Dot All 2021

Day 1

• State of Craft
• Craft, Web Vitals and You
• Hap­py Team, Hap­py Clients — a 10,000 ft View of a 1,000 Hour Project
• Build­ing with Bumpers
• Use Entry Types for the Love of…Clients

Day 2

• State of Craft Commerce
• The Sev­en Dead­ly Sins of Author Experience
• Get­ting Start­ed with Man­u­al Acces­si­bil­i­ty Testing
• Launch­ing Craft in Crit­i­cal, High-Traf­fic Situations

Clos­ing Keynote #

by Hen­ri Helvetica

Launch­ing Craft in Crit­i­cal, High-Traf­fic Sit­u­a­tions #

by Sue Mal­o­mo from Hap­py Cog

Talk abstract:

Many of our sites are very high­ly traf­ficked and/​or have sig­nif­i­cant traf­fic spikes, and have a lot of com­plex func­tion­al­i­ty that isn’t always very easy to just throw a page cache on top of. We’ll take a look at how to opti­mize Craft in these sce­nar­ios and keep the site super fast, and how to live-debug issues if there are prob­lems post-launch.

• Back-end devel­op­er at Hap­py Cog
• Review­ing a recent project to show how they made improve­ments on per­for­mance after a rough launch:
  • Craft CMS
  • Nuxt
  • Stripe
  • Rev­enue­Cat
  • Spark­Post
  • MailChimp
  • Ter­raform for infra
• used cus­tom API mod­ule and Ele­ment API, con­sumed by Nuxt front-end and native iOS and Android apps
• Site launched and BOOM things went south quickly 
  • 
• They got to work opti­miz­ing the site
  • opti­miz­ing queries
  • added serv­er-side caching via Redis
  • Craft caching for logged-in users
  • where they couldn’t opti­mize they lazy-loaded data to help mit­i­gate the size of the ini­tial payload
  • mea­sur­able and notable results from the optimizations
  • 
  • 

Get­ting Start­ed with Man­u­al Acces­si­bil­i­ty Test­ing #

By Lupe Camacho

Talk abstract:

Auto­mat­ed test­ing tools are great for find­ing and squash­ing crit­i­cal acces­si­bil­i­ty issues. But did you know that they can only catch about 30% of the total acces­si­bil­i­ty issues on a site? In this talk, we’ll focus on how you can use man­u­al acces­si­bil­i­ty test­ing to improve the UX of your sites and plu­g­ins. First, we’ll dis­cuss how to plan the scope of a man­u­al audit. We’ll cov­er how to use acces­si­bil­i­ty per­sonas to guide your test­ing, and search Craft CMS con­trol pan­el for com­mon issues. Final­ly, you’ll learn about a pow­er­ful brows­er tool for speed­ing up your man­u­al testing.

• Lupe is the acces­si­bil­i­ty engi­neer at Pix­el & Tonic
• Self-taught devel­op­er, learned online (hooray!)
• IAAP-cer­ti­fied as web acces­si­bil­i­ty specialist
• What is dif­fer­ence between auto­mat­ed acces­si­bil­i­ty test­ing and man­u­al testing?
  • Light­house is a tool that allows auto­mat­ed testing
  • Man­u­al test­ing means using a tool like a key­board to test what it is like for some­one only using a key­board; or use a screen read­er to test the site from the POV of a blind or visu­al­ly impaired user.
  • 

How do you decide what to man­u­al­ly test?

• Not every page on your website!
• Triage your man­u­al tests
  • Glob­al site con­tent (head­er, foot­er) — spend time here because of the impact on site pages
  • Com­mon­ly-used components
  • Essen­tial site functions
    • For an e‑commerce site: pri­or­i­tize adding to cart, edit­ing cart, con­tact mer­chant, get to impor­tant pol­i­cy information
    • As an exam­ples, Lupe’s work on Craft is pri­or­i­tiz­ing the author expe­ri­ence (cre­ate entry, edit entry, man­age assets) since those are essen­tial func­tions of the Craft application.
  • Find rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ples of con­tent to test

