Craft Link List (Archive)

Introduction

Out with the old and in with the new.

Happy 2016!

Since we've just closed out 2015, I thought sharing some stats from the first 8 issues of Craft Link List (CLL) here in the intro as a fun way to lead into the new links in this issue.

I post links under various categories so I'll share the top links in each one.

The top clicked link overall (which happened to be in the News category): Craft Usage Statistics

Top clicked Perfecting your technique link: Performance optimization in Craft CMS

Top clicked Tools, tips and fundamentals link: Why do my URLs suddenly have “index.php”?

Top clicked Plugged In link: Craft Sitemap

Top clicked Overheard link: Drupal loses 2

Top clicked Finally... It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting link: Reasons NOT To Use Wordpress.

Pic Puller bites the dust

Also, in personal Craft news, I had to kill off my own Craft plugin at the end of 2015, Pic Puller for Instagram, due to changes in the API rules imposed by Instagram. It was fun while it lasted.

If you'd like to sponsor the newsletter, please let me know.

Now, let's get into the 2016 links. Enjoy.

-John

News

Craft in the Enterprise: The Associated Press

The Associated Press is using Craft CMS. That's big news. (Yes, that's an intentional pun.)

Who uses Craft CMS?

The AP is not the only one using Craft (besides you and me, of course). Straight Up Craft has a handy list to help convince the powers that be that Craft is the real deal for your next project.

Tools, tips, and fundamentals

Craft 2.5 Quick Look

Mijingo covers the 3 top feature of Craft 2.5 in 1 minute.

Running Redactor “I” in Craft 2.5

Craft 2.5 comes with a shiny new copy of Redactor 2 baked in. Would you rather stick with version 1 instead? No problem.

Updating Redactor Configs for Redactor II

If you've got Redactor v1 settings that need to be updated to Redactor II, this docs page will help you out.

Gist for setting permissions for a Craft CMS

Get your CHOWN_USER, CHOWN_GROUP, and BASE_DIR straightened out.

Nystudio107's Yeoman generator

Yeoman generator for Craft CMS installs.

Creating Templates for Each Individual Entry Type

Another find from the official Craft docs. This is the way to do your templates for various entry types.

Plugin + a Feature Request: Quick Fields for Craft

Ever been creating a field layout for an entry type and realize you forgot to create one field? This plugin adds buttons to the field layout that allow you to quickly create fields and field groups on the same page.

Want to see this in the Craft core? Vote for it here.

Perfecting your technique

Notes on Updating Plugins for Craft 2.5

Ben Parizek has collected his "notes as our team upgraded a few plugins to 2.5 and take advantage of the new features and UI updates." Thanks, Ben.

How to upload "illegal" files to Craft.

Last month in Slack someone was trying to upload vCard files into the Craft control panel but the file extension, .vcf, isn't among the allowed file extensions. The trusty Craft documentation came to the rescue with the extraAllowedFileExtensions for Assets config settings.

Craft CLI

Command line interface for Craft CMS.

Craft Commerce : What you absolutely need to know

Media Surgery continues it's video series on Craft CMS with an overview of Craft Commerce.

Plugged In

SEOmatic

A turnkey SEO implementation for Craft CMS.

I haven't used this myself, but it looks impressive and gets praise from the Craft Slack community. It's high on my list for my next site.

Twigutils - an output formatter for Craft

Craft CMS plugin containing numerous functions useful in Twig. Like what?

Format phone numbers
Add 'http' to links when not included
Make a Table Of Contents based on text in a text field

Schematic

Schematic allows you to synchronize your Craft setup over multiple environments

Craft Calendars

Craft Calendars adds full-featured Calendar and Event management to your Craft-powered website.

Minimee for Craft

Minimize, combine & cache your CSS and JS files. Because size (still) does matter.

Fix Me A Link

Obfuscated links to Assets in Craft. URLs expire in 15 minutes so they can't be shared.

Uninstall plugin for Craft CMS

Plugins can malfunction to the point where you can't even access the Admin CP to uninstall them. Khalwat has devised a way to uninstall misbehaving plugins from the command line.

Craft Business Logic plugin template

A handy template for using your own PHP via a custom plugin.

CraftySocialShare

Simple Social Button Plugin for keeping templates clear of random script tags and social button markup.

jSocial

jSocial is a Craft CMS plugin that gives the user the ability to add customizable links to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

It also supports custom images, classes, font awesome icons, fontello icon sets and plain text.

Big Dates plugin for Craft

This plugin gets Craft to show full timestamps for all Post and Expiry dates on Entry indexes in Craft CMS.

Redirect-Manager

Keep all your 301s & 302s managed within Craft. Very useful when using NGINX because you don't have an .htaccess file.

I can vouch for this personally. I'm using it in my own projects.

Craft-reroute

This is another plug-in for handling your redirects. Take your pick. Choice is good.

Expanded Singles

A simple plugin for Craft CMS that alters the Entries Index sidebar to list all Singles, rather than grouping them under a 'Singles' link.

Customizing the control panel for your clients can help them get up to speed quicker.

Be Relevant

A nifty Craft CMS dashboard widget that tells you about potentially outdated entries.

Yii, Twig, PHP & More

What's New in PHP 7

PHP 7 is here and this link will highlight what's new.

Overheard

#craftcms -from:ITNewsWall

Last month, there was a Twitter account spamming the #craftcms hashtag. Andy Gaunt helpfully pointed those annoyed by this activity posted this handy tip on removing that spam from search results. This is a great feature of Twitter to know for the future.

Brandon Kelly contacted the spammer directly and the current spam problem seems to be over. For now.