Why we’re using Craft CMS! Part 1 (& Podcast!)

As developers, we consistently strive to deliver feature-rich, performant and secure products. Due to the fast-paced nature of our work, it can often be difficult to deliver all three within the time and budget requirements of any given project.

We also spoke about this on a Podcast which you can listen to at the end of this post.

To ensure we meet these goals, we often reach for frameworks and tools which allow us to build products without re-inventing the wheel. We have recently been working with Craft CMS 3 to build client websites, and have been loving it. Here’s why:

Our clients love it

Craft allows us to develop websites that are easily editable and vastly extendable, we enjoy being able to give more power to our clients. Keep your eyes peeled for part 2 of this blog where we will discuss why Craft 3 is so great for our clients.

It uses modern PHP tech

In a move which has been greatly welcomed, the team at Pixel & Tonic have migrated to a more modern backend architecture to run Craft 3, now powered by composer to allow a much easier package installation. Craft is easier than ever to extend and install.

Additionally, Craft now follows modern PHP coding standards such as PSR 1 & 2. This helps ensure consistency across the codebase, making it drastically easier to develop against.

Powerful asset management

Craft 3 has an incredibly powerful asset management feature. From the editor to the asset file system, right through to the custom transformations generating optimised assets, it’s now incredibly easy to add, manage and use assets in websites. Pro Tip: Did you know you can press shift + space to view asset previews.

A vast collection of plugins

While Craft 3 was only released a short while ago, there are already hundreds of plugins available, with more being added every day. Having such a large catalogue of plugins available helps reduce development time and allows much larger features to be added to a site simply via installation. A full list of plugins is available at https://plugins.craftcms.com/

The good news is that even if there isn’t a plugin that meets your needs, creating one is incredibly simple.

We recently launched our first Craft 3 plugin, a simple twig filter to md5 hash a variable. We utilised this when needing to create a key for caching from a long URL with lots of query parameters, as the length was too long for the database key. It’s available here: https://bit.ly/2UxOVq0

At Steadfast Collective, we are constantly looking to improve our work and make our developers’ lives easier.

We are extremely happy with how Craft 3 has supported our work.

Listen on iTunes or Google Podcasts