Acces­si­bil­i­ty Personas

• 
• You build per­sonas based on how the per­son will inter­act with your website
  • I am a sight­ed user, using a mouse, etc. 
  • From the per­spec­tive of a key­board-only user
    • affects users with motor dis­abil­i­ties, lit­tle or no use of hands, limb loss or injury, blindness
  • Chrome exten­sion: Acces­si­bil­i­ty Insights
  • 
• Com­mon Issues with accessibility
• Focus Loss
  • fixed this issue in a recent update to Craft
  • every brows­er has default focus styles to show where the user is on the page
  • if you change the focus styles, you should change the col­ors to meet min­i­mum con­trast guidelines 
• Mouse-only inter­ac­tions
  • Make sure inter­ac­tive items can be accessed/​toggles on with just a keyboard
• Use semat­ic HTML elements
  • it’s dif­fi­cult to cre­ate a from-scratch ele­ment and have it be ful­ly accessible 
  • aria-label, role, onclick, onkey­down, tabindex
• Ques­tions to ask your­self when test­ing for a key­board-only persona
• Are focus out­lines vis­it­ble enough?
• Is key­board focus man­aged in an intu­itive way?
• Can you acti­vate all inter­ac­tive ele­ments sans mouse?
• Can you skip sec­tions (like nav)
• Screen read­er user persona
• low or no vision
• uses key­board, screen­read­er soft­ware on their device (e.g. VoiceOver on macOS and iOS)
• video: How A Screen Read­er User Access­es The Web: A Smash­ing Video — Smash­ing Magazine
• all visu­al con­text is lost when using a screen reader
• how do we spec­i­fy visu­al indi­ca­tors (like nav) for screen readers?
  • add aria roles to the elements 
  • is this a user inter­face control?
• aria roles can cause prob­lems when used improperly
  • “the first rule of aria, don’t use aria” <= if you don’t know how it impacts your site on screenreaders
  • 
• Is there enough con­text for a screen­read­er user?
• Lupe has been show­ing some real­ly good videos of screen­read­er using the Craft CP. I’ll try to get links to them to put here.
• Ques­tions to ask your­self when test­ing a screen­read­er persona
• Am I using semat­ic HTML?
• Are page titles, head­ings, and images descrip­tions helpful?
• Do item have enough con­text when viewed in isolation?
• Are state and role com­mu­ni­cat­ed for inter­ac­tive elements?
• Are errors, sta­tus mes­sages, and oth­er alerts com­mun­ci­at­ed in a non-visu­al way?
• Lupe is now doing a live demo of her test­ing tools
• Acces­si­bil­i­ty Insights for Web
• axe Dev­Tools | Devel­op­er Tools for Acces­si­bil­i­ty Testing

The Sev­en Dead­ly Sins of Author Expe­ri­ence #

by Hen­rik Hentschel

• join­ing the con­fer­ence from Switzerland
• the expe­ri­ence of authors and edi­tors when they want to change and add con­tent in a CMS
• Pur­pose of a CMS?
  • a tool to man­age the life­cy­cle of com­mu­ni­ca­tion content
    • cre­ate, use, archive
• He wants to show how we can make the cre­ation process eas­i­er or wose
• Zeix AG — small dig­i­tal agency for user-cen­tered design
  • 27 spe­cial­ists in 17 disciplines 
  • Swiss mar­ket leader
• Why author experience?
  • Good UX of a web­site edpends on a qual­i­ty of the content
  • in order to cre­ate good con­tent, use cas­es of authors and edi­tors must be con­sid­ered, along with the backend
  • the less frus­trat­ed authors are, the more often and com­mit­ed they will be using the CMS and keep­ing the con­tent up-to-date
  • “with­out a good author expe­ri­ence there is no good user experience”
• Who are the authors?
  • 4 groups
    • con­tent respon­si­ble (own­ers) — con­tent know-how, editorial
    • occas­sion­al — pub­lish some­times but need help with the CMS
    • sup­pli­ers — exter­nal peo­ple, free­lancers oth­er agen­cies who sup­ply illos, pho­tos, videos
    • web authors — edi­tors or authors who pull the strings, they cre­ate the con­tent int he CMS and very good at it

