Introduction

The Dot All after-issue with more #CraftCMS news, tips, & links than should be allowed in a newsletter.
Hello Craft friends! If you made it to Dot All in Montréal, I hope we were able to say hello in person. If you were not there, fear not. This issue is packed with news from the conference.
We start this issue with Brandon’s slides from the keynote. Later in the issue, you’ll find links to many slides from Dot All presentations below. (Video links coming soon!)
There are several links with attendees helpfully sharing their impressions of the conference. As always, there are general Craft tips, plugins, and other goodies.
This issue is so packed, I didn't mention P&T's new office or find room to share all the great Dot All photos. (See what I did there!)
As always, if you’ve got a Craft-related link to share, visit the submit page.
Thank you to this issue’s sponsors.
Need responsive images? Of course, you do. ImageOptimize by NYStudio 107 has got you covered whether you're using Craft's built-in image transforms or a service like Imgix.
Freeform, the form plugin by Solspace, now includes table support along with a host of other handy field types. Check it out before you tackle your next form.
Let’s hit the links.
-John Morton
Top Stories
State of Craft 2019
Brandon’s deck on the State of Craft CMS in 2019 features some impressive numbers:
- 627 plugins in the Craft Plugin store
- $700,000 - the amount of money paid out to plugin developers.
- 148 Craft Partners
- 4.0 - the next major version of Craft
The State of Craft 2019 points to an exciting 2020.
Craft 4 and Craft Cloud Announced at Dot All 2019 | Craft CMS
The big news from Dot All is, predictably, the announcement of the next major version of Craft. The surprise announcement was Craft Cloud, which is “Headless Craft as a service.” For some circumstances, in the future, you may be able to skip devops entirely.
Also revealed in this post is the location of the next Dot All. North America? South Asia? Eastern Europe? Betting is now closed.
Dot All 2020 will take place next September in the "Venice of the North," Amsterdam.
News
Craft 3.3.6
There have been 4 releases of Craft since the previous issue. No major changes in that time, but there are tweaks and bug fixes.
Craft 4 upgrade path for Super Table and Neo
In Discord (message 626359463263207424) on Sept 25, Brandon casually mentioned, “We're actually planning on writing built-in migrators for both Super Table and Neo so it all gets converted to Matrix fields as part of the Craft 4 upgrade.”
That's rather cool.
devMode.fm // Dot All 2019 Conference Recap & Analysis
The devMode.fm crew recaps the Dot All 2019 Conference in Montréal, Canada… joined by Ben Croker and Lindsey DiLoreto. If you couldn’t make it, this podcast is for you!
Highlights from the 2019 Craft CMS Developer
Andrew Armitage shares his highlights from Dot All 2019.
Featured Sponsor

