3 min read
Craft CMS at Shape
Over the past year, we’ve been tinkering with a Content Management System (CMS) called - Craft, and we love Craft CMS! When we first started Shape, we ran mostly every website through Expression Engine, but we’ve dropped this completely in favour of Craft CMS.
Current clients that have websites on Expression Engine though, don’t fear - We will still be 100% supporting and updating these systems. We won’t leave you behind (Some of you might want to make the switch!)
Since making the full switch we’ve been rather busy with Craft...
A few recent projects have demanded complicated functionality that favoured being built as a plugin within Craft. We’ve found plugin development in Craft to be a breeze! Considering we’ve never done this before for any other CMS.
This is good news, because it means that no task is too unachievable and we already have a list of plugins we’ve already created:
2 recent projects demanded a points system that rewarded it’s users with points for performing certain tasks e.g. Sharing an article = 2pts or logging in X amount of times = 5pts. So we built a plugin to handle this functionality.
We’ve already had a big response to this plugin and are currently expanding it to work with Craft Commerce as a ‘Credits’ system for customers.
https://github.com/madebyshape/points
This uses the popular Select2 jQuery plugin and allows you to create Select2 fields in the CMS. This extends a normal <select> field by allowing the CMS user to search the options. You can also plug custom JSON arrays in to it using Twig to generate data directly in to an entry! Neat huh!
https://github.com/madebyshape/select2
We are big fans of Crawf’s plugins, and after using his Comments plugin for a recent project, we wanted to extend this to allow users to also submit a rating with a comment. Perfect for reviews & ratings on eCommerce websites!
https://github.com/madebyshape/comments-rating
Our most recent plugin gives you lots of widgets for the Craft CMS dashboard if your using Craft Commerce. Wdigets such as Cart Abandonment Conversions, Recent Products, Top Products and Total Revenue per Month, Year etc. Who doesn’t love lots of widgets :)
https://github.com/madebyshape/commerce-widgets
We’ve been building a plugin that allows the functionality of Livefyre directly in to your Craft website. This is being built as part of a current project and will be released soon.
All the plugins have been released for free on our Github.
You know a CMS is growing in popularity when Meetups start appearing around you. When Scott & Hannah from Club got in touch and let us know they were setting up a Craft CMS Manchester Meetup - We were keen to drop by.
The people who attend are a mixed bunch of serious back end developers, to front end only developers, marketers and content managers. Even people that haven’t even touched Craft CMS yet.
Sadly we missed #1, but with #4 approaching and seeing the group grow steadily over time, you know it’s going to be a success.
Take a look at the website and the Meetup event page and drop on by.
Previously we used Cart Throb and Expression Engine for all eCommerce jobs (Apart from some Shopify ones dropped in there). But recently we’ve made the full commitment to Craft Commerce.
This has been a big change for us, but we love what we see and how easy it is - not just for our developers, but from a client / shop owner point of view when managing products, stock and promotions.
But, we’ll be writing a bit more on this over the next few weeks, explaining features we like, would like to see and also what we’ve done to extend it.
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.
