Dodgy Code @ Dot All 2022

I spent 3 incredible days in Brooklyn, NY getting to know the Craft CMS community. Here’s what I heard, what to look forward to, and which trends you should watch.

Photo Credit: Shawna O’Neal (Dodgy Code)

Dot All is a (mostly) annual conference hosted by Pixel & Tonic for the members of their Craft CMS community. Talks focus toward development within the Craft ecosystem, but also include various topics from across the web development industry. Speakers this year presented on web accessibility, HTMX, scaling web applications, kubernetes, global technology usage, headless applications, and more.

https://craftcms.com/events/dot-all-2022

Community Despite a Pandemic

This year was a highly anticipated return to in-person community events, with the last in-person Dot All taking place in Montreal for 2019. Since then, the Craft CMS community has thrived digitally via its Discord Server and the efforts of community based spaces such as CraftQuest.

After last year’s virtual conference, this year went hybrid with both in-person tickets and a discounted live streaming pass. The result was an intimate venue with additional attendees tuning in via live feed.

One thing that easily became apparent — the community has been alive and well. Many of us were thrilled to meet our remote colleagues and digital collaborators in person, share our struggles and successes, and take advantage of the incredible diversity of the Brooklyn food scene.

Image Credits: Pete Eveleigh (Foster Commerce), David Hellmann (Dynatrace), Shawna O’Neal (Dodgy Code)

The Latest News for Craft CMS

There were so many announcements and updates for the State of Craft discussion, that I can’t possibly list them all here. Instead, here are some of the major points (that I’m the MOST excited about):

1. Shopify x Craft CMS

This was my favourite announcement — Dodgy Code has long held that the shop experience of Shopify paired with the content management power of Craft CMS could be the answer for sites that sell, but need robust content too. Craft Commerce is great, but for many of our clients it’s truly overkill for their needs. Looking forward to the release sometime next year!

2. Inception Fields

The answer to nested fields, matrix or otherwise. Matrix is here to stay, but to provide a better author experience a new field type is born. This field type will use a similar UX as the new address fields for Craft CMS & Craft Commerce and reap the benefits of keyed-in performance.

3. Decoupled 1st Party Integrations

In addition to the new Shopify integration, the existing Stripe plugin will be Craft CMS compatible and have deeper access to Stripe’s features. Taking advantage of Subscriptions no longer requires Craft Commerce!

4. Content Structuring Overhaul

In Craft 5, ‘categories’, ‘tags’, and ‘globals’ will shift into becoming ‘entries’. The taxonomy enhancements to allow separation of the four elements is still a WIP, but some of the pre-fetch functionality (currently reserved to globals) has already found itself as a setting across the board in the v5 release. The development team is committed to a positive and clear author experience on this one.

5. Craft Cloud

Originally intended as a headless development initiative, that has since been set aside for now, the “Craft Cloud” name has been recycled for a 1st party hosting platform. Craft Cloud aims to automate and smooth out setup of web hosting for its CMS users, with a focus on easy setup, performance optimisations, scalability, and environment sustainability. It sounds like this could be a valuable replacement to using Laravel Forge but the jury’s out on whether it will compete with Matt Gray’s Servd

Official Announcements: https://craftcms.com/blog/dot-all-2022-announcements

Image Credit: Gael P.

Speaker Experience

This year, I got to speak LIVE on stage for the first time in my career (eek!). It was equal parts exciting and intense leading up to my Day 3 time slot, with a lot of interesting presenters to live up to.

Truth be told, I saw it going a lot differently in my head. Something about those 3 steps up onto the stage just pushes all semblance of order out of your head and leaves you hoping you’ll just remember the data and get through the next 45 minutes.

I missed a couple of points and anecdotes I meant to use, finishing my time slot at 37.5 minutes. Yes, I use a stopwatch app to make sure I know my pacing, and yes it does really help!

I won’t be winning any awards for comedy or entertainment, but I did deliver the information I wanted to and it was fairly well received. The absolute best part of this community is the support it gives to its members. The advice, comraderie, and genuine care exhibited by the Pixel & Tonic staff, other attendees, and speakers went above and beyond — making the speaker experience remarkably pleasant, inspiring, and engaging.

