Dot All 2022

I’ll keep this space updat­ed with thoughts and notes on the pre­sen­ta­tions from Dot All 2022. 

• Dot All sessions
• Get a tick­et here

Day 1 #

The first day of Dot All is two full-day work­shops: There won’t be any cov­er­age here for these sessions. 

Sched­ule Day 1

Day 2 #

Sched­ule Day 2

It’s a sun­ny, chilly morn­ing here in Brook­lyn and atten­dees are gath­er­ing in a court­yard out­side the venue for cof­fee and break­fast before the con­fer­ence starts at 9 AM EDT. 

State of Craft

Bran­don Kel­ly will kick of the con­fer­ence with his talk on, well, the state of Craft CMS. Maybe we’ll see some­thing new?

• Team Update
  • 17 team mem­bers at P&T
  • Bri­an Han­son, and August Miller are the newest team members
  • Iwana — start­ing soon to work on Craft CMS
• Sales, prof­its, rev­enue con­tin­ue to grow
• Rev­enue dri­ven by Craft CMS and Commerce
• Craft 4, Com­merce 4
  • big releas­es, first major releas­es in 4 years
  • 60% of new installs run­ning on Craft 4
  • 46% of active­ly-updat­ed installs are run­ning Craft 4
  • 87% of most pop­u­lar plu­g­ins already avail­able for Craft 4. They are hap­py with this % con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of plu­g­ins that need­ed to be updated.
  • Fea­tures in 4 Review
    • Inac­tive users, built for Com­merce. User accounts that don’t have user and password.
    • Address­es — native address fields to sim­pli­fy the com­plex­i­ty of address fields in Commerce
    • Con­di­tion Builder — Bran­don reviewed this fea­ture and where it’s available
      • Rela­tion­al fields can also use the con­di­tion builder
      • Com­merce uses con­di­tion builder, too, in var­i­ous loca­tions like ship­ping con­di­tions etc.
    • Uni­fied Ele­ment Editor
      • gives plu­g­ins a real­ly easy way to have a ele­ment edi­tor inter­face (“the stan­dard edit­ing experience”
    • Access­bil­i­ty
      • they are on track to reach WCAG AA 2.1 compliance
      • Lupe, the acces­si­bil­i­ty engi­neer, did a com­pre­hen­sive audit and found over 500 issues that need­ed to be addressed.
      • they have made a ton of progress and are now over halfway done
      • they releas­es a Craft CMS Acces­si­b­li­ty Con­for­mance Report, which is is avail­able at craftcms​.com/​a​c​c​e​s​s​i​b​i​l​i​t​y​/​r​eport
    • Plu­g­in Store
      • they launched a new plu­g­in store before Craft 4 release
      • redesigned
      • sep­a­ra­tion between Craft 3 and 4 plugins
      • side­bar with plu­g­in vital signs
  • New plugin:Shopify plugin
    • they’re launch­ing a new first-par­ty plu­g­in soon to sup­port Shopi­fy (edi­tor: smart move! Shopi­fy is huge!)
    • syncs down all Shopi­fy prod­ucts into Craft install, read only view of those products
    • relat­ed entries to the products
    • sim­ple but they hope it’s effec­tive at con­nect­ing Craft to Shopify

Craft Cloud update

• They announced Craft Cloud 3 years ago in Mon­tréal as ​“head­less Craft as a Ser­vice” with a lot of lim­i­ta­tions built in. They want­ed to com­plete with SaaS head­less only options (like Con­tent­ful). They got feed­back from the com­mu­ni­ty that they were build­ing the wrong product.
• They threw it all out and start­ed over. 

• Tenets of Craft Cloud

  • Sim­plic­i­ty; you shouldn’t have to wor­ry about serv­er specs, CPU etc. Or oth­er devops concerns.
  • Secu­ri­ty
  • Speec & Scalability
  • Envri­on­men­tal Responsibility

• Tech Specs

  • Hybrid server­less & con­tain­er-based architecture
  • AWS Glob­al Accelerator 

  • Cloud­flare — enter­prise-leve part­ner­ship with them

  • Fea­tures

    • auto­mat­ic Composer/​npm builds
    • built-in log­ging, image tran­sofmrs, and asset storage
    • Git branch environments
    • Sta­t­ic-page caching (cloud­flare)
    • Glob­al CDN
    • Built-in SSL
    • Fire­wall and DDoS protection

They are still work­ing on it. ​“We’re get­ting there.” They plan to launch with­in the next year.

