Dot All Round-Up 2022

It’s the perfect opportunity to be surrounded by a thriving international community of peers, learning from each other and chatting about their experiences developing with Craft CMS and Commerce.

Consisting of a single day of workshops and two days of talks related to Craft CMS, Commerce and modern web development, we’ve pulled together a round-up of our highlights.

Craft 5

On May 4th 2022 (yes, force jokes were had), Craft 4 was announced and as imagined, it’s been worth the wait. Safe to say, in true Craft style, they’re already innovating and developing Craft 5. The team at Pixel & Tonic have said that it will ‘mark the biggest leap forward for content modelling since Matrix was added in 1.3’, which is something we’re particularly excited about.

As seen in Craft’s overall round-up, the features we can expect are:

• Entries everywhere – categories, tags, and global sets are becoming entries.

• Unified content view – a new way of organising all site content.

• Multiple entry authors – entries will no longer be limited to a single author.

• Decoupled entry types – entry types will become an independent concept, separate from sections. (Sections will choose which entry types are available to them.)

• Entry portability – entries can move to other sections that allow the same entry type).

• Scheduled drafts and releases – choose a future date that a draft should be applied, or assign multiple drafts to a “release” so they can be applied in bulk.

• Inception fields – create nested entries without limits.

When can we expect it? Craft 5 is due to be released in Q4 2023, with the potential to fall around the time of Dot All 2023, too.

Craft Cloud

Craft Cloud has been a few years in the making with a decision to take a couple of steps back in 2020 when Craft decided their plan was too rigid to meet the needs of the community (another positive about Craft, is that if something is not right, they’ll fix it before it’s a problem).

There were many features expected to come along with Craft Cloud, such as serverless and self-hosted projects, Craft & plugin licence management, Plugin Store management, account organisation, client billing and much more.

We got an update at Dot All 2022, and it looks like it’s finally starting to take shape with the original plan for “headless Craft as a service” knocked on its head. Instead, it will be a one-size-fits-all service for traditional, headless, and hybrid Craft sites.

As seen in Craft’s overall round-up, the features we can expect are:

• An automated build pipeline for Composer and npm scripts

• Built-in logging, image transforms, and asset storage

• 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

When can we expect it? 2023, but no exact date has been announced yet.

Looking for Craft’s overall round-up, read it here.

Headless Craft Commerce

We attended this workshop on the first day of the conference, so we got a lot more hands-on experience. It was interesting to understand how Foster Commerce — the agency running the workshop — had set up a Nuxt JS application that interacted with Craft’s backend. The approach was clever and took a lot of the strain away from Craft, making for a fluid and fast front end.

Managing Craft at Scale
This talk opened our eyes to some of the issues we have been having with our Craft builds at scale. It was incredibly useful to find out possible fixes and understand better methods to manage our super large sites.

Kubernetes (K8s)

We haven't considered or taken the time to explore hosting with Kubernetes before, but it's a new and rapidly growing method to host websites. This talk gave more understanding of its capabilities — automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications — it’s likely to become even bigger and more known in the future, and so was useful to understand to get ahead of the curve.

Design systems using Storybook

The talk about using a design system to visualise components using Storybook seems like it’s something of a game changer without a need to jump straight into Craft. Storybook design systems power the front end — you’d be in good company with Shopify, Airbnb and Salesforce using it — it allows developers to engineer design systems at scale, which means we can show how components will work without developing it in its entirety. Its core message? Build UIs without the grunt work.

HTML over the wire

This was interesting for us as we've just started using a new plugin, Sprig, which sends data back as HTML and then outputted on a page straight away. Previously we were doing API calls, so working with JSON, and so this seems like a happy medium.

Accessibility
There was a great talk by a small, UK-based agency that rebuilt the W3C website (People who standardise the web) and their journey on making things super accessible, and how everyone in the project had to fully understand what was involved to truly make a website "accessible.”

Three intense yet totally enjoyable days at the conference were concluded with an after party with everyone attending. It was really fun, and great to talk about everything we’d all learnt and a reflection on the Craft Community and how eager everyone is to learn, share ideas and get along. Not to mention the fact the view from the after party was exceptional.

Manhattan

A big highlight was going to the Rockefeller Center and Top of the Rock to take in the 360-degree view of New York City. We found that incredible to see the cityscape at night and see sights we’ve only ever seen in films. We weren't quite prepared for how big Central Park was either; however, it was great walking around it as the seasons were shifting—it seems we can’t escape grey squirrels.

The food

Jamie and Rhys were in their element when it came to the food. The team back home weren’t kidding when they mentioned the portion sizes, and it’s safe to say they’ve never had bagels, burgers or pizza slices that tasted so good.

Dot All is an incredible three-day experience for anyone involved with developing with Craft, and we’d recommend it if the opportunity comes your way.

Dot All 2023

Next year, Dot All will be a little closer to home (ours anyway!) in Barcelona. If you are interested in attending but are unsure of what to expect, want more information on Craft or are a local Craft developer looking for other community members, join us at Craft CMS Notts.