Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

The Craft graph, updates-a-go-go, tips, plugins and more.

Have you checked out the Craft usage numbers lately lately? Impressive.

This graph, Craft’s 1,500 stars on Github, plus the increased activity in the Craft Slack jobs channel all suggest a bright future for Craft developers. Want more? Check out the 5,213 sites link in The Craft Advantage section.

In this jam-packed issue, you'll find recent updates for both Craft 3.1.x and Craft 3.0.x. The Craft community has come through once again with more tips, plugins and more. There are also numerous links to the expanding Craft Guides section in the docs.

Did you create a Craft tool, post or plugin? Submit your link suggestion here. ✏️

Thank you to this issue's sponsors. They make this newsletter possible.

fortrabbit is an official Craft hosting partner. When you choose them to host your site, Craft-expertise is part of the package. Check them out.

Solspace Freeform Payments adds the ability to collect payment through Craft using Freeform. It’s now just $59.

Let's hit the links.

-John Morton

News

Craft 3.1.7

We're now ten releases from 3.1.0, including minor updates.

As the previous issue of Craft Link List was published, Craft 3.1.0 had just been released. Version 3.1 introduced many new features, changes, and improvements, prompting a warning in the changelog to be extra careful with your update process.

If you’ve waited to update, things are looking good now. As always though, database backups are your friend.

Craft 3.0.40 released

Craft 3.1.x is out, but if you're sticking with what you know in the 3.0.x branch, you also have an update which includes the new update command that you can run from the command line to update your Craft install to 3.1 and higher.

According to Brandon, the primary purpose of the 3.0.x updates are to ease the transition to 3.1.x.

Odds & Ends

This post from the Craft CMS team announces Craft 2 and Commerce 1 have extended "end-of-life" dates. Plus Commerce 2 Gateway Plugins are now free.

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Tools, tips, and fundamentals

Swiff

A collection of multi-environment, time-saving command line tools.

Troubleshooting Failed Updates | Craft CMS

Craft Guides, an expanding section of the Craft documentation, has a page dedicated to failed updates. Hopefully, you never need to read this page, but if you do, click the link above.

Project Config | Craft 3 Documentation

Now that 3.1 is official, it's time to review the docs on working with Project Configs.

Inside Soft Deletes in Craft 3.1 | CraftQuest

One new feature of Craft 3.1 is soft deletes, making entry deletion similar to using the trash or recycling bin on a computer.

This video from CraftQuest gives you all the details. You can watch this video for free with a free CraftQuest account.

Environmental Configuration Documentation [Updated]

The differences between environmental variable (i.e. $ROOT_URL) and an alias (i.e. @rootUrl) can be confusing. The Craft documentation page for them has been updated to highlight their differences and provides examples of how to use them.

How to Make Changes to php.ini

This Craft CMS guide will help you site fine-tune your server's php.ini file.

How to Access the Control Panel from a Subdomain

PhpStorm 2019.1 Early Access Program is now open

PhpStorm users rejoice. Twig debugging is coming soon.

Shuttle | A simple SSH shortcut menu for macOS

To use SSH you've got credentials to remember. If you don't use an SSH config file or just like a GUI, check out Shuttle. You can add non-SSH terminal commands as well.

See what files changed on your server in past 24 hours

Recently in Slack, a user reported a denial of service attack on a site. After it was over, one suggestion was to run the following command on the server to see what files changed in the past 24 hours.

find /directory_path -mtime -1 -ls

Still concerned about the safety of your server? If you're on Nginx, check out Andrew's recently updated Nginx config for Craft which has some protections you can add to your basic config. This deep-link highlights customization to stop bots trying to login to a non-existent Wordpress admin panel on your Craft site.

devMode.fm // CSS & CMS Musings with Eric Meyer

In this episode of devMode.fm CSS legend Eric Meyer talks about the early days of CSS, and how it almost died and more. Craft CMS gets a shoutout as well.

How can I get parameters in twig?

{% if craft.request.getQueryString('success') %}

Perfecting your technique

Craft CMS on Nanobox: Part 2 – DRY-RUN a.k.a Local Staging

Oto Hlincik continues his series on Nanobox + Craft local development.

Upgrading Craft 2 to Craft 3 with A&M Forms

Sean Smith, aka Caffeine Creations, talks about his Craft 2 to Craft 3 upgrade experience.

A WIP cost calculation for upgrading a site from Craft 2 to Craft 3 ⭐️

If you're trying to price out the cost of upgrading a Craft 2 site to Craft 3, you're not alone. This Tweet, shared by @mijewe, is a first take on calculating those costs.

The Anatomy of Dark Mode (A Craft CMS plugin)

Matt Gray is back with another Craft post, this time he discusses the building of his Dark Mode plugin.

Turn Craft 3 into a headless CMS ⭐️

This post discusses how to "use CraftQL to access content in Craft, and Gatsby to render it into static HTML."

Field Notes: Brand Identity and Ecommerce with Jim Coudal and Noah Bernsohn

The Commerce Minded podcast discusses “why Craft Commerce was the best fit for the Field Notes site.”

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Plugged In

Craft Mixins

The Macro Kit plugin provides access to a large number of useful Twig functions that can be easily imported into your front-end templates for use in Craft CMS.

Molecule

Molecule allows you to grab Twig components from outside the template folder. This is useful if you want to keep your Twig partials, CSS, React/Vue files, etc in a single component folder.

Async (Background) Queue

This plugin from Oliver Stark replaces Craft's default queue handler and moves queue execution to a non-blocking background process. The command craft queue/run gets executed right after you push a job to the queue.

Updating Plugins for Craft 3.1 ⭐️

All the things you should consider as you test your plugins for Craft 3.1 compatibility.

View Count

Count the number of times an element has been viewed.

Open Weather

Integrate weather information from any location right into your Craft CMS 3 website.

Gonzo — The Pattern Library (Beta)

The Gonzo plugin helps you easily create a pattern library in Craft.

Communicator ⭐️

Will Browar has a new free widget set that replaces 3 widgets that were part of his Guide plugin. It allows you to have a site's Changelog in a widget. A Global widget, that allows communication to all users of a Craft site in the control panel. Lastly, it includes an Email Support widget so your users can reach out for help and automatically include their browser details.

The Craft Advantage

Craftwork: 5,213 Sites Built with Craft CMS

Judd Lyon created an extensive, sortable list of enterprise-level sites that use Craft CMS (as of early Jan 2019), ranked by AHREFS Domain Rating, Majestic Citation Flow, and Mozscape Domain Authority. This data could be very useful when selling your own clients on a Craft CMS solution.

Yii, Twig, PHP & More

Emulating Components in Twig - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Jake Dohm takes the idea of DRY JavaScript components and applies that thinking to Twig.

All Twig functions can take named arguments! 🎉

h/t Andrew

If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition. If you deliver solutions informally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience. And if you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own.