCMS-Boilerplate

Rylan Bowers shares his boilerplate for getting a Craft site build up and running quickly including a gulp workflow.

How can I translate static text in my templates?

Sometimes copy you need to translate comes from a non-translatable field in the CP (such as the Site Name), and other times it’s hard-coded right into the templates. So how do you translate that stuff? Another good link from the docs.

If you're interested in this topic, be sure to check Translate in the Plugged In section of this month's newsletter.

Perfecting your technique

The Nearly-Headless CMS

This post doesn't mention Craft specifically, but the concepts do apply when you consider Craft and the Element API plugin. This post is a companion to the Love Your CMS video mentioned in the top story section above.

Migrating Content from ExpressionEngine to Craft

Last month in Slack I asked for posts about bring an ExpressionEngine site's content into Craft. I ultimately didn't need to go down that path, but if you are, here's a post to get started on your journey.

Minifying Craft HTML templates

You minify your CSS and your JS, but how about your actual templates in Craft? What would Angry Brad do?

Database migrations for WordPress, ExpressionEngine and Craft

Working on a site with more than one developer? DMLogic writes on how to share database changes between team members during site development.

Plugged In

Reasons - conditional fields for your control panel

This is really cool. Reasons makes it possible to add simple conditionals in order to hide or show fields based on other fields' values. According to M. Mikkel Rummelhoff, its implementation is very much inspired by Advanced Custom Fields for Wordpress.

Craft Videoembed

Craft plugin to generate an embed URL from a YouTube or Vimeo URL.

Translate

This handy plug in parses your templates for translated strings, i.e. Craft::t(), Craft.t() and ""|t(), and generates a list which you can translate for every language installed on your site.

Import CSV

Plugin that allows you to import data from CSV files.

This is the plugin mentioned in the "Migrating Content from ExpressionEngine to Craft" article in this issue.

Craft Content Stats

Add a quick visual overview for the content in your Craft site.

Craft Admin Bar

Simple front-end shortcut bar for users logged into Craft CMS. (Sort of like you see in Wordpress without needing to wade into Wordpress. Ick.)

Craft Sitemap

Google wants you to have a sitemap.xml, so you need to have a sitemap.xml. Josh Baker has just made that a bit easier.

SuperSort

Michael Rog (co-host of Craft Podcast) helps get your arrays in shape by sorting "elements by any accessible object value — including values from Matrix blocks, related elements, math calculations, etc."

Printmaker

Michael Rog must not sleep. Here's another plugin from him that helps you output a PDF from any template in just one line of code.

Anchors plugin for Craft

Automatically add linkable anchors to HTML headings in Craft. From some company called Pixel and Tonic... every heard of them?

Tiny Image

Tiny Image is a plugin which allows you to provide a clean and easy to use interface for clients to compress their images using the TinyPNG API.

Overheard

Something horrible happened.

Feature Request: Built In Publication Approval Workflow

The feature requests for Craft have been showcased here before. This request for a workflow for entry approval was mentioned in Slack early in September. I know I've had clients request this feature before. Vote early. Vote often.

It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.

The Stiff Side of CMS? New Study Shows Brands Struggling to Integrate, Adapt & Learn

This post reports on a study of CMS's in large enterprises.

41% of respondents describe learning to use a CMS and training others as a challenge: 35% say the challenge is “moderate,” while 6% call it a “major challenge.”

A RequireJS, Backbone, and Bower Starter Template - YouTube

RequireJS is a frequent topic in the Slack forum. Recently this video was pointed out as a good place to get an overview of it. Seemed like a good link to end with this month because you can never know too much. Right?

Issue 6 October 1st 2015