2 min read
Key takeaways from Dot All 2023 in Barcelona
There are some big changes coming to Craft CMS 5 whether we like it or not. Good job we like it! With a new "card" view that makes picking/choosing content a lot easier and a tonne of performance improvements when saving long form content.
Craft CMS 5 is due to be released Q1 2024 and Inception fields are no longer a field (We were teased with this at Dot All 2022), but having a matrix in a matrix is! The new way of handling matrix content (Blocks will essentially be entries!) and building a matrix field is going to save developers and authors a lot of time that's for sure.
Multistore is FINALLY coming to Craft Commerce along with catalog pricing that makes showing/sorting by sale prices a lot easier.
We saw the worrying look on Joe’s (Director of Servd) face when he saw you could run Guzzle API requests directly in twig templating
We picked some very handy little tricks for customising the Craft control panel using element actions, creating custom utilities, and creating front-end shortcuts to access the control panel lightning-fast.
Accessibility, performance, and sustainability have never been more important in our industry and it really showed through a number of talks given. Especially how committed Craft CMS 5 is to a fully accessible Control Panel.
Craft Cloud is (finally) here after being talked about for nearly 4 years and the direction pivoting multiple times. It looks really impressive and the P&T team has done an amazing job on it. We're going to try and get on the waiting list to give it a whirl. The only worry is the monthly cost for smaller businesses at around $260 per month.
There was a great talk about reusing a component library that can span across a company with multiple sites, that exist in a private repo. Something we're currently working on internally so we got a few takeaways from that.
It was great to see some large projects being featured and some helpful tips on how to best manage sites with lots of traffic and/or lots of data/entries, especially how to skip the queue feature in Craft CMS, and run scheduled CRON jobs to better handle tasks.
This was the first year of "Lightning Talks" (15-minute talks) which we thoroughly enjoyed. But the main stand-out plugin that got a mention in a lot of talks was Sprig from Ben, this is a powerful plugin and is definitely getting some traction in the community.
Dot All Barcelona, 2023
It's safe to say that Dot All was a great success. We are still buzzing about the things we learned, from all the inspiring talks our fellow Craft community members gave to everything we have to look forward to with the future of Craft.
With the long-awaited arrival of Multistore in Craft Commerce and the game-changing way matrix fields will now work, we cannot wait to get stuck into some of these new features!
All in all, the future of Craft is looking VERY promising for both developers and authors. Cheers to Craft CMS!
Right, where do we recon Dot All 2024 going to be...Barbados?
I've been at Shape for around 8 years now. I bagged a couple of weeks of work experience at the end of my first year at Salford Uni and from then on, well what can I say, they couldn't get enough of me.
