Attending & Speaking at the Craft CMS Summit

I’m a little belated, but I was lucky enough to attend and speak at the first Craft CMS Summit two weeks ago. This was the first online conference that I had ever attended, and I was thoroughly impressed. I had always been a bit hesitant to attend online conferences because I was unsure about the quality, but after experiencing it firsthand I won't hesitate in the future. Everything was very well organized and the speakers all gave excellent presentations. It was also nice to sit and learn in the comfort of my own home instead of having to deal with the extra burdon of traveling for a conference. Side note: Environments for Humans, the company who hosted the conference, has additional upcoming events.

State of Craft CMS

Brandon Kelly, started the conference by giving a brief history of Craft and a peek at some new features. Here are a couple bullets I pulled out:

• There have been over 10 iterations of just the basic Control Panel layout.
• They invited 10 people into the Blocks (Craft’s previous name) private alpha. There was minimal functionality, no Twig templating language (they created their own), and they just wanted to get some eyes on the interface.
• There have been over 13,600 licenses issued.
• 3,300 unique sites with recent CP usage in the last 30 days.
• Revenue has been excellent. He also said June is going to have another spike.
• They are considering Craft as of now, hitting 80% of what a site needs to do. The other 20% being really custom stuff that won’t be baked in.
• Next batch of stuff is going to be usability improvements and improving their docs.
• They are hiring a third party company to help with docs.
• Saving big stuff for 3.0.
• 3.0 will have in-browser asset editing, which they demoed.
• Plugin store is coming this year. This will allow developers to submit their plugins to Pixel & Tonic. Then, those plugins will be available for download, and update from within the Craft control panel.

E4H has also made the entire recording available for free.

Twig for Designers

Ben Parizek next gave a presentation on Twig, the templating engine that Craft uses. He shared this awesome spreadsheet which is a nice resource for example code for all of the default Craft custom fields.

Template Organization

Anthony Colangelo gave an interesting presentation about template organization. My main takeaway was to think about the structure of your templates based on the type of template, and not just the sections of the site. You can view the slides on Speaker Deck.

Craft Tips & Tricks

I was struggling to come up with a topic, so I just ran through a collection of real-world tips and tricks I had come across while building Craft sites. Here are a couple of my favorite ones from the presentation:

Merge

The Twig merge filter can help to reduce duplication in your template:

{% set filters = ['type', 'product', 'activity', 'element'] %}
{% set params = { section: 'media', limit: 12 } %}
{# Apply filter? #}
{% if craft.request.segments[2] is defined and craft.request.segments[1] in filters %}
    {% switch craft.request.segments[1] %}
        {% case 'product' %}
            {% set product = craft.entries({ slug: craft.request.segments[2], section: 'product' }).first() %}
            {% set params = params | merge({ relatedTo: product }) %}
        {% case 'type' %}
            {% set params = params | merge({ type: craft.request.segments[2] }) %}
        ...
    {% endswitch %}
{% endif %}
{% set entries = craft.entries(params) %}

That code sample was used to apply filters on a media page. This way, we could reuse a single template.

Macros

Macros are kinda like helpers. They are useful for creating little reusable functions:

_helpers/index.html

{%- macro map_link(address) -%}
    http://maps.google.com/?q={{ address | url_encode }}
{%- endmacro -%}

contact/index.html

{% import "_helpers" as helpers %}
<a href="{{ helpers.map_link('400 S. Maple Avenue, Suite 200, Falls Church, VA 22046') }}">Map</a>

That code will result in: Map

Element Types and Plugin Development

Ben Croker talked about building plugins, and specifically Element Types. Element Types are the foundation of Craft’s entries, users, assets, globals, categories, etc. Craft has given us the ability to create Element Types through plugins. It’s not thoroughly documented yet, this is all they have, but you can use the existing Element Types to learn how to build them. You can take a look at his slides on Speaker Deck, but the bulk of the presentation was demoing an Element Type that he built.

Craft Q&A Round Table

The Pixel & Tonic team sat around and answered questions from the audience. Here's a smattering of the notes I took:

• “We have some ideas of how to get DB syncing working, thats why every table has a uid column.” It’s an itch they want to scratch for themselves too.
• On their list: using a JSON file for field/section setup
• Matrix within Matrix will be coming eventually. The UI is tough, but the code is all in place.
• There is the possibility that it will eventually be public on GitHub, but they have to work out some of the app setup stuff.
• They’ve considered renaming “localization” to just be “sites”, then people can run multiple sites with one Craft install.
• “Will comments be a part of core?”, “No, that’s plugin territory”
• Duplicating entries will be coming in Craft 2.2
• They have a lot of plans for the edit field layout page to make it more user friendly