Craft Con­sole update

• they announced it last year at the viru­al Dot All
• it was just comps in Fig­ma but now it’s real
• replace­ment for Craft ID (cus­tomer portal)
• added Orga­ni­za­tions (work like Github orgs)
• Orga­ni­za­tions will have Plu­g­in Store List­ings and Part­ner Profiles
• Bran­don is giv­ing a quick walk-thru of the changes with Console

Craft Con­sole is com­ing lat­er this year.

Craft CMS update

• they’ve been busy since Craft 4 released ear­li­er this year.
• they’re putting the fin­ish­ing touch­es on Craft 4.3
• Bran­don is walk­ing through some of the changes in Craft 4
  • New fil­ter­ing sup­port in the Craft Plu­g­in Store
  • Date con­di­tion rule has some pre­sets in addi­tion to the range.
• It has been over 11 years since Bran­don and Brad start­ed work­ing on Craft CMS. At the time Expres­sio­nEngine was con­sid­ered one of the best CMSes for con­tent modeling/​content authoring.
• June 2013 — Craft 1.0 — ele­ment type API, live pre­view, cus­tom fields, entries, glob­al sets
• July 2013 — 1.1 
• Sep­tem­ber 2013 — Sec­tion types and entry types
• Novem­ber 2013 — Matrix fields — the orig­i­nal vision for Craft com­ing together
• AFter 2.0, every­thing sine then has more focused on author­ing expe­ri­ence (AX) and devel­op­er expe­ri­ence (DX) but they have not made a sin­gle change to con­tent mod­el­ing since 2.0

Craft 5

• the biggest leap foward in con­tent mod­el­ing fea­tures since Matrix was added in 1.3

• “Entries every­where”

  • an idea they’ve been noodling on for a few years
  • Cat­e­gories become Entries
  • Tags become Entries
  • Glob­al Sets become Entries
  • Uni­fied con­tent view
    • map out IA view of your website
    • “entry” doesn’t show up, they just call it content
    • ful­ly cus­tomize the con­tent mod­el­ing and author­ing experience
    • it is slide-out dri­ven, so when you click on some­thing a slide­out opens up
  • Mul­ti­ple entry authors
  • Decou­pled Entry Types
    • entry types will be their own glob­al con­cept. when you edit a sec­tion, you choose the entry types instead of cre­at­ing them. 
    • you can reuse the entry types
  • Entry portability
    • you can move entries from one sec­tion to another
  • Sched­uled Drafts
    • mul­ti­ple drafts? cre­ate ​“Releas­es” so the con­tent goes live together 

  

Nest­ed Matrix

• Some plu­g­ins have filled the gap of sim­i­lar func­tion­al­i­ty (Neo and Supertable)
• Chal­lenges: per­for­mance and author­ing experience
• Per­for­mance challenges
  • Bran­don goes through the ele­ment saves required for a com­plex nest­ed matrix block and the per­for­mance chal­lenges with it
  • mul­ti-sites real­ly make it com­pli­cat­ed — could be over 2700 saves for 10 sites
  • But they’ve been work­ing on mak­ing the sav­ing more performant.
    • Delta saves inro­duced in 3.4
    • 3.7 those delta saves were made recursive
    • but that didn’t real­ly help with per­foe­mance of a poten­tial nest­ed Matrix because of revisions
    • Craft 4 has a fea­ture called ​“shared block cus­tody” — no longer a 1:1 map­ping of the matrix block and the ele­ment that saves it.
    • the result is that sav­ing is much faster — one row of new data vs an entire ele­ment saved. The same thing applies to revi­sions, too.
• But how do they fix the author­ing expe­ri­ence?
• Bran­don makes fun of the wild­ly com­plex page builders that peo­ple build (edi­tor: agree)
• they think the solu­tion for nest­ed matrix is the slide out UI but the save but­ton pat­tern doesn’t fit
• New field type
  • INCEP­TION FIELDS
    • like address fields, but for nest­ed entries
    • Cards + Slide­outs UI pattern
    • Entry types (already decou­pled in Craft 5)
    • Entry porta­bil­i­ty
    • Releas­es

