Dot All Round-Up 2023

The annual three-day developer conference brings together the international Craft community. And this year, they weren't the only Abstrakt team members in attendance - they were accompanied by our Lead Digital Designer, Lucy, who was there to deliver a keynote talk.

Dot All offers an incredible opportunity for our team to talk all things Craft CMS and Craft Commerce and to learn, collaborate and discuss the future of Craft with the Pixel & Tonic team and the wider Craft community.

Consisting of an all-day Craft 5 workshop, an accessibility workshop, 17 sessions, lightning talks, and a Q&A panel, it was a full on 3 days! We’ve pulled together a round-up of our highlights.

Craft 5 and Commerce 5

Focused on content modelling and authoring experience improvements, the team at Pixel & Tonic presented Craft 5 as ‘the biggest leap forward for content modelling since Matrix was added in 1.3’!

In addition to this huge upgrade Craft 5 also includes some long-awaited features, which we are super excited about:

• Element cards. Elements can now be displayed in the control panel as cards, with customizable content previews.

• Field instances. It’s now possible to include the same custom field multiple times within a field layout.

• Address fields. Addresses can now be added to any element via the new Addresses custom field type.

• All-new Matrix fields. Matrix fields now manage nested entries, can be displayed as an embedded element index, and can be nested.

• Inline editing. Element table views now support inline editing, making it easy to make quick changes to several elements at once.

• SSO, 2FA, and passkeys. User authentication is getting a major upgrade, with single sign-on, two-factor authentication, and passkey support.

• CKEditor. The CKEditor plugin is getting a major update, which will add the ability to create nested entries within the rich text content.

Commerce 5 is also on the way, which will bring multi-store / multi-currency support, which will be a BIG one for our global clients.

Craft Cloud

Craft Cloud, a first-party hosting solution for Craft CMS is finally here, after 5 years in the making!

With serverless and self-hosted projects, Craft & plugin licence management, Plugin Store management, account organisation, client billing and much more as outlined below, the launch of Craft Cloud is monumental :

• Automated build pipeline for Composer and npm scripts

• On-demand image transforms

• Custom staging environments based on Git branches

• Unlimited scalability thanks to a serverless architecture

• Static page caching, a global CDN, SSL certificates, a firewall and DDoS protection, all powered by Cloudflare

• Worldwide availability, enhanced by AWS Global Accelerator

Craft Cloud's serverless architecture and global CDN were created with sustainability in mind, keeping carbon footprint to a minimum. Reduing the impact of the website's we build is extremely important to us at Abstakt so that's a HUGE tick.

'Reactive Front-ends with Sprig'

A brilliant insightful talk by Ben Croker, the creator of Sprig. Giving an in-depth look into just how powerful HTMX can be with Sprig. As we've been using Sprig for the last year or so, it was great to be reminded just how useful the tool has been for us and how it's streamlined and simplified aspects of our development process. While also providing additional insight into the power of this tool and what can be achieved with it.

'Planet saving pixels. Creating a web that is good for people and the planet'
Delivered by our very own Lucy Williams, this talk introduced us to digital sustainability and explored practical ways to create more performant websites that help lower a website’s carbon footprint and deliver great digital products for people and the planet.

Videos of each of the above sessions and many more are available on craftcms.com/events and on Vimeo, including Brandon Kelly’s State of Craft keynote and Lucy's Planet Saving Pixels keynote.

Lucy Williams - Lead Digital Designer

"For a non-technical person I was a little cautious that the talks may be too technical, but as a digital designer with previous development experience I had a good enough level of background knowledge to keep up with the talks.

From my perspective I felt the two track days were set up well for me as I could switch between tracks to seek out the less techy talks. Topics such as Authoring Experience, Accessibility, Personalisation were very relevant to both designer and development roles, so there were a lot of interesting and tangible takeaways from these sessions for myself and other non-devs.

The single track day in particular was full of speakers with topics that were more generalised for the industry, and less closely linked to Craft CMS specifically; Humanising UX, Choosing a CMS, Digital Sustainability, Running an Agency - all highly relevant to my role as a lead digital designer.

As a non-developer attending a developer conference I felt it very inclusive and accessible to all! Digital designers, agency owners, content authors, account managers would all benefit from attending!"

Next year's Dot All date and location has yet to be announced. However there is a thriving Craft community, with lots of meet ups, so there are lots of ways to get involved in the meantime. At Abstrakt we host Craft CMS Notts; a quarterly event for local Craft designers, developers and content authors - we'd love to see you there!