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Craft CMS 4 Released
- Darmody 4y agoI was always curious about CraftCMS because it's built with Yii 2 instead of any other popular PHP framework. Sadly I never had the chance to look into it. Last thing I heard it they were looking to migrate the codebase to Laravel as Yii 2 is no longer up to date and Yii 3 is far from being complete and production-ready. Congratulations on the release.
- brandonkelly 4y agoYeah we’re starting to investigate which route we’ll take (Yii 3, Laravel, or Symfony). These days everything is so componentized it’s becoming less and less important, though. Craft has always pulled in a various Symfony components, and v4 adds Laravel Collections.
- V__ 4y agoDo you have any interesting assessments you can share? The pro cons, or what you like/dislike about the mentioned selection?
- brandonkelly 4y agoNot yet. We’ll share some thoughts when we make our decision, I’m sure.
- V__ 4y agoCan't wait! Cheers.
- open-source-ux 4y agoCraft CMS follows an interesting business model: a self-host product which is purchased with the source code of the product i.e. 'source only'. It's not open-source - the source code of the product cannot be shared or distributed by others, but it can be modified by the customer to suit their needs. The source code is published on GitHub so anyone can see it. Presumably the product creators trust customers will pay for the product (if some do not, it probably doesn't matter to profitability). Another profitable PHP product called 'Kirby CMS' also follows this model. The idea of 'source only' is not new at all. Back in the late 90s when Delphi was popular, many developers created and sold components to other developers (e.g. UI widgets). These components came with full source code of the components but they were not open source. The label 'source only' is considered a dirty word among some open source advocates. But if you are building a B2B (Business-to-Business) software product, 'source only' is a viable option to successfully make a living from your product - one that isn't completely closed source. (As an aside, here's the Craft CMS licence: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/blob/develop/LICENSE.md https://github.com/craftcms/cms/blob/develop/LICENSE.md)
- ricardonunez 4y agoI know is more complicated than that but wasn't that how Stallman envision it? Free as in Freedom and not financially. By the way, I remember those Delphi days with UI widgets. It is an interesting model. Does anybody knows how to handle the annual license renewal?
- V__ 4y agoYou mean in general, or how Craft does it? You set up an account with them, and buy as many licenses as you need. Furthermore, you also don't have to buy a license each year, you just won't get updates. The renewal fee stays the same, even if you pause it for a few years. See: "How Craft Licenses and Renewals Work" [1] [1] https://craftcms.com/knowledge-base/how-craft-licenses-and-renewals-work https://craftcms.com/knowledge-base/how-craft-licenses-and-r...
- dgb23 4y agoSource only / source available / dual licensing and so on is a common model for web development components and libraries. Some from the top of my head are tailwindui, mui, mapplic, flickity, many plugins for Wordpress and other plattform-like things and there are several additional CMS solutions, typically PHP based, that do this.
- shantnutiwari 4y agoI tried Craft as an alternative to Wordpress-- couldnt even get it installed. The instructions assume you have a whole PHP dev environment setup-- very frustrating, after some time googling the various errors I kept hitting I just quit. This has been my issue with most Wordpress alternatives-- they assume you are a professional PHP developer, rather than someone who just wants to try a CMS. And then everyone complains whY dO yOu uSE wordPResS iT is hOrriBle
- V__ 4y agoI'm not trying to sound harsh, but in that case, Craft CMS is probably not the right Wordpress alternative for you. Craft's philosophy is to give you the tool you need and make no assumptions about how you want to build your site. That means, there are no themes nor sites or blog posts by default. You have to set up your site's structure, the content fields yourself and then write the templates using TWIG. This is a CMS to be setup by developers.
- colourgarden 4y ago> The instructions assume you have a whole PHP dev environment setup How else would you expect to run a PHP-based application? WordPress also requires a PHP environment and database. I wouldn't argue against Craft being more difficult to install than WordPress but I also wouldn't describe it as difficult (I'm a FE dev, no PHP wizard). And I don't recall Craft every being marketed as a WordPress alternative - it's always been a "CMS for developers" (I think this may have been a tagline on their homepage at one point).
- detaro 4y agodev environment is the key word I assume. Wordpress is "upload to PHP-enabled webspace and run", many more modern things expect that you install them using composer etc pp and then deploy from there. (no clue if