Imple­ment­ing com­po­nent-dri­ven design sys­tems with Craft + Fractal

by Dal­ton Rooney, Raygun 

• Dal­ton gave the his­to­ry of his work and how he camet o the idea of build­ing com­po­nent-dri­ven design sys­tems and a way of work­ing togeth­er between dev and design
• A mod­el that pro­vides dif­fer­ent lev­els of access into the project to the right peo­ple at the right time.
• Brand guide­lines => Style Guide & Pat­tern Library => Com­po­nent Library => Pro­duc­tion Application
• This work came out of the need to col­lab­o­rate with more team mem­bers, get feed­back ear­li­er in the design process
• Why did they choose Fractal?
  • frame­work agnostic
  • flex­i­ble structure
  • script­able, well-doc­u­ment­ed, easy to integrate
  • Craft CMS exam­ples already exist
• Anato­my of com­po­nent (in Fractal)
  • orga­nized into hiearchi­cal folders
  • a tem­plate (twig) and con­text (js)
  • styles and scripts
  • vari­ants (con­text-defined)
  • docs or oth­er assets
• Frac­tal Workflow
  • a node appli­ca­tion installed as a peer dep in the repo
  • all front-end com­po­nents are devel­oped and test­ed in Fractal
  • use Hygen to scaf­fold new components
  • Lar­avel Mix to com­pile all scss and js from the Frac­tal fold­er but any build tool will work; Frac­tal doesn’t care
  • Frac­tal task that exports all com­po­nents to the Craft tem­plate fold­er and gen­er­ates a components-maps.json file.
  • Craft fractal-folder plu­g­in (pri­vate)
• Craft’s tem­plate hooks con­nects Frac­tal to Craft CMS
  • Con­text is pareped in a cus­tom PHP mod­ule and inject­ed into the entry tem­plate with a tem­plate hook.
  • The tem­plate includes the Frac­tal template 

What they like about this setup:

• encour­ages reusable components
• remove log­ic fromt he templates
• decou­ple front-end from CMS
• get input from stake­hold­ers ear­li­er in the process
• self-doc­u­ment­ing, can share with clients

what they don’t like about the setup:

• every­t­ing is ren­dered with twig.js but it’s not the same as twig.php
• no log­ic in the tem­plate, no Craft CMS fla­vored Twig func­tions allowed
• full inte­gra­tion requires cor­rep­sond­ing PHP modules
• Frac­tal app is in main­te­nance mode, not active­ly developed

See also:

• Com­po­nent Libraries with Frac­tal (and Twig)

Craft in K8s

by Matt Gray, Servd.host

• K8s => Kubernetes
• enter­prise adop­tion of K8s is about 75% among enter­pise companies
• 400% increase in K8s postings
• Why care about this for Craft CMS?
  • dozens of com­pa­nies offer­ing man­aged kuber­netes now
  • best prac­tices
  • envi­ro­ment stored config
  • exter­nal back­ing services
  • build, release, run
  • state­less processes
  • port bind­ing
  • dis­pos­abil­i­ty
  • log event streams 
• 2019 Dock­er start­ed to become adopt­ed for pack­ag­ing and run­ning applications
• Nitro used, DDEV uses it
• Every­thing start­ed to get containerized
• Why is K8s so popular?
  • it acts as an abstrac­tion over serv­er resources
    • sched­ul­ing
    • net­work­ing
    • stor­age
    • resources
    • scal­ing
    • deploy­ments

The pieces of K8s (and Craft)

