This year's Dot All 2023 conference took place at the beautiful, authentic MACBA Convent dels Ángels in Barcelona. An important part of this conference for Laméco was the introduction of Craft CMS 5.
On behalf of Laméco, we (Dary & Sander) followed the entire conference. In this blog we share a full report.
The first day of the event was entirely dedicated to the introduction of Craft 5, where an alpha version was presented to the community. This hands-on workshop gave participants an exclusive opportunity to learn about the new features and to actively participate in their development.
Author Experience (AX) and Content Modeling
The Craft 5 update emphasizes the Author Experience (AX) and Content Modeling. Regarding the Author Experience, the main focus is on improving the display of relationships between elements and content. This is accomplished by displaying thumbnails and summaries, which can be customized through the Craft configuration. This gives Content Editors a clearer view of the relationships between different elements and content. Moreover, they get the ability to edit the content of these relationships directly through the convenient slide-out editor, without leaving the page. Another promising feature is the ability to perform bulk edits within the overview.
Roadmap
The roadmap for Craft 5 includes exciting developments such as Single Sign-on, Two-Factor Authentication, easy copying of content from one site to another, and translatable Alt-texts for images. The official release of Craft 5 is expected in the first quarter of 2024 and requires PHP 8.2.
Later in the day, we had the chance to get to work with the preview version of Craft 5 ourselves, and there was also room for small presentations in which people demonstrated the new features already on local versions (not live, of course 😉 ).
Build a Collaborative Content Platform with the Control Panel
A beautiful and fast website is not enough; configuring and using the CMS correctly is equally important. In this session, Moritz L'Hoest showed how Craft CMS can be used to provide customers with an optimal Author Experience (AX). These include customized widgets on Craft's dashboard, reviewing content when multiple content editors are working on a website, and migrating content from other systems into Craft CMS.
Reactive Front-ends with Sprig
The first project in which we used Sprig was some time ago. Sprig makes it possible to display new data without reloading the page, such as when filtering news items or scrolling through news stories. Ben Croker, owner of PutYourLightsOn, demonstrated that you can update data on your Web site without user interaction (for example, when displaying the number of tickets available). It is inspiring to see how we can improve the user experience of a Web site with relatively simple technology.
Craft CMS and DDEV Together
DDEV focuses on setting up projects quickly and easily, whether you are an experienced developer or new to the field. By working with Docker containers, you ensure that everyone is working with the same configuration, which promotes direct involvement in the project and avoids annoying delays.
Practical Tips for Accessible Websites
Kaitlyn Martinez and Lupe Camacho shared valuable insights during a comprehensive session on the principles of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Accessibility begins in the design process, with attention to color use, contrasts, visual interactions, fonts and sizes. In the development phase, there are also numerous steps to make a Web site more accessible to people with disabilities, such as adding alt text to images and providing additional context to buttons and links in text.
State of Craft 2023
The third and final day of Dot All 2023 began with an informative "State of Craft 2023" presentation by Brandon Kelly(Mr. Craft CMS so to speak). He shared some interesting statistics, including the fact that Craft CMS started 10 years ago with version 1.0 and is now used on a whopping 75,000 active domains. It was also revealed that Craft Commerce 5 is in the works, enabling multi-store functionality .
More Inspirational Sessions
The State of Craft presentation was followed by a talk by Lakeshia Wright titled "Humanizing UX Strategy for Greater Impact. In it, she emphasized the importance of seeing website visitors as people (humans) rather than users (users) and advocated accessibility and customization to improve the experience for all users.
Afterwards, attendees had the opportunity to give so-called "Lightning Talks" and share their knowledge and experience. Then there was an extensive Q&A session where questions from attendees were answered via Discord, on a variety of Craft-related topics.
During the conference, we also helped Andrew Welsch, the owner of NYS 107 (known for SEOmatic and Return), with a solution for GitHub. It was great to see how the Craft community is open to collaboration and eager to help each other.
That was it for Dot All 2023. We had an informative and interesting conference. The small-scale format makes it more relevant. It also makes it easier to connect with speakers you are less likely to talk to at larger conferences. Tonight we will do another small beer 🍺 in Barcelona. Thanks for following our posts!
