Dot One 2024 - Afternoon round up
Dot One is a one-day event created to bring the UK Craft CMS Community together. We’ve had a brilliant time catching up with those in the industry who are as passionate about the system as we are. Events such as these are so important. Not only for networking with the Pixel and Tonic team, clients and other agencies, but also to share ideas and troubleshooting. It also provides an opportunity to find out about the long-term goals of Craft CMS as well as playing a part in shaping its future. With that in mind, here’s a rundown of the second part of the day.
Email Content Creator
Our very own developer Mike Lowe kicked off the afternoon right after the morning session discussing the journey that led to the creation of Email Content Editor. This is a plugin that gives content authors more control over their system emails. Among other things, this means that you can carry out changes without having to wait for development time. If you think this might be useful to your organisation, you can find the finer details in Email Content Editor on the Plugins section of our site.
Craft Cloud
Then, Pixel and Tonic Chief Tech Officer, Brad Bell gave us a demo of Craft Cloud, a scalable hosting platform described as a one-stop shop for CMS and infrastructure. Some of the benefits include:
- It is easy to scale up and down quickly
- It can import environment variables
- You can put your own Cloudflare in front of craft Cloud Cloudflare
The team has outlined a roadmap for rollout if you’d like to know more. Alternatively, take a look at their case study How Craft CMS built Craft Cloud for a full account of the finer details.
Naturally, delegates were keen to know more about its specific capabilities. Pixel and Tonic’s Q&A which followed was a great opportunity to discuss the demo in more detail. Another hot topic was what major features could, or should, be part of Craft 6. The Craft Cloud demo also left developers keen to know more about a possible move for Craft from its own framework to Laravel in the near future. This would allow them to take advantage of the tools and improve efficiencies, we may even see improvements in scalability and performance. We’ll keep you updated on this as it develops.
Perhaps the big question of the session though was what happens to Craft 5 now that talks have started around Craft CMS 6? Well, good news, the team assured us that they remain committed to continuing Craft CMS 5 for the foreseeable future and even hinted at what improvements we can expect from version five in the not-too-distant future - watch this space!
Lessons learned
What then followed was an insightful talk from Andrew Armitage in Lessons learned from a project that nearly killed our agency. Here he discussed the difficulties his agency faced during a problematic website build. In it he highlighted a number of red flags that we ourselves have encountered from time to time which have led us to develop similar strategies such as creating a risk register and always ensuring a thorough discovery.
Andrew stressed the importance of creating goal harmony and resisting the temptation to move too quickly or think that you might be able to turn the ship around further down the line. Ultimately the agency survived the painful experience. A key takeaway for us was that it is important to accept when something isn’t going right. It’s better for both you and the client in the long run if you address it and work to find a suitable solution.
Changing health and performance outcomes for elite athletes
Towards the end of the day our Designer Ben and Developer Charlie along with founder Alex did a fantastic job of presenting Changing health and performance outcomes for elite athletes. In it the team talked about how the high-profile Vodafone PLAYER.Connect has been built using Craft CMS to grab data and build analysis tools to monitor elite sports people's performance, well-being and recovery. It has now been adopted by a number of sports teams and athletes including the GB Men’s Wheelchair Basketball team and Welsh Rugby Union Women’s Team.
To round the conference up Oscar Pettersson delivered his talk How to Introduce and position Craft CMS effectively; a useful talk for everyone but especially those who are client-facing. In it, he covered effective strategies for introducing Craft CMS to non-technical stakeholders. Above all, he advised that it’s important to empathise and give examples of how you can tackle specific challenges or support your clients' strategic objectives. It’s important to be ready to get into the details. Some of the selling points of Craft CMS he identified included:
- The system’s focus on content
- How easy it is to pick up and use
- It’s scalability - it grows as you grow.
It reminded us that there’s always work to be done when it comes to shouting about the brilliant work we’ve done. We’ve got the portfolio and expertise, now it’s time to focus on producing some examples!
Another great event put on by Pixel and Tonic with some truly exciting plans in the pipeline for Craft CMS. Now it’s up to the terrace to catch up with some familiar faces.
If Craft CMS sounds like the type of content management that could transform your organisation, why not get in touch? We’d love to hear from you!