Today I published the last three videos of the Smoke Testing Craft CMS with Playwright course. This course was a lot of fun to make and once you watch it and implement the techniques, I think it will make your deployments a bit less stressful. And, you'll pick up a few new skills along the way.
One thing I kept thinking about while building it: smoke tests catch the deploys that break the site. They don't help with the deploys that work too well, like the half-finished feature you accidentally pushed to main, the new layout that turned out to be wrong for half your audience, the content type you wanted to test for a select set of users before rolling out broadly.
Smoke tests are silent on all of that, because the site is still technically working. Just not the way you wanted.
That's what feature flags are for.
If you haven't seen it yet, I built a Feature Flags plugin for Craft CMS and released 1.0.0 last month. Last week, I released 1.1.0 with new features, including multi-site support.
The Feature Flags plugin lets you toggle features on and off from the control panel without redeploying, gate functionality to specific users or environments, and run gradual rollouts on production.
Pair it with smoke tests and rolling out new features go from "fingers crossed" to "what's the worst that could happen?"
This plugin is now in my default plugin set for every project. It should be in yours, too.