Sev­en Dead­ly Sins

• worse than the stan­dard sins
• Involve­ment — arro­gance  — talk to end users as ear­ly as pos­si­ble in the devel­op­ment process and involve them
• Expla­na­tion — lazi­ness — if the CMS pro­vides too many tem­plates that aren’t clear­ly descirbed, the authors will only use the ones they know.
  • name tem­plates so it is cleared what they are for reference-page vs standard-template
  • infor­ma­tion text with UI elements
  • Lev­el Entry Type plugin
  • Notes plu­g­in
    • also use entry notes fields (native)
• Text/​Image — Glut­tony — a prob­lem here is that web writ­ers could have to deal with too many things that has noth­ing to do with qual­i­ty of content. 
  • image man­age­ment — make sure the CMS han­dles the hard work of images. 
    • Ima­geOp­ti­mize plugin
    • Image Reize plugin
  • edi­to­r­i­al process
  • enable a release or approval process
  • use Pre­view link to send to con­tent owner
  • Work­flow plu­g­in is help­ful to set up edi­to­r­i­al process
• Restric­tion — voluptuousness
  • using images that don’t match the content :(
  • for a bet­ter AX, don’t restrict the authors too much
  • cor­rect rights assign­ment is helpful
  • use the CMS to help restrict what the authors can publish
  • images are con­tent and must match text content
  • icon­ic images should be avoid­ed because they con­fuse the users rather than help
  • give authors an option of choos­ing alt con­tent, like a col­ored area if they don’t have a suit­able image
• Link­ing — envy
  • when writ­ing for the inter­net, we leave the lim­i­ta­tion of print­ed text
  • not all users are aware how impor­tant it is to link pages for shar­ing addi­tion­al on-site infor­ma­tion and for SEO
  • Sug­ges­tions
    • CMS back­end should help with linking
    • auto­mat­ic basic linking
    • help­ful plugins
      • “Sim­i­lar” plugin
• Ori­en­ta­tion — anger
  • anec­dote about a miss­ing front-end ​“Edit” but­ton; author didn’t know you had to be logged-in to see the but­ton on the front-end
  • help authors ori­ent them­selves and reduce confusion
  • Sug­ges­tions
    • Quick Edit but­ton (han­drolled)
    • exem­pli­fy all elements
    • Dash­board — Build­ing a Craft CMS Dash­board Wid­get | CraftQuest
    • Help­ful Plugins
      • Active User
      • Recent­ly Changed
• Main­te­nance — Avarice
  • always neglect­ed in terms of resources for maintenance
  • why? because it didn’t mat­ter in the print days. Once print­ed, the works was com­plete and no one touched it again
  • web­sites need care and updates
  • cre­ate a traf­fic light sys­tem for con­tent to be maintained
  • 
  • man­age­ment of assets (images, documents)
    • Asset Usage plu­g­in — adds columns ​“Usage” and ​“Cur­rent Usage”

State of Craft Com­merce #

by Luke Holder

• Luke isn’t the only devel­op­er Commerce
  • Luke, Nathaniel, and Dale are the main devel­op­ers on Commerce 
• The team is impressed with the great com­merce sites the com­mu­ni­ty builds on top of Craft Commerce
• Craft Com­merce plugins
  • report­ing plugins
  • prod­uct sync plugins
  • mar­ket­ing tool integrations
  • pay­ment gateways
  • util­i­ties to make Craft Com­merce better
• Com­merce is a plugin!
  • they have the same chal­lenge as oth­er plu­g­ins to stay on top of changes in Craft 
• Com­merce will be on the same year­ly major release cycle as Craft
  • Com­merce 4 will be out around the same time as Craft 4
  • Cur­rent ver­sion is 3.4.x
  • it’s good to see that they’ll be mov­ing togeth­er in terms of releas­es and versions
  • no con­fu­sion about which ver­sion Com­merce works with which ver­sion of Craft

Recents updates

• 40 ver­sion releas­es over the last year
• try to keep COm­merce as sta­ble as pos­si­ble — core part of cus­tomer businesses
• fea­tures
  • 3.3.- par­tial payments
  • cus­tomer noti­fi­ca­tions when price of prod­uct changes. If cus­tomer has cart and price has changed or prod­uct unavailable
  • 3.4 — merge PDF exports, more con­trol over sales, slide-out edi­tor UI suppor
• 3.4 will be the last major com­merce release of Commerce
• Yes­ter­day in lat­est 3.4 release they released an update to the exam­ples templates
  • look nicer, slick­er, cleaer. Code was cleaned up to make it eas­i­er to copy and paste.
  • JS is depen­den­cy free! yay!
  • these tem­plates are locat­ed inside the com­merce direc­to­ry in the vendor direc­to­ry of your project. You have to copy them in.
  • use a com­mand to gen­er­ate tem­plates craft commerce/example-templates

