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Dot One 2019

Dot One 2019: Photo of Melbourne Museum. Credit: John Gollings
Dot One Australia took place on February 5, 2019, at the Melbourne Museum Treetop Room. In contrast to Dot All, this is a one-day event without workshops but with many presentations.

Unfortunately, the videos were published only recently, so I could not watch them before. Before that, I had to rely on the excellent and detailed summary of the event by Rohan Bassett. The participants were satisfied, especially since there was also factual information about the present and future of Craft CMS.

Future of Craft - Brandon Kelly

Brandon Kelly, CEO of Pixel & Tonic, gave a preview of the future of Craft CMS. But first, there was an update on the current Craft ecosystem.

The Craft CMS Ecosystem

The plugin store, for example, is now available as a website at plugins.craftcms.com. Over 470 plugins are available there, and Pixel & Tonic have paid over $288,000 to plugin developers.

6,700 members are registered in the official Craft Stack Exchange, and 90% of questions are answered there. There are currently 50,000 Craft licenses in use, and this time, only the licenses that were also used on at least one other day after the initial activation were counted. In total, there are currently over 65,000 websites powered by Craft CMS.

90% of new Craft projects use Craft CMS 3, which has a high adoption rate.

What's planned for Craft CMS 3.X?

In 3.X, there will be improvements for multi-lingual sites, such as multi-site element queries or category status per site. In terms of accessibility, WCAG 2.0 compliance is targeted, as well as complete control of the control panel via keyboard or mobile drag-and-drop. Regarding author experience, pagination will be introduced for index pages, sorting elements by user-defined fields, and mass editing of elements.

What's planned for Craft CMS 4?

The field layouts will receive a major update, and conditional fields will be introduced. For example, a field X is only displayed if there is also a value in the field Y. Or only certain user groups can see specific fields.

The sorting of the new field layouts and conditional fields will also be used to filter the elements on the index pages.

Fields should also be able to be arranged side by side in the future, instead of just one below the other. CRUD is to be added to the fields so that the user has all the options for creating and managing fields directly in the field layout.

The nested matrix is finally to come, and the new functions of the field layouts are also to be made available in the matrix.

What's planned for Craft CMS 5?

This was a relatively short section where there wasn't that much detail. Still, it was interesting to see Brandon Kelly give out this development plan far into the future.

The control panel is to be completely redesigned and based on Vue JS. Benjamin David told me about these plans at Dot All 2018 in Berlin. Furthermore, a complete REST API for system administration, as the control panel, will be a single-page app in the future. For content, there is to be a GraphQL API. With the Vue conversion, it would also be possible that Twig could become just an optional plugin. Because Vue can then be used directly for templating.

Future of Commerce – Luke Holder

Luke Holder, the leading developer of Craft Commerce, first introduced the store system. For example, all the standard features like shopping cart, orders, taxes, special sales, or shipping are included in Craft Commerce.

The essential features of Commerce, however, are other reasons. The main advantage is that Commerce is based on Craft CMS, and Craft is perfect for content-driven websites and is appreciated by designers and developers. Extensibility is also a big plus, as it continues to be an installable product for which plugins or custom functionality can be written. With SaSS solutions like Shopify, you must rely on what the software or its ecosystem offers. Lastly, he mentioned the ability to create a custom checkout UX specifically adapted to the project.

Craft Commerce 2

Craft Commerce 2 was in beta for nine months and was released a few weeks ago. It has been completely rewritten for Craft 3.1 and thus also supports Project Config. Subscription support with Stripe has been integrated, and several gateways have been spun out as plugins. In addition, order data can now be exported to Excel or as CSV.

Commerce Lite

Commerce Lite is for standard websites that only need some e-commerce functionality. For example, the shopping cart or complex shipping options and the advanced discounting capabilities of Commerce are missing. So application areas of Commerce Lite are sites that accept donations or if only single projects are sold on the blog.

What's planned for Craft Commerce 2.X?

Support for donations, more shipping/promotion terms. Non-physical products should be able to be better integrated into Commerce 2, and it will be possible for users to register at checkout as well.

Orders should also be able to be edited or created in the control panel. In addition, partial refunds will be possible so that the entire order no longer needs to be refunded.

Support for gift cards and discount codes is planned, as well as partial payments of the invoice amount. Overall, localization is also to be improved, especially more options in this regard for product types.

What's planned for Craft Commerce 3.X?

Multi-stores should be able to be implemented with Craft Commerce 3.0. Full support for multiple currencies is also planned. So far, multi-currency support is only available for payments, allowing customers to make a payment in their local currency. So now, if you give a 10 US dollar discount, this will automatically assign a 10 Australian dollar discount, for example. With full multi-currency support, it is possible to set different prices and deals for each language/currency.

The PHP-Money-Library
will be integrated into Craft Commerce 3, which should facilitate the technical handling of different currencies.

A REST API for the shopping cart is planned for Craft 3. X. So that all essential data can be fetched as a query, you get a JSON response. This will also make it possible for an iOS app to communicate with Craft Commerce.

Presentations

Enclosed are the Vimeo links to the presentations, as some interesting topics were covered:

Photo from  Thomas Sausen<

Self-employed web developer from Germany who started with WordPress websites in 2005, then moved to ExpressionEngine and lost his heart to Craft CMS in 2013. As the founder of Craftentries, he has been covering the Craft ecosystem since 2015.

Thomas Sausen Web Developer