Issue 7: Go Speed Crafter, Go!

Introduction

Go Speed Crafter, Go!

Each month a theme seems to present itself for Craft Link List. This month speed ties most of the links together. The issue kicks off with some news about the magic that happens when you combine Craft and PHP 7. Spoiler alert: impressive speed boost.

In the rest of this issue, you'll find of links on improving your development workflow. There is a Yeoman generator for Craft, a set of Craft code snippets for Atom, 2 different form creation plugins, and nearly every other link will make you a more efficient Craft developer.

If you'd like to sponsor an upcoming issue, please get in touch.

On to the links!

-John

News

Brandon Kelly on fostering a strong Craft community

Brandon shared this graph that shows Craft's "support volume over the past 12mos. Revenue has grown 70% in that time," and adds that "fostering community support works."

I will add my own spin here as well: no noticeable increase in support requests as Craft sales jump by 80% is probably due of the quality of Craft CMS itself. When things work this well, they don't need as much support. Nice work, P+T.

If you're not there already, join the active Craft community in Craft Slack and on the Craft Stack Exchange site.

Featured Sponsor

Pic Puller for Instagram

Quickly add an Instagram to your Craft site with Pic Puller for Instagram. It supports a variety of different feeds (a users, a tags, liked image) and includes a fieldtype to include Instagram media in your entries.

Recent updates include :

Support for non-square images and videos
Support for Instagram's new "low-bandwidth" videos

Tools, tips, and fundamentals

Yeoman Generator for Craft

Get your starter site up quickly with Trond Sørås’ updated Craft workflow. It now uses Gulp instead of Grunt.

How do I fix a “stuck” task?

Occasionally a task in your control panel will get "stuck." Get it moving again with this handy link directly from the docs.

Craft CMS Snippets

Do you code with Atom? If so, check out this collection of snippets to streamline your Craft + Atom workflow.

Filters in Twig and Craft

Mijingo posts about filter fundamentals. You may already be familiar with filters, but the article is a quick read and may remind you why you love Craft so much.

Widen search to include more results

The gist linked above will allow you to widen a search within Craft to include more results (i.e. show matches of only one word even if multiple are provided, and matching parts of words).

This is probably not a good idea for high traffic sites, but a blessing for standard ones.

Do you need something like this in the official Craft build? If so, vote for it in the here in official feature requests area on the Craft site.

Using Categories in Craft CMS

"Let’s say you have a website that displays recipes for beer brewing..." Ok, Mijingo, you've got my attention.

Want to know the ins and out of categories in Craft? Check out another good Mijingo post on Craft fundamentals.

Contact Form in Craft CMS

More from Mijingo. This time they're teaching the world how to create a simple contact form in Craft for free. They offer a full range of paid course too. Lots of good stuff there.

Differences between Craft and WordPress

WordPress vs. Craft, the good parts and the bad parts in one convenient post.

Mats Mikkel wraps it up with "the #1 pro for me w/ Craft vs. WordPress is that even with far less experience, I tend to work much faster in Craft."

How do you get a matrix editor into frontend of your site?

Matrix is one of the best things ever™ about Craft. How can you get that to work on the front end of your site though? Good question.

Why Shape Loves Craft CMS

Shape loves Craft and they want to tell you why. It's a good read if you're trying to convince a client why you want to use Craft to build their site.

What is Craft? (You probably know this quite well already but...)

Has someone asked you what Craft CMS is? Jérôme Coupé has written up a thorough overview of Craft with overviews of other CMS's to follow.

Perfecting your technique

The Tech Perspective on "Why Craft?"

Episode 5 of Craft.Podcast covers Craft's technical merits and explains how Craft adds value to projects from a developer perspective.

Lazy loading channel content in Craft CMS

Craft may blazingly fast on a shiny new PHP 7 server, but lazy loading can make your site feel even faster for your users. Codesion shares a tutorial to get you thinking about the benefits of lazy loading content.

Video: Capture your 404 pages and fix them

Media Surgery continues their video series on Craft. Episode 3 covers catching those pesky 404 pages using Google Analytics. (Also see 404 Finder in the Plugged In section in this issue for another approach.)

Ansible Deploy CraftCMS to Cloud VPS

This is a quick guide & set of example Ansible playbooks for automated deployment of a CraftCMS installation to a VPS server such as a Digital Ocean 'droplet' or Vultr VPS.

Plugged In

404 Finder Plugin

You may have watched the video mentioned earlier in this month's issue on 404 errors. Here's a plugin worth checking out on the same topic.

404 Finder promises to "keep track of where you users are running into errors on your website" and the plugin "provides the ability to mark 404 errors as spam and to hide them from your 404 error list."

AssetSubfolderAccess

This plugin makes it possible to limit user groups to only access certain subfolders of your asset sources.

Buffer for Craft

A simple plugin for integrating Buffer into Craft CMS websites, for sending out social updates from Twig templates, via a trigger URL, or from other plugins.

Disqus for Craft

If you're including comments on your site, you should probably check the docs on integrating Discuss, but you might also check out this plugin that's "real usefulness... is that it takes care of the Single Sign On (SSO) integration with your Craft site." Faster and simpler for a user? Yes, please.