• Con­tain­ers
  • K8s orga­nizes containers.
  • Make sure we are using con­tain­ers with­in our Craft project. We export them as ​“images” (a blue­print for a con­tain­er) so they’re avail­abel to K8s
    • PHP, nginx, Craft CMS
    • split out process­es into mul­ti­ple con­tain­ers — allow K8s to do the things it does best
• Epher­mal File Systems
  • con­tain­ers have their own filesystems
  • Con­tain­ers restart often
  • Each time, their filesys­tem resets to tmatch teh state
  • Any­thing we write to the file sys­tem at run-time will be lost, unless we pre­pare for it.
  • plu­g­ins can be a chal­lenge — make sure they don’t write any­thing to the file sys­tem that will cause prob­lems if those writ­ten files go away.
  • 
• cpresources
  • This is an assump­tion that Craft/​Yii does make…that both PHP and ngnix are using the same filesys­tem and can share cpresources files.
  • this is a prob­lem in K8s because there are two sep file sys­tems in two sep containers
  • wrap every­thing in a ​“pod” — a K8s con­cept that allows every­thing to stay togeth­er and be grouped together
• Logs
  • epher­mal fil­sys­tems means that the file sys­tems don’t last long, so log files might go away! 
  • instead of sav­ing logs as files, we can use std­out and stderr K8s will col­lect and orga­nize them
  • CRAFT_STREAM_LOG=TRUE — Craft 4 will send logs to std­out and stderr instead of writ­ing to the file sys­tem. If using Craft 3, you’ll need to imple­ment your own over­ride for this.
• Ses­sions and Cache
  • Craft’s default cach and ses­sion han­dles use the filesystem
  • can hurt per­for­mance if cache has to be regen­er­at­ed too often
  • solu­tion: use Redis — easy to deploy to K8s, very easy to con­fig­ure in Craft
• Image resiz­ing
  • pro­cess­ing images using ImageMag­ick or GD requires a lot of memory
  • save your­self a headache and just use an exter­nal ser­vice: Imgix, Server­less Sharp

A Prac­ti­cal Guide to HTML ​“Over the Wire”

by John D. Wells

• MPA — mul­ti-page application
  • what is good at?
    • SEO; serves HTML
    • not com­plex, no com­pli­cat­ed stack to deal with 
    • speed Not so good?
    • UI fideli­ty
• SPA — Sin­gle-Page Application
  • SEO? Not so good
  • Com­plex­i­ty? Very com­plex from design; build tool required, API required, etc.
  • Speed? it can vary depend­ing on the imple­men­ta­tion — inti­ial pay­load can be very big
  • UI Fideli­ty? excellent
• What about hav­ing the best of both worlds? 
  • Some­thing that is good with SEO out of the box wihtout trying, 
  • some­thing that is fast, 
  • not that com­plex or with­in developer’s control, 
  • and good enough UI fidelity
• HDA — Hyper­me­dia-Dri­ven Application
  • coined by the cre­ator of HTMX
  • inter­acts with the server 
  • responds with HTML instead of JSON
  • HTMX — evo­lu­tion of Inter­cool­er (js library)
    • author is try­ing to improve the HTML spec. The­o­ry is that HTML when it was first cre­at­ed was incom­plete; no PUTs, go GETs, no way to talk to a serv­er with­out a GET request or PUT request via form and oth­er code. 
  • Unpoly
    • Hen­nig Koch
    • “unob­stru­sive JS frame­work for serv­er-side web applications”
    • it is try­ing to pogre­sive­ly enhance an MPA
  • Hotwire
    • evo­lu­tion of turbolinks
    • by Basecamp/​Hey team
  • oth­er adja­cent tooling
    • Hyper­script
    • Alpine.js
    • Sprig — Ben Cro­ker, Craft CMS Plu­g­in, built on HTMX
    • Tail­wind­C­SS

Craft Com­mand Line Magic

by Michael Rog

Slides for the talk

• Craft’s native CLI tool
  • a host of utilites for main­tain­ing and work­ing with your Craft installation
• build­ing your own CLI commands
• use case examples

Res­cue sit­u­a­tions when you need to use the com­mand line

• ./craft users/set-password
• ./craft users/create --email --password --admin

Devel­op­ment commands

• ./craft resave/entries --set=myField --if-empty --to bulk update entries
• check Michael’s slides and the offi­cial Craft docs for more examples

