Craft CMS Summit 2015

State of Craft

Brandon Kelly, founder of Pixel & Tonic, opened with an overview of the Craft ecosystem, as he did last year. The numbers tell the story:

• 66 updates since Craft 2.0
• 460 new features, 491 improvements, 552 bug fixes
• 88% of active sites already running Craft 2.3
• 260 plugins listed on Straight Up Craft
• 1,500 registered users on craftcms.stackexchange.com, 2,600 questions asked, 96% answered
• 10,000 active Craft sites, up from 3,300 last year

Companies now using Craft include Airbnb, Foursquare, and Oakley. Pixel & Tonic has grown its revenue and doubled the team from three to six people.

A plugin store was announced at the 2014 Summit, but it still hasn't launched. Craft 3 updates were also quiet for some time. Both came back in a big way.

Craft 3

Craft 3 is coming in three phases: Dev Preview starting May 2015, Public Beta, and the final release. Phase 1 is all under the hood – no visible changes to the control panel.

The key changes:

• Yii 2 – optimized for PHP 5.4, faster, more secure, better documentation
• Reworked codebase – no more separation between Component Models and Types
• New plugin system – plugins now have their own namespaces, are Yii modules, and no longer require a primary plugin class
• Extended Element Queries – more options when querying elements
• Volumes replace Asset Sources
• Improved debugging
• Double the performance – Craft 3 is expected to be about twice as fast as Craft 2 and Drupal 7

Craft Commerce

The biggest surprise at the Summit was Brandon introducing Luke Holder as Pixel & Tonic's seventh team member. Luke had been developing an e-commerce plugin called Market Commerce for Craft. Pixel & Tonic bought the plugin and hired Luke to help turn it into Craft Commerce.

Craft Commerce is set to become a full e-commerce solution for the Craft ecosystem, covering products, variants, orders, discounts, taxes, shipping, and support for the most widely used payment providers.

Master and Controller

Joel Bradbury gave an in-depth look at Craft's architecture and showed how to build complex front-end workflows while letting Craft do the hard work. He covered extending and replacing native controllers, method chaining, and the practical question of when to reach for hooks, extends, abstract classes, or replacements.

Advanced Component Management in Craft

Megan Zlock from Viget demonstrated how to use Matrix to build sites with easy-to-maintain components. She focused on using templates with partials, components, and macros, all following the DRY principle. This topic was discussed at last year's Summit as well, but this session explored it in much more detail.

Programming in Twig

Marion Newlevant's Twig session was the one I needed a year ago. Syntax, variables, control structures, and finally a clear answer on when extends, includes, embeds, and macros are the right choice.

Craft for Content

Aaron Berkowitz from nclud showed what content modeling looks like in practice. His case study was Walt Disney World: attractions, locations, and recommendations as content types, mapped out with their relationships and assigned to section types. Hard to find a more complex real-world example.

Diving Deep into Craft Plugins

Adam McCombs focused his session on the plugin ecosystem. He reviewed 20 plugins from other developers and shared tips for building your own, including how the standard MVC model differs from Craft's approach.

My take

The Craft CMS Summit 2015 was just as good as last year's event. The Craft 3 roadmap finally gave a clear idea of where the CMS is going. Craft Commerce was a real surprise. No one expected Pixel & Tonic to buy an existing plugin and turn it into a full e-commerce solution. With the team doubling in size and the user base tripling in a year, it's clear that Craft has matured.