Will Browar

Today, he works as a Front-End Development Lead for a global fleet management company, contributing his extensive expertise and guiding teams. In his free time, he passionately dedicates himself to developing plugins

Why are you using Craft CMS?

I had worked at an agency that did a lot of marketing sites using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and other PHP-based CMSs. We got to the point where clients were complaining about the authoring experience and the hoops they needed to jump through to manage image assets and content. We explored other CMS options and found that Craft CMS gave us a great balance between flexibility for content management and the ability to do whatever we wanted on the front-end.

When clients wanted more complicated functionality, we could use plugins or write our own custom modules to handle very specific requirements. That’s where I grew to appreciate the design decisions of the APIs and Control Panel. Now I focus on plugin development and try to go further to improve the client’s author experience.

What was your first Craft project?

We started using Craft CMS very early on in the Craft 2 days and to be honest I don’t remember which project it was that we started using Craft. I think it was either a national frozen custard chain or a cancer foundation in the Rochester, NY area.

What's your favorite project you've done with Craft CMS?

My favorite Craft CMS project was the work I got to do to rebuild Kodak.com. Being a Rochester, New York resident, someone who worked with Kodak film in a photo lab, and a photography geek for many years, it felt like an honor to work with their teams of designers and developers.

We launched the site as a Craft CMS + Vue.js-based SPA, and then we converted the front-end over to Nuxt to take advantage of its static rendering. It was a challenging project, but the people we worked with were great and I learned a ton in the process.
Do you have a favorite craft site that someone else has implemented?

You see a lot of really great work come through the Craft CMS newsletters and on the Craft CMS Discord - both from a design and functionality standpoint.

One of my favorite sites going way back is the Field Notes site and store because I like their products and their overall design aesthetic.

What are the biggest benefits of Craft?

As a front-end developer first, I want the ability to design a site to look the way I want, then I want the ability to edit content without letting the tools I use change my design. The people behind Craft CMS and most plugins make sure you have the ability to separate data in the CMS from how you display it on the front-end of your site.

I think having flexibility all across the way you manage fields, code page templates, and work with content in plugins and modules is Craft CMS’s number one benefit.

What improvements to the CMS would you like to see?

I’d like to see a little more support for image formats outside of JPEG, PNG, and GIFs. As formats like JPEG-XL and AVIF have better compression and start to let us do more things with HDR and other image features, it would be great to see Craft CMS treat these file formats like images instead of generic asset files.

What are your favorite plugins?

Most of the sites I work on have these plugins installed by default:

• Admin Bar
• Blitz
• CP Field Inspect
• Expanded Singles
• Guide
• ImageOptimize
• Image Resizer
• SEOmatic

My general strategy - in the CMS and on the front end - is to avoid dependencies and utilize the core system wherever possible. So when I pick plugins I try to imagine what I would do the day the plugin no longer works or is no longer available. So for SEOmatic, I could create a bunch of SEO fields, and for Blitz I could use Varnish or another caching strategy. But until then, these plugins save me time and support headaches.