Introduction

Craft tips, plugins, news and more for everyone.

Hey Crafters. Welcome to another issue of Craft Link List. Highlights include some details about what "active installs" means, making Craft 2 plugins written without composer easier, advice on hosting and more.

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Let's hit the links.

-John Morton

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News

Regarding the "Active Installs" count in the plugin store

Curious about the Active installs count in the Plugin Store? You are not alone. Here are answers to your burning questions.

1) Does the number reported as active installations count only 1 per site license (shared across multiple installs across different environments), or will the count be inflated if the developer has the plugin installed on dev/staging/production environments (so it’d count as 2 or 3 instead of 1).

once per unique Craft license key

2) Does the count include installs that were done via the command line?

yep

3) When someone uninstalls the plugin, does the active install count decrease?

yep

4) If the plugin was uninstalled but not removed completely, does this plugin count towards the active install count?

only counts if the plugin is installed & enabled

5) Anything else interesting about active install count we might want to know?

right now the count does not decrease if a Craft license goes MIA, as we don't really know if that is because the license has been discarded, or they just haven't logged into the Control Panel in a while. We probably need to come up with a threshold where if we haven't heard from a Craft license in X days/months, we consider it inactive and stop including its plugins when tallying up active plugin counts. Maybe 3 or 6 months?

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Tools, tips, and fundamentals


Clear stalled pending tasks

To clear stalled pending tasks you can safely truncate the queue table in the database. Don’t delete the table, but rather truncate it, which removes all of the rows in the table. You can do this via the command line or a GUI tool. (h/t Andrew)

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Craft 3 logging

Yo, plugin devs. Here's how to write to the Craft logs in your plugins.

Craft::error($message);
Craft::info($message);
Craft::warning($message);
Craft::getLogger()->log($message);

Although mentioned previously, you might be interested in logging to a separate file instead.

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How to host your Craft web site.

Hosting of your Craft site is a fundamental part of actually having a Craft site. It’s a common question and Nevin Lyne, aka the guy who founded Arcustech, had a helpful and succinct suggestion recently in Slack.

“If you are not well versed in setting up servers or want someone else to manage the server side for you, take a look at managed hosting from someone like us at https://www.arcustech.com/managed/craftcms-hosting/ or the other Craft hosting partners at https://www.fortrabbit.com/craft-hosting. Other options would be a server deployment service like https://forge.laravel.com/. For a good listen on hosting check out https://devmode.fm/episodes/web-hosting-with-arcustechs-nevin-lyne podcast episode, or https://nystudio107.com/blog/web-hosting-for-agencies-freelancers for a great blog post.

Arcustech and Fortrabbit are both Craft Hosting partners as well.”

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