New Fea­tures for Craft Com­merce 4

• Mon­ey Field (cur­ren­cy field)
  • impor­tant for com­merce; Com­merce doesn’t have a mon­ey field right now because we expect the same currency
  • will be in Craft core
  • you can use this field in your con­tent model
  • allows val­i­da­tion of the amount so it match­es the local­iza­tion of that currency
  • adding money/money Com­pos­er pack­age to Com­merce 4
    • pro­vides val­ue or mon­ey object
    • they can replace floats for stor­ing cur­ren­cy val­ues with the new mon­ey object
    • will help with bugs that occur with round­ing on dis­counts etc
    • 
    • will also help with cur­ren­cy conversion
• Address Field
  • will be added to Craft, too, and avail­able for con­tent modeling
  • will use stan­dard inter­na­tion­al­ized address inputs
  • based on Google address data 
  • pro­vides val­i­da­tion of address and for­mat­ting (very cool!)
• Cus­tomers === Users
  • all cus­tomers will be users in Craft Com­merce 4
  • allows for mar­ket­ing based on email addresses 
  • same user can be re-attached to the order
  • has good CRM implications 
• User Address Book moved to Craft Core
  • makes it avail­able to all plu­g­in devel­op­ers and implementations
• Dis­count Con­di­tion Builder
  • “if cus­tomer have 5 things in their cart, they get this discount”
  • 3.2 had a con­di­tion for­mu­la added
  • Con­di­tion builder now sits in Discounts
  • 
  • This will help sim­pli­fy how con­di­tion­al dis­counts are cre­at­ed (less frag­ile code)
  • con­di­tion­al builder in ele­ment index is AND based right now but they will improve it to have ALL based con­di­tions, too
  • Ship­ping Rule Con­di­tion Builder will be added, too
• Detailed Per­mis­sions
  • Improved per­mis­sions for dis­counts, sales, and subscriptions
  • more fine-grained per­mis­sions for com­merce system
  • will retain some cus­tomer per­mis­sions but because cus­tomers are mov­ing into users, some of those per­mis­sions will be removed
• Not every­thing in Com­merce 4 but…
  • Allow­ing addi­tion­al Tax ID validators
    • cur­rent VAT sup­port but they want to sup­port addi­tion­al validators
  • Com­merce debug panel
    • sim­i­lar to Craft debug pan­el but docused on Commerce
    • see infor­ma­tion about cur­rent cart with­out hav­ing to dd etc
  • Mul­ti­ple coupons per discounts
  • New ways to add line items to the cart
    • don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need a pur­chas­ble ID

Craft Com­merce Roadmap

• Q1 beta release for Com­merce 4
• Q2 sta­ble releas­es for Com­merce 4
• Gate­ways
  • Stripe is only gate­way they sup­port for sub­scrip­tions; very basic
    • work­ing on new ver­sion of Stripe that allows dynam­ic prices for subscriptions 
    • dynam­ic line items-related
    • sync pay­ment sources
    • sync cus­tomers
    • sync oth­er data
  • Mol­lie sup­port wil be improved
• Mul­ti-store and mulit-currency
  • com­plex fea­ture that touch­es every part of the COm­merce system
  • lay­ing the ground­work to sup­port both of these via the fea­tures already announced
  • this is the next item after Com­merce 4, planned for Com­merce 5 — see roadmap

Day Two Sched­ule #

Today is the sec­ond and last day of the con­fer­ence. The sched­ule today has 5 talks planned. It kicks off with the State of Craft Com­merce by Luke Holder.

Day One Wrap #

That’s a wrap for day one! Thank you for reading. 

I’ve been clean­ing up and edit­ing the notes so they’re eas­i­er to read and follow. 