Prod­cu­tion

• ./craft mailer/test

Build­ing your own cus­tom CLI commands

start slides here

• Key con­cepts
  • con­trollers Request => Response
  • rout­ing: name­spaces, con­troller maps
  • plu­g­in vs modules
  • actiona, argu­ments, options
  • out­put, exit codes
  • slide on build­ing a cus­tom mod­ule for con­sole command

#### Use Case Exam­ples start slides here

Man­ag­ing Craft at Scale

by Mark Huot

• should be called Learn­ing from Mark’s Mistakes
• what is scale? where are today -> get­ting big­ger, more traf­fic; whether small­er site or big­ger site
• Big Site, Big­ger Risk
  • Mark’s exam­ple of a client site that gets a lot of traf­fic, this time unex­pect­ed: get­ting hit with a lot of bots
• Small Site, Big Reward
  • brick n mor­tar sales => online dur­ing pandemic
  • scal­ing issues can hap­pen to any­one; small sites big site every­thing in between
• it’s all about being pre­pared to scale!

Keep Craft Updated

• the longer you put it off the hard­er the upgrade gets
• even­tu­al­ly you’ll have update for a secu­ri­ty update or fea­ture update and the updates only get hard­er the longer you wait.
• you also get per­for­mance updates in Crarft 3.7.x because so many were added (and, of course, in Craft 4)
• two ways to update:
  • update in the con­trol pan­el <- scary!
  • com­mand line ver­sion through a stan­dard devel­op­ment and deploy­ment process
• don’t for­get to keep all plu­g­ins updat­ed at the same time that you update Craft

Dis­able devMode

• use the user-spe­cif­ic Devel­op­ment set­tings instead, so you still get to see them as a logged-in user
• Yii Debug tool­bar — Mark’s favorite view is the Time­line view 
• the worst thing you can do is ​“guess­ing and check­ing” Instead start with the time­line view of Yii debug tool­bar and method­i­claly find your start­ing point
  • you can also do this via the data­base queries tab in the Yii Debug Tool­bar. Find the slow­est query and see what you can do to address that first.
• MySQL explain view in Yi Debug Tool­bar — use the ​“rows” col­umn to iden­ti­fy slow or inef­fi­cient queries. The more rows MySQL is look­ing through and not return­ing isn’t optimal.

Rela­tion­ships

• “one of the best fea­tures of Craft”
• they are flex­i­ble because they’re two direc­tion­al (source, target)
• but they can be hard to scale prop­er­ly with­out some adjust­ments. How?
• Switch your rela­tion­ships and make it relat­ed to the tar­get element
• {targetElement: category} <- be more explic­it about the type of rela­tion­ship since this cat­e­go­ry is only this type of rela­tion­ship. Mark does this by default to get a faster JOIN.
• eager-load all the things using with in the ele­ment query to get around the N+1 issue
  • see docs on eager loading
  • edi­tor note: Col­lec­tions in Craft 4 makes eager load­ing sim­pler. CraftQuest mate­r­i­al on eager loading

con­tent table

• try to lim­it the num­ber of columns in the content table
  • don’t cre­ate ALL THE FIELDS — each new field is a new col­umn, is a longer search etc.

Hire a DBA for a week

• if you’re realling hav­ing issues, hire a DBA for a week and get project-spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion for how to improve the database.
• Mark uses the Preparse field a lot to help save on JOINs and oth­er expen­sive queries. The data is stored in the field on-save ver­sus query­ing dynamically.
• Preparse Field
• “mind your database”

Day 3 #

Sched­ule Day 3

Cre­at­ing Empa­thy Through Collaboration

by Sarah Carr

• What is empathy?
• Why does it matter?
• How do I use it?

Impor­tant notes from Sarah:

• don’t be some­one# you’re not
• she doesn’t want to tell you how to do your job
• be delib­er­ate about your inter­ac­tions with others

What is empathy?

