2 min read
Craft CMS 3 Beta
As you might be aware, we love Craft CMS at Shape (See - We Love Craft CMS and Our favourite Craft CMS plugins) and have been using it for many years. Over this time we’ve dabbled with the latest instalment… Craft CMS 3.
For a while this was only a developer preview and not to be used on production projects. But the buzz around this release has always been high within the community.
After seeing Joel Bradbury’s presentation at the previous Craft CMS Manchester Meetup on how to convert a Craft CMS 2 plugin to a Craft CMS 3 plugin we decided to have a play with the dev preview (And start converting our plugins to work on Craft CMS 3).
We were impressed! The speed, the new features - Just, YES!
So just recently, Pixel and Tonic have released the Craft CMS 3 is now in Beta! Which means the actual release isn’t far off! So we thought it would be good to outline some of the hot features of this new release -
One of the main things that Pixel & Tonic been boasting about is the speed of 3 over 2. Due to this now running on Yii 2 and having a PHP minimum of PHP 7 the speed has dropped by nearly three quarters!
Their example of loading 5,000 entries takes just a mere 1.8 seconds, which is a dramatic drop in time compared to the 8.7 seconds which the current Craft version runs.
This means lightning-fast websites! Perfect for projects that are more mobile / tablet focused.
A feature some clients request a lot is the ability to edit their images within the CMS. Not many people have Photoshop skills (Or the money to pay Adobe’s extortionate monthly prices *cough*). Previously this has been achieved with plugins like Image Resizer - But now this will be part of core!
Let’s face it, if you haven’t hacked Craft CMS 2’s locale/language feature to work as a multi-site feature - You’ve not dived deep enough in to how powerful this could be! Pixel and Tonic have realised that developers were hacking around this feature and decided that having Multi Site as an option is the best way forward.
This means you can now run multiple websites from one Craft CMS license (No extra cost!) and have one central CMS to manage all your content (Even have sites share content!)
Not only that, but you can also have Multi Site and Multi Language!
One pain in the butt for developers is that transferring content between environments is messy business. The ability to move and track content changes from production to local is important to make sure no content is lost when updates are made to a project.
We can’t wait to dive in to this a bit more and see what it has to offer.
And for the finale - Plugin Store. Although not part of the beta, we hope that this is available in the full release. A quick and easy way of finding plugins to use on a project rather than doing Google / Github searches would speed up development a lot. We hope this will bring one-click updates also and a way to manage plugin licenses within each project - But we can only wait and see. Here's the best Craft CMS plugins!
I'm Jason, Co-Founder, and Lead Developer at MadeByShape. When i'm not walking my pooch Sully (Or him walking me), you'll find me cycling in the hills, at a gig or starting another DIY project.
