Matthias Ott

What was your first Craft project?

My website, matthiasott.com, was created in 2015 with Craft 2. Meanwhile, I finally updated to Craft 5.

What is your favorite Craft site you have created?

Still, my own website. :) Mainly because my website is the perfect place to keep trying out new technologies and to develop personally, for example, by writing blog posts and sharing my experiences with others. In addition, trying out and working on my website is a wonderful balance to my day-to-day business.

Do you have a favorite craft site that someone else has implemented?

Phew, that's a tricky question. On the one hand, there are so many different good websites that it's hard to decide. But because I can spend hours on typography and fonts, I'll pick out the website of the Swiss type foundry Dinamo: https://abcdinamo.com/

From the cookie notice to the animations to the layout, the site is exciting and sometimes wonderfully weird.

What are the biggest benefits of Craft?

• There is great flexibility in implementing customized structures and templates.
• The convenient and user-friendly backend, which in most cases requires no training to find your way around.
• Many helpful and sensibly implemented functions exist, such as matrix fields, image transforms, caching, database backups, and the convenient installation of plugins via the store.

Or shorter? :) Flexibility, backend interface, out-of-the-box features

What should be improved in Craft CMS?

The documentation is very good. Nevertheless, it can take a while for beginners to find their way around Craft because it has grown into a really extensive system over the years. Plugin development, in particular, is relatively complex for developers with less experience with Craft and Yii. But once it's up and running, plugins and the developed pages will all be more stable and perform better.

What are your favorite plugins?

One of the great strengths of Craft is that you can implement many things without plugins. That's why the list of plugins I use in projects is usually relatively short and depends heavily on the project. Here are my favorites among the free plugins:

CKEditor: It's a plugin that I almost always use. It activates CKEditor, one of the best open-source rich text editors.

Cookies: It sets cookies. Simple and indispensable.

Webhooks: Webhooks can send POST requests when certain events are triggered in Craft. For example, you can start a task in automation tools such as Zapier or IFTTT when you save an entry

Sprig: An exciting plugin that allows you to build interactive, reactive front-end components in Twig.

Webmention: Indispensable for me on my own website for receiving and sending webmentions. And now finally available for Craft 5 ;)