ImageOptimize: Optimized, Responsive Images Made Easy
Automatically create & optimize responsive image transforms, using either native Craft transforms or a service like Imgix, with zero template changes.
Tools, tips, and fundamentals
Impostor Syndrome and the Creative Industry
Jay Collett spoke on Imposter Syndrome. Want to find your own Clance Impostor Phenomenon Score? Click the link and don’t overthink your response. You can do this!
Creating Focal Points in Craft CMS
This 2017 post from Parliament Perspective offers a short guide on how to use the focal point feature in Craft.
Basic SEO functionality for Craft CMS | Craft Snippets
Piotr Pogorzelski discusses how to set up SEO functionality in Craft CMS with pure Twig code or using the Seomate plugin.
Tip: CSS animations and Twig
Piotr also shared a tip on using transition-delay
in your Twig templates.
How to acccess Craft CMS's "helper" classes in Twig templates
What are “helpers”? Go to the Craft CMS docs and type helper
into the search field to see them.
Top Craft CMS Plugins used at MadeByShape
Tom Pickering shared a list of essential Craft plugins used at MadeByShape.
RSS feed for a podcast in Twig
Andrew followed tip above with another for a "JSON feed for a podcast in Twig" here. Then Brandon added a link to the Craft docs showing how to set up a JSON Feed for your site with Element API. (Sidenote: I spend too much time on Twitter.)
Sample gatsby-config.js enabling live preview in Craft CMS
In keeping with the JAMstack theme of Dot All, here is asample gatsby-config.js
enabling live preview in Craft CMS by Mike Pierce.
Perfecting your technique
Using AWS Lambda* and Feed Me to Create an Automated Content Pipeline - Speaker Deck
Juan Ramirez spoke about the power of combining Craft's Feed Me plugin with a Serverless API (via AWS Lambda) using his project Waveguide as an example. Very cool.
Fortifying Craft for High Traffic
Prateek Rungta from Miranj shared his Dot All slide deck. It includes a complete Nginx config on page 154, yes, page 154!, that supercharges the performance of a $40/month VPS server.
Craft in Docker: Everything I've Learnt by Matt Gray
Matt Gray had an impressive presentation at Dot All on Docker. This post is his personal post-mortem of the talk. It shares some of the feedback he's receive, his slides and, in a future update, a link to a video of his presentation.
devMode.fm // Turning knowledge & passion into your own SaaS
In this episode, we talk to Matt Gray about his journey from working at an agency to freelancing to developing his own software as a service (SaaS) called “Servd”.
Matt Gray is ok!
Testing with Craft | Giel Tettelaar - Speaker Deck
Giel Tettelaar from Global Network Group shared slides from his Dot All 2019 presentation on Testing with Craft.
Headless Commerce with Craft CMS and Gatsby
Brian Hanson's Dot All 2019 deck at the link above walks through "how we built a proof of concept using Craft Commerce and Gatsby."
LAMPstack vs. JAMstack
Andrew Welch's presentation helped define the differences between the traditional LAMPstack and the new hotness, the JAMstack.
He even touched on a few other stacks: LEMP, WIMP, MEAN, and even the KRAP stack.
GraphQL Schema Auto-Completion with PhpStorm
The JS GraphQL plugin combined with a little magic will give you full auto-completion and syntax highlighting of GraphQL schemas in PhpStorm.
Getting Technical: Building Complex Craft Plugins
"This post aims to help anyone who is about to embark on building a more complex plugin."
Using Firefox Containers for Web Development
This free post on CraftQuest discusses "one of the challenges of working on a website or web application where there are different account types... while testing and coding" by using Firefox Containers.
Sponsor

Introducing the new Table field type for Freeform Pro!
Freeform 3.5 introduces a variety of new features and improvements. Most exciting of all is the Table field type, which allows you to collect and handle repeating data from users. You can leave the rendering completely to Freeform, or also completely customize it however you wish with the flexible templating options!
Plugged In
Apple News
This plugin provides an Apple News integration for Craft CMS, making it possible to publish your content to iPhone, iPad, and Mac users around the world.
Healthz
This plugin will provide an endpoint that allows health checks on Docker or Kubernetes workflows.
SAML Identity Provider
SAML Identity Provider creates an easy way to do Single Sign-On (SSO) and Single Logout (SLO) in Craft CMS version 3.
Agent
Query the server-side information from user agent data to obtain a user's browser type, version, operating system, device type, and more.
Currency Layer
This is a plugin layer for the Currency Layer API that lets you store and retrieve currency values locally. If you use this in conjunction with Craft Commerce it will populate the conversion rate values for corresponding Payment Currencies.
Overheard
It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.
Check disk space usage on Linux with Ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage)
Matt Stein mentioned that ncdu
"is great+easy for browsing folders by usage". The post linked above will give you a quick overview of how to use it.
Cascadia Code
Cascadia Code... is the latest monospaced font shipped from Microsoft and provides a fresh experience for command line experiences and code editors.
A README for “Simple” Websites?
Angie Herrara talks about the benefits of a README file, and how it can "help you (or some other developer) down the road." h/t Sean Smith
DNS Server Types | Cloudflare
Nevin Lyne shared this link when answering a question DNS. So that you are prepared for your next developer trivia challenge, there are 4 categories of DNS.
- Recursive resolvers,
- Root nameservers
- TLD nameservers
- Authoritative nameservers