Dot All 2019

This year's venue was the Phi Center. The trip to Canada was a bit too expensive and time-consuming, so, unfortunately, I couldn't enjoy the 18 talks and three workshops on site. Therefore I had to trust the official blog post on the one hand and listen to devMode.fm on the other hand.

Brandon Kelly delivered his annual keynote:

• 627 in the plugin store
• 700,000 US dollars was paid out to the plugin developers. Last year it was 135,000 US dollars.
• Craft Discord has 3,400 members.
• 70,130 websites use Craft CMS
• 148 Partners in the Partner Network
• Eddie, Oli, Heidi, and Nathanial strengthen the Pixel & Tonic team with 11 employees. The goal is to hire another 4 team members.

Craft Cloud becomes Headless Craft as a service. Thus Craft without templates, plugins, and software updates or DevOps work. The service is scheduled to launch in 2020, but exact details or pricing are still missing.

It could be interesting for service providers who only want to maintain the content of their Gatsby sites or single-page apps with Craft.

Craft 4 focuses on accessibility, collaboration, content modeling, and user experience:

• Full keyboard support
• Better mobile support
• High contrast mode and dark mode
• Multi-author editing
• Conditional fields
• New UI elements in the field layouts (Grid, HR, Fieldset)
• Nested matrix fields
• Custom element overview page (table, tree structure, gallery)

Craft 4 is scheduled for release in 2020.

The port from Apple News 2.0 to Craft 3 was still released during the conference. And the Craft blog can be found on Apple News.

Dot All 2020 will take place in Amsterdam in September 2020.

Even though I can't comment on the individual presentations, I felt this year's announcements were very well done. Craft 4 offers purely from the features much of what the community has wanted for years. Nested matrix fields, in particular, have been requested since 2013. On the other hand, conditional fields are a feature that belongs in the core. I use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin in every WordPress installation, partly because of this feature. All the better if Craft implements a similar feature in the CMS directly.

I'm waiting for more info on Craft Cloud, such as subscription costs. But Pixel & Tonic have recognized the spirit of the times, and it goes in the direction of JAMstack. Craft 3.3 needed to bring the headless mode, and Craft Cloud seems to be the next step.

This new Zwitgeist was also reflected in the presentations. There was the workshop Modern Web Development with Craft, Vue, and GraphQL and the following presentations with JAMstack reference:

• Headless Commerce with Craft CMS and Gatsby (Brian Hanson)
• Comparing JAMstack to LAMP (Andrew Welch)
• Feet on the ground, head(less) in the cloud with Craft CMS (Dimitri Steinel und Mike Pierce)

I can't wait for the videos of the presentations to be released, as the following are of burning interest to me:

• Oops–I guess we're full-stack developers now (Chris Coyier)
• Craft in Docker: Everything I've Learnt (Matt Gray)
• Content Strategy – How we Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Complex Site Structures (Nick Spriggs und Allyssa Price)
• The Great Beyond - Managing a Migration to Craft (Andrew Armitage)
• Crafting for the Author: 7 Principles for Improving Author Experience (Kyle Cotter)
• David and Goliath: How a bespoke CMS can compete (and beat) industry leaders (John Lamb)
• Progressively enhance your Craft site with Vue (Francesca Buratti)

And looking at blog posts about the conference, it seems to have been again very informative, top organized, and fun. But read the articles by Matt Gray, Ben Croker, Jamie Jenkins, and Andrew Armitage for yourself.