Craft Services

In this episode, we wish you a Happy New Year and chat about some [mostly Craft-related] technologies and trends we're looking forward to in 2017: Craft CMS 3, Yii 2, the Craft plugin store, VueJS, Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, content marketing, CMFs (content management frameworks), and a golden age of #perfmatters. We wrap up with some philosophical conversation about activism, empathy, and breaking out of your bubble.

Michael & Andrew interview two developers who have made the switch from Drupal to Craft CMS: Patrick Harrington and Marko Srdoč. Some very interesting discussion ensued about the strengths of Craft CMS, and also where Craft CMS could learn from Drupal. The unique perspective that two experienced Drupal developers offer on their take of Craft CMS is quite insightful, and provoked a nice discussion of how to pitch Craft to clients that have heard of Drupal, but not Craft CMS.

Andrew & special guest host Earl Johnston interview long time ExpressionEngine developer Sean Smith from https://caffeinecreations.ca/ , discussing his recent transition to using Craft CMS.  We cover both the moments of unbridled joy, and the moments of frustration as Sean discusses his approach to learning to use Craft, and the contrasts between it and ExpressionEngine.

Michael & Andrew continue the conversation about website performance, focusing on efficient Twig templating with Craft CMS.  Topics covered include how to code performant templates, using the {% cache %} tag efficiently, how to profile and optimize your front-end dev, and a good discussion of Eager Loading.  TTFT (Time To First Teet is also covered)

Michael & Andrew continue the conversation about website performance. This time we cover server-side performance, and the benefits of embracing performance-minded server tech like PHP7, Nginx, MariaDB, and HTTP2. As in our previous episode, we cover the practical implications, how to educate your clients about these technologies, and why you should build these improvements into your estimates and maintenance contracts.

Andrew Welch returns to the Craft Podcast, this time to talk about server and client-side performance practices. Performance is an afterthought to many designers, developers, and even clients, but it is a crucial part of creating a modern website. In the first part of this two part podcast, we discuss why performance is so important in terms of user experience, Google SERP rankings, conversions, and e-commerce. Andrew explains some best-practices for server setup and provides an intro to putting together a performance-focused front-end development workflow. In spite of a few technical glitches, the content here is solid, so buckle up and enjoy!

In this episode, we talk with Andrew Welch about SEO: What does SEO mean in 2016? How do we tell if we're doing well? What are the modern best practices, and how do we implement them in Craft? Meta tags, structured data, JSON-LD, Twitter Cards, Facebook Open Graph, Page Speed - we cover a ton of ground. Equally as important as the technical implementation, we also discuss how to sell SEO to clients, and discuss why SEO matters from a business perspective.

In this episode, Pixel & Tonic founder Brandon Kelly, and newly-minted Chief Customer Officer Leslie Camacho give us a personal introduction to P&T's new Craft Services program and share their vision for helping Craft customers be more successful.

In this episode, Les calls Michael in Singapore to talk about how to get involved in the CraftCMS community, the importance of StackExchange, Slack etiquette, and how we're all in this to make each other better.

In this follow-up to Episode 4, Michael — joined again by our friend Steven Grant — talks about Craft's technical merits and explains how Craft adds value to projects from a developer perspective. We discuss Craft's flexible, content-first architecture, the benefits of API dogfooding, why developers love Twig, and how Craft makes it easy to create great end-user experiences. Michael says the word "stuff" way too much.