-Ryan

Post-Con­fer­ence Dis­cus­sion with Craft Team #

Andrea DeMers and Ben Cro­ker will host a dis­cus­sion with the Craft CMS team on Twit­ter Spaces. Join in and lis­ten.

Use Entry Types for the Love of… Clients #

by Stephen Callender

Abstract:

Entry Types are the under-appre­ci­at­ed heroes of Craft CMS. With prop­er­ly used entry types you can cre­ate a con­tent mod­el that allows your clients the free­dom they expect from a mod­ern CMS. In this ses­sion, Stephen will show you how they use Entry Types in our builds at Fos­ter Com­merce for both Twig and Nuxt head­less projects. For a lit­tle spice, we’ll explore the edge cas­es and some argu­ments against using them. By the end, you’ll be singing the prais­es of Entry Types and we’ll start a fan club.

• Chan­nel and Struc­ture sec­tion types have mul­ti­ple entry types
  • sin­gles do note
• Entry Types are the heroes, pow­er­house, unsung heros of Craft CMS
• Entries | Craft CMS Doc­u­men­ta­tion | 3.x
• Stephen says Sin­gles sec­tion type overuse is a problem
• CMS Bare Min­i­mum Assumptions
  • It should allow nest­ing of pages
  • it should allow cre­at­ing of pages from reusable templates
• When is a Sin­gle sec­tion a good idea?
  • it’s the homepage
  • it’s a util­i­ty page that exists whether there’s an entry in Craft or not
• Cool things to use with Entry Types
  • cre­ate a ​“redi­rect” entry type

Build­ing with Bumpers #

by Shaw­na O’Neal

• cre­at­ing a guid­ed CMS expe­ri­ence for con­tent authors
• What is bumper?
  • refer­ring to a bumper at a bowl­ing alley or on a car
  • guide the user towards their goals
  • and pre­vent them from cat­a­stroph­ic dam­age if they do some­thing wrong or unexpected
• Why build with bumpers?
  • helps iden­ti­fy intend­ed usage
  • pre­serves the design — keep con­tent choic­es (Hel­lo, WYSI­WYG!) from break­ing the design
  • stream­lines con­tent updates — it’s eas­i­er for them to quick­ly update con­tent when the changes are need­ed. Get in, make updates, get out.
  • opti­mizes performance
  • cre­ates expectable outcomes!
    • It shouldn’t be a mys­tery what hap­pens when they fill out a field or change data/​content
• There is more than one way to build a website
  • well-deserved shade thrown to tech twitter :)
• Set expec­ta­tions well-ahead of the project development
  • CMS is the glue that hold dev, design, UX, and perf together
  • Clear com­po­nent def­i­n­i­tions — how will the com­po­nents be used, where can they be used, what are the limits?
  • Client Expec­ta­tions — set these explicitly 
    • have dis­cus­sion with client so they know exact­ly how much con­tent edit­ing and flex­i­bil­i­ty they’ll have.
  • Set field limits
    • If a design only sup­ports 4 images, set the lim­it in the Craft field so you keep cre­at­ing expectable outcomes
• Don’t over­do it
  • Matrix blocks can be a per­for­mance hit
  • Para­dox of Choice — the more options you pro­vide a human, the more like­ly they are like­ly to become over­whelmed. The Para­dox of Choice — The Deci­sion Lab
  • pro­vide few­er, flex­i­ble options
• Scal­ing Components
  • “Nev­er, ever expect that a client won’t push fields beyond rea­son­able expec­ta­tions. Plan for it.”
  • Plan for what the client’s needs are right now vs where they’re going tomorrow
  • Fail with error tem­plates — ​“do it with style” :)

Hap­py Team, Hap­py Clients — a 10,000 ft View of a 1,000 Hour Project #

by Kyle Cot­ter and Kate Lech­leit­er of Hap­py Cog

• How can we have a hap­py team and keep our clients happy?
  • Plan
  • Com­mu­ni­cate
  • Trust
  • Adapt
  • Refine
• Using a 1,000 agency project as a frame for this talk

Tra­di­tion­al Agency Workflow

• Water­fall approach (Water­fall mod­el — Wikipedia)
  • each phase needs to be com­plet­ed before mov­ing on to next phase
  • siloed, lack of communication
  • QA is typ­i­cal­ly at end when time­lines are tight and bud­gets low
• Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Orga­nized Depart­ments (PODs)
• group of peo­ple work­ing togeth­er, dif­fer­ent disciplines 

• They’ve used the POD process on these types of projects:
  • news out­lets
  • non-prof­its
  • Sales/​marketig
  • e‑commerce
  • basi­cal­ly all types of projects?