• The abil­i­ty to under­stand and share the feel­ings of another. 
  • read their behavior
  • imag­ine their POV
  • under­stand stres­sor or struggles
• cog­ni­tive: know­ing how some­one is feel­ing and what tye might be thinking
• Emo­tion­al: phuys­i­caly feel­ing a sen­sa­tion along with anoth­er person
• com­pas­sion­ate: mov­ing beyond con­nec­tion and under­stand­ing to take action — donat­ing to charity/​helping others
• Brené Brown quote: ​“We need to dis­ple the myth that emapthy ​“walk­ing in some­one elses’s show” Rather than walk­ing your shoes, I need to learn how to lis­ten to the sto­ry you tell about what it’s like to walk in your shoes and believe you even what it doesn’t may my experiences.”

Why does it matter?

• Work­ing with peo­ple can be overwhelming
  • dif­fer­ent personalities
  • var­ied life xperiences
  • unique ways of working
  • com­munca­tions styles
  • cog­ni­itve abilities
  • remote work
  • mixed avail­abil­i­ty
  • fam­i­ly needs
  • slack and zoom eqtiutte
  • time zones
• empahy improves team performance
  • shared under­stand­ing unites toward a shared goal
  • bet­ter equip your tema to han­dle stres­sors and unknowns
  • smoother, and more clear communication
  • increased pro­duci­tyivy
  • hap­pi­er peo­ple, hap­pi­er clients

How do we use it?

• Take C.A.R.E.

  • C: Com­mu­ni­cate what’s important
  • A: Assume good intentions
  • R: Roll with the punches 
  • E: Every­one is human

• Com­mu­ni­cate what’s important

  • talk often, be honest
  • don’t make deci­sions in a vac­cum. Be open and hon­est about work, con­tri­bu­tions to the project
  • Exam­ple: a team mem­ber is too wordy and/​or ver­bose when it coems to cre­at­ing tick­ets (sarah says this is her)
    • ask the team waht woudl help
    • acknowl­edge devel­op­er con­text switching
    • reword para to bullets
  • “I would’ve writ­ten a shorrter let­ter, but I did not have the time” –Pas­cal
  • sep­a­rat­ing con­text from content
  • Being con­cise is hard­er than being verbose!
• Key take­aways:
  • com­mu­ni­cate with pur­pose — be clear about what you’re ask­ing for
  • Speak up when you’re unsure
  • Learn oth­er people’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion styles

• Assume Good intentions

  • Don’t jump to conclusions
  • Exam­ple: a team mem­ber is sud­den­ly unpro­duc­tive, out­put is dif­fer­ent than before
    • remem­ber this is unchar­ac­ter­is­tic, not like them
    • give the ben­e­fit fo the doubt
    • offer sup­port to begin a conversation
  • Exam­ple: the eager junior developer
    • added a new fea­ture into the branch with­out telling any­one, which intro­duce a lot of issues/​merge conflicts
    • “We judge our­selves by our inten­tions and oth­ers by their behav­ior” –Stephen Covey
    • assume they meant well — observe before you judge, keep an open mind, check in with them
    • don’t scold, but do educate
    • encour­age them to chan­nel their ener­gy through prop­er processes

• Roll with the Punches

  • embrace flex­i­bil­i­ty
  • Exam­ple: short notice PTO by a key team mem­ber mid-project
  • empa­thet­ic respons­es: not all vaca­tions are vaca­tions, burnout can come quick­ly, main­taing work/​life bal­ance can be tricky
  • build in flex­i­bil­i­ty from the start
  • meet peo­ple where they are — what flex­i­bil­i­ty means to you might mean some­thing total­ly dif­fer­ent to some­one else on your team.
  • take time for yourself

• Every­one is Human

  • exam­ple: deploy­ing bro­ken code — a devel­op­er deployed bro­ken bro­ken code into a pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment. The code passed QA, but the wrong pack­age was pulled in, and pro­duc­tion was down for an hour. The client is extreme­ly upset.
  • empa­thet­ic response
    • mis­takes hapen; this won’t be the last
    • keep your cool – blame and argu­ment won’t bring pro­duc­tion back up
    • address the imme­di­ate need, then dis­cuss prevention
  • You are not your work
  • Keep your cool
  • It’s a two-way street

Final thought: ​“When we under­stand each oth­er bet­ter, we can cre­ate things togeth­er we nev­er could have alone.”

