Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

More news on Craft 3.2 & Craft 4, the end of Pic Puller, Craft tips & more.

Welcome to another issue of Craft Link List. If you have a link to submit to a future issue head over to the submission page.

What's in this issue?

Craft 3.2 is getting closer and details continue to emerge. There is an important Stripe Plugin update for EU users in the plugins section. There are 2 great articles in The Craft Advantage section. Also, Pic Puller is going away.

Thank you to this issue's sponsor, Solspace. If you've got a form, they've got a plugin for you.

Freeform is the form-building power tool for creating forms in Craft.

Solspace has also recently released a light-weight form builder with Express Forms .

Thank you to Jalen Davenport, proofreader and friend, for help on this issue.

-John Morton

News

Craft 3.1.27 released

Craft 3.1.27 seems like a relatively minor bug fix update. One Craft 3.1.26 feature of note: “Improved the performance of background jobs.” Read the changelog for full details.

Tags & Categories going away in Craft 4

In Discord last week Brandon mentioned a few Craft 4 details:

Tags & Categories are going away in Craft 4. They'll be converted to Entries during the upgrade process.
The "Entries" section will be renamed to "Content", so in the end, your entries, categories, and tags will all reside together as "Content" elements. Craft is a content management system after all.

Craft Commerce 2.1.6 released.

Commerce 2.1.6 introduces new minQty and maxQty variant query params. It also includes a few bug fixes.

Instagram API changes and the winding down of Pic Puller

Besides writing Craft Link List, I’ve been the creator of Pic Puller for Craft for many years. Last week I decided to stop development on it due to changes in the Instagram/Facebook API. This post goes into some detail on the decision.

Pic Puller is going to live on a farm.

Featured Sponsor

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Tools, tips, and fundamentals

How to use Laravel Mix in your CraftCMS project

Starting Craft has a helpful post on getting Laravel Mix configured for your Craft site build.

Sortable Categories on per Entry basis

This question about sorting categories appeared around the same time Brandon mentioned the change in categories in an upcoming Craft 4 release mentioned in the News section above.

One way around this limitation is to use a channel of entries in place of categories since it is possible to drag and drop the order of related entries in an entries field.

RespImageLint ⭐️

RespImageLint, i.e. responsive image linting, is a bookmarklet that checks images of a webpage against a list of common mistakes and best practices. Just run the bookmarklet and see if it detects any problems with your images.

Ellipsis pagination component for Craft CMS

Craft Snippets, aka Piotr Pogorzelski, is back with a new tip on making a useful pagination Twig macro.

Craft tip: object-position & focal point

Jake Dohm shared this tip on using the object-position CSS property the focal point set on image tags in Craft.

Also, see the Craft docs for the asCss argument for use with the focalPoint method.

Craft tip: Contact Form plugin + timestamp

Thanks, Andrew.

Securing Credentials with Environment Variables

If you’re a CraftQuest subscriber, check out this short video on security.

Tailwind CSS v1 released

The Tailwind utility-first CSS framework is popular in the Craft community and is now officially at version 1. With its official release there comes an upgrade guide in case you've been using the 0.x version for your projects.

Simple patches plugin for Composer

A composer plugin to add patches to packages. For a quick hotfix or similar without having to wait for an official release of the package.

Perfecting your technique

Importing Entries into a Multi-lingual Craft CMS Website

Sean Smith from Caffeine Creations walks through importing entries into a Craft CMS multilingual site so that each entry is associated with its corresponding alternate language entry.

Team Workflow with Project Config in Craft CMS 3

Plugin settings can't be set on the server when using project config, use environment variables in the plugin configuration file to workaround it.

LightWallet intro at Google I/O

Katie Hempenius introduces LightWallet, a performance budget tool for Lighthouse. Here's a link to the performance budget tool which calculates the "time to interactive" for your page.

Read more about custom performance budgets you can set up via JSON files. This tweet offers a snapshot of what this all means.

A Gatsby/Craft Q & A on Twitter

This short back and forth on Gatsby and Craft covers a lot of basic questions on why you’d build a site with these tools.

Craft tip: Surname of the last editor?

Q: Can you output the name of the last user to edit a channel entry if different from the author?

A: See the screenshot answer in this Tweet

Using craft.query() for a Custom Query

Another good link for CraftQuest subscribers.

Choosing the Right Ecommerce Platform with Dave Ritter of Ritter Knight Creative

Learn how Craft Commerce works for clients with established business logic.

Sponsor

Solspace Express Forms starts at just $29!

Introducing Express Forms, the intuitive and lightweight form builder that gets the job done but doesn’t get in your way. It’s a complete solution with unlimited email notifications, field types and validation, spam protection, managing and exporting submission data, popular API integrations, flexible templating and more! It was developed with a "developer first" mentality, so it’s also highly extendable. Curious how it compares with Freeform? Check out the comparison chart here.

Plugged In

Stripe 2.0 for Craft Commerce

We just released Stripe for Craft Commerce 2.0.0, which introduces a new “Payment Intents” gateway that supports 3D Secure 2.

🚨 EU merchants must switch to Payment Intents/3DS2 by 14 September, per PSD2.

Knock Knock

Password protect your entire Craft website front-end with a single password. A fast and easy way to lock down access to your website, without worrying about Apache or Nginx configuration.

Self licenses manager

If you've created a plugin that is for sale in the Craft Store, you can create "free" licenses for yourself with this plugin. Another option is Craftnet-cli, a command line interface allowing you to do the same thing.

Element Link

For those occasions when what you want is not the element edit modal, but the actual edit page.

Sprout SEO for Solspace Calendar

Add a Metadata (Sprout SEO) field to your Calendar Event Field Layout to map your search, social sharing, and structured data metadata.

Azure Blob Remote Volume

Azure Blob Remote Volume plugin for Craft CMS 3.x

Craft Dynamic Fields

Populate Craft fields with dynamic data using the power of Twig.

Commerce Admin Orders

Create orders directly from within the control panel.

GDPR Cookie Consent

A full-featured GDPR cookie plugin.

The Craft Advantage

Craft and the art of content management ⭐️

Seamus Holman from Gridwork shares why his studio builds on Craft CMS in this well written and beautifully designed post.

Craft vs. Wordpress: The Definitive Guidestar ⭐️

If you or your client is on the fence about whether to use Craft CMS or Wordpress for an upcoming site build, this excellent post will make the decision much easier. Spoiler: you'll probably end up choosing Craft.

Yii, Twig, PHP & More

PHP Approves Short Arrow Functions

// traditional PHP function format
$extended = function ($c) use ($callable, $factory) {
    return $callable($factory($c), $c);
};

// with arrow function:
$extended = fn($c) => $callable($factory($c), $c);