1000 hour project example

• Canary Media | Cov­er­ing the clean ener­gy transition
  • team was able to work on dev and design/​rebrand at the same time
  • 4 month timeline
  • Ded­i­cat­ed project man­ag­er is impor­tant for allo­cat­ing peo­ple to the project, man­age bud­get etc

The Design Process in a POD setup

• Col­lab­o­ra­tion is what makes the tra­di­tion­al­ly water­fall process more collbaroative. 
• no tra­di­tion­al hand-off from design to devel­op­ment since every­one is involved through­out the project.

• The col­lab­o­ra­tion process

  • design team brought up to speed on what Tail­wind is so they under­stand how devel­op­ers will imple­ment designs

• Devel­op­ment process

  • How do we get design out of Fig­ma and into brows­er as quick­ly as pos­si­ble in order to col­lab­o­rate with designers?
  • Focus on front-end cod­ing, so the design is bat­tled-test­ed in the browser
  • quick n dirty in the brows­er so the design team can react to it and give feedback
  • They built a cus­tom com­po­nent view­er that lets you test com­po­nents at every view­port size
    • the com­po­nent view­er uses real good (pow­ered by Vue) and is tied to tickets
    • can live type and change the text so they pre­view the design with dif­fer­ent content
    • Is sim­i­lar to Sto­ry­book?

• Con­tent Modeling
  • design team works in Craft to make sure the assump­tions the devel­op­ers make are correct
    • since the design team owns the IA and sitemap
• Devel­op­ment
  • Twig devel­op­ment
  • devops is done upfront, so there’s no wait­ing near launch
• Con­nect­ing the Dots
  • final QA and address­ing issues that would pre­vent launch
• The Launch Process
  • because of every­thing they’ve done in the process, then launch process is smooth and uneventful.

Craft, Web Vitals and You #

by Jemi­ma Abu, self-taught front-end devel­op­er from Lagos, Nigeria

• Under­stand­ing Web Vitals
  • “Web Vitals is an ini­tia­tive by Google to pro­vide uni­fied guid­ance for qual­i­ty sig­nals that are essen­tial to deliv­er­ing a great user expe­ri­ence on the web.” Web Vitals
• Core Web Vitals — per­for­mance met­rics for deter­min­ing user experience
  • Load­ing
    • LCP — Large Con­tent­ful Paint — how long it takes the largest image or text block to render
    • FID — First input delay — less than 100ms is good
      • mea­sures how long it takes a web­site to rep­sonse to a user’s first interaction
    • CLS — mea­sures how much the page moves around (caus­ing usabil­i­ty issues)
  • Inter­ac­tiv­i­ty
  • Visu­al Stability
• Test­ing Web Vitals
  • Tools you can use to test your web vitals
    • Light­house
    • Page­Speed Insights
    • Light­keep­er
• Craft and Web Vitals
  • Is there a rela­tion between using a CMS and web vitals?
• Test­ing Craft Sites
• Improv­ing Web Vitals
  • Reduce load­ing ani­ma­tion (decreas­es CLS score?)
    • ani­ma­tion time is added to ren­der­ing time
  • Set ele­ment dimensions
    • set fixed dimen­sions on an ele­ment pre­vents CLS when the image loads
  • Use caching
  • Defer scripts

State of Craft #

The first talk of the day is Bran­don Kelly’s State of Craft. He’s done this talk at every Dot All. 

• Atten­dees from at leas 25 countries.

Bran­don is tout­ing the breadth sites using Craft right now.