I’m truly honoured to have been selected to speak, and I can’t wait to iron down the wrinkles for the next one! From what I’ve heard, I’m much harder on my performances than anyone else, and I was happy to see how many people were discussing their personal connectivity and device limitation experiences! Feel free to judge for yourself …

Mind the Gap: What’s left behind when we build for the cutting edge? is now available for (free) online viewing:
https://craftcms.com/events/dot-all-2022/sessions/mind-the-gap…

Image Credit: Ryan Irelan (CraftQuest)

Favourite Talking Points: Day 1

Everything from Brandon Kelly’s State of Craft talk is always the highlight of our Day 1 mornings. An exciting and energetic start to a packed day.

Over the next 6 hours, highlights included:

• A look at both Storybook and Fractal as tools in aiding with design systems on Craft sites. Both of these talks highlighted the need for close Designer & Developer collaboration on all web projects. We advocate for this heavily here at Dodgy Code, so it was great to see others taking a strong approach to it as well!
  — Imple­ment­ing com­po­nent-dri­ven design sys­tems with Craft + Fractal
  — Crafting components with Storybook
• An “under the hood” look at Kubernetes (K8s) and DevOps planning for projects at scale. I always walk into Matt Gray’s talks feeling like an idiot, and leaving like I actually know something worthwhile… like why kubernetes can be good for managed Craft CMS hosting… Forward this one to your DevOps specialists (but also maybe just get Matt’s Servd hosting so that he can do it for you…)
  — Craft in K8s
• We’ve had SPAs v. MPAs, but here comes Hypermedia-Driven Applications (HDAs) … A look at HTMX, Unpoly, Hotwire, and Sprig (the htmx wrapperfor Craft) for reactive elements on websites. We’ve used htmx / Sprig on a few sites and really enjoyed this history and insight!
  — A Prac­ti­cal Guide to HTML ​“Over the Wire”
• The coolest guide & reminder to use and MAKE YOUR OWN command line functions. How do we keep forgetting we can do this?! It’s so easy!
  — Craft Command Line Magic
• The big scaling talk (a personal favourite from this year’s conference), also affectionately named “Learning from Mark’s Mistakes”. Lots of valuable insight on what it takes to grow and scale a Craft CMS website, including reminders of which “small” stuff makes for big impact. Emphasis on the database with this one, folks.
  — Managing Craft at Scale

Favourite Talking Points: Day 2

Moving into Thursday, some of us were feeling the impact of the city that never sleeps. Welcome to Day 2 (or Day 3 if you attended the workshops).

Clearly, the best talk of the day was Mind the Gap — Whats left behind when we build for the cutting edge? But bias aside, here’s some top highlights:

• A heartfelt, and refreshingly human centric, chat on how to bring empathy to our team management and client relationships.
  — Better Together: Improving Collaboration Through Empathy
• Proper and performant ways of breaking up fields and content relationships for a better content authoring experience (I nodded my head in agreement through much of this talk). Also, a look at Vizy richtext plugin as an available Redactor alternative.
  — Using Entries and Rela­tion­ships as your con­tent builder system
• John Henry’s iconic mustache, and enough convincing arguments on how to edit the Craft CMS control panel in ways that don’t make me panic over system fragility, consistency, and the like. I’m willing to look deeper and re-consider my limits on this one… maybe 😉
  — Bending the Craft Control Panel
• A stellar round of insight into how truly successful accessibility carries through every aspect of a project… with a free open source frontend kit and transparent project guide to the W3C website redesign. This is a favourite talk from 2022, and we’re still gleaning info from it a week later!
  — Accessibility takeaways from the W3C website redesign

Image Credit: Ryan Irelan (CraftQuest)

Major Takeaways

The entire community is truly dedicated to doing right by both site users, and content authors. Major commitments to accessibility and user friendly practices are seen across the talks both on stage, and off.

Whether you’re building a headless system, a brochure site, a complex integration, an e-commerce system, or a multi-site monolith… it seems we’ve all found a home in Craft CMS and its design freedom.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all in Barcelona, for Dot All 2023! Adiós!

Looking for a Craft CMS developer that can bring your website project to life?
Find us at https://dodgyco.de and let’s get started!