Bend­ing the Craft Con­trol Panel

by John Hen­ry Donovan

• “we put as much effort into the autho­ing expe­ri­ence as the front-end of your web­site” — what John Hen­ry tells clients 
• con­tem­plate the client’s long-term solu­tion rather than the fast sell
• Sta­t­ic mes­sage translation
  • translations/en/app.php
• cus­tomize table columns
• uni­code works in lay­out tabs — num­ber the tabs in the field lay­out so authors know the order of enter­ing content
• tabs can be admin only
• write clear field instructions
  • you can hide the field instruc­tions via mod­ule and field in user account
• use con­di­tions where necessary

• Plu­g­ins:
  • Verbb’s Con­trol Pan­el Nav
  • Envi­ron­ment Label by Top Shelf Craft
  • Con­trol Pan­el CSS by Dou­ble Secret Agency
  • Do It Your­self wid­get by Chris­t­ian Seelbach
  • Cre­ate a sup­port form using Freeform and then use the Freeform widget
  • Default Dash­board — cre­ate a default dash­board for each user
  • Craft CMS modules
    • 
  • Matrix Façades by Andrew Welch nystudio107/​matrixfacades: This is a project demon­strates how to improve author­ing expe­ri­ence Matrix Façades and CraftQuest on Call 36: Bet­ter AX with Matrix Façades | CraftQuest
• Recap
  • bend the client, then bend the con­trol panel
  • cus­tomize the con­trol pan­el to meet the client’s busi­ness logic

Mind the Gap – What’s left behind when we bulid for the cut­ting edge?

by Shaw­na O’Neal

• As devel­op­ers, we always get the newest devices but the glob­al user base isn’t buy­ing into annu­al upgrade. 
• Google ​“Chrome User” Study
  • from Chrome instal­la­tions from a group of coun­tries around the world
  • their find­ings are from Win­dows, Android and ChromeOS
  • Android devices glob­al­ly vary widely
  • ZA devices typ­i­cal­ly have 1 GB RAM
  • US devices typ­i­cal­ly have 2 GB RAM but also high­t­est % of 10GB or more
  • not every­one is goign to be on a fast enough device to han­dle big js pay­loads and processing
  • 13 tabs uses in Chrome uses over 3 GB of memory
  • but Chrome itself only needs 128 MB to run, the rest is our web­sites need­ing a lot of resources

• Dig­i­tal Divide
  • the grow­ing gap between peo­ple who have access to com­put­ers and inter­net and those who do not
  • 1 in 10 US house­holds don’t access access to a computer
  • mobile device access is con­sid­ered a luxury
  • inter­net was devel­oped uneven­ly across the globe 
  • geog­ra­phy lim­its infrastructure
• JavaScript
  • client-side ren­der­ing is a bur­den on devices with less capabilities
  • rapdi­ly increas­ing down­load sizes for ini­tial JS payload
  • sec­u­lar standarizations — 

Using Entries and Rela­tion­ships as your con­tent builder system

by Justin Holt

• the typ­i­cal apporoach­es to con­tent edit­ing in Craft are:
  • sta­t­ic fields
    • straight­for­ward and sim­ple, con­trol the con­tent to match the page
    • hard to scale, rigid, not bespoke. Requires a devel­op­er to add new con­tent flexibility
  • matrix fields or Neo
    • pre­dictabil­i­ty and flexibility
    • Per­for­mance hits hap­pen in large con­tent sets. 
  • Vizy fields
    • max­i­mizes flexibility
    • UI can get con­dus­ing to edi­tors. Large con­tent sets can be unwiedly 
• live demo of site with a lot (i mean, A lot) of Matrix blocks
• demo’ing holts­dogs: https://​holts​dogs​.com
  • every­thing on the site is using the schema approach
  • view only user avail­able in the Dis­cord so you can see how the site is configured
• Plu­g­ins that can help/​improve the experience
  • Restrict ele­ment deletions
  • Ele­ment Relations
  • one more i didn’t get
• Best prac­tices
  • strict com­po­nent entry naming 
  • abtract, but not too abstract

Pix­el & Ton­ic Q&A

I’m mod­er­at­ing this dis­cus­sion, so I will not be able to take notes in real-time.