• ProP­ub­li­ca
• TheNex­tWeb
• Bare­foot Contessa
• Tito’s Vod­ka

Craft team is incred­i­bly proud of the work the com­mu­ni­ty is doing. 🎉

Craft Team Info

• Craft sales are con­tin­u­ing to grow and the team has also grown.
• 16 peo­ple on the team now

Craft Plu­g­in Store Stats

• launched about 3.5 years ago
• only 200 plu­g­ins at the time of launch
• now at 898 plugins 

Craft ID ➡ Craft Console

• Log­ging into Craft ID has got­ten awkward. 
• They are work­ing on an update.
• New ver­sion of Craft ID will be called Craft Con­sole
• Will get a minor facelift
• They are adding a new thing: Orga­ni­za­tion Accounts
  • can be owned by one or more Craft IDs
  • accounts are free
  • can have addi­tion­al mem­bers with more focused permissions
  • holds your Craft CMS and plu­g­in licens­es (like cur­rent accounts can)
  • Orga­ni­za­tion Accounts are now required to pub­lish a plugin. 
  • Part­ner Net­work pro­files will also require an orga­ni­za­tion account
  • They will auto­mat­i­cal­ly migrate exist­ing accounts
  • LAUNCH: next year

Craft Cloud Update

• Announced in Mon­tréal in 2019
• Con­cept was head­less Craft as a service
• It was very lim­it­ed (no tem­plates, plu­g­ins) because of tech­ni­cal limitations
• They were excit­ed about the idea but….the com­mu­ni­ty reac­tion wasn’t real­ly positive. 
• They decid­ed not to launch Craft Cloud as orig­i­nal­ly planned.

For­got every­thing they ever said about Craft Cloud because:

• Craft Cloud is a PaaS for all Craft CMS projects
• for launch it’ll be clos­er to a ​“auto­mat­ed work­flow PaaS” type of thing
• basi­cal­ly this is a man­aged host­ed ver­sion of Craft CMS
• The new demo sites are host­ed on Craft Cloud. It’s been a test for them of the new platform.
• Craft CMS web­site will re-launch on Craft Cloud
• No date for launch except ​“Next year”

Craft CMS Updates:

• 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 have launched since the last Dot All conference.
• it hasn’t been a smooth road and they’ve had some bumpi­ness with the releases
• Bran­don shared the frus­tra­tion with plu­g­ins break­ing and wants to make sure releas­es aren’t breaking.
• How do they rem­e­dy this?
  • As of Craft 4 they are intro­duc­ing a new release cycle
    • one major new release per year
      • 2022: Craft 4, Com­merce 4
      • 2023: Craft 5, Com­merce 5
      • etc

When is Craft 4 coming?

• Beta planned for Q1 2022, sta­ble release planned for Q2 2022
• Craft 3.7 will be the last minor release of Craft 3
• Craft 4 requires 7.4 — enables Craft to be ful­l­ly typed
• 7.4 typ­ing should help with project con­fig changes

Craft 4 fea­tures and updates:

• Col­lec­tions
• .collect() runs the query and returns them as a Lar­avel Collection
• Eager loaded ele­ments are returned as col­lec­tions. It allows us to loop over col­lec­tions like an array.
• Exist­ing tem­plates will work
• But you can also switch over to .collect()
• Col­lec­tions have their own collect() method
• Mul­ti-fac­tor Authentication
• want to imple­ment it in a gener­ic way that works for everyone
• Authen­ti­ca­tion chains — a list of steps, some option­al, some not
• Inac­tive user accounts
• Let’s admins cre­ate accounts that can be assigned to con­tent but not be active. 
• Aimed at agen­cies who are cre­at­ing accounts for clients
• Ele­ment Index filtering
• fil­ter results in ele­ment index pages in a live search/​filter setup
• Cus­tom sources
• Give your own cus­tom source its own label and what kind of ele­ments should show up for that source
• source set­tings are now stored in the project config
• More com­ing
• they want to do nest­ed matrix fields
• and con­di­tion­al fields

Craft 4 beta in Q1 and Sta­ble release in Q2 2022

Notes and Thoughts from Dot All 2021 #

I’ll keep this space updat­ed with thoughts and notes on the pre­sen­ta­tions from Dot All 2021. 

• Dot All full schedule
• Get a tick­et here
• Tune in for our CraftQuest on Call livestream on Thurs­day at 12 PM EDT.

The con­tent on this page will auto­mat­i­cal­ly update every 30 sec­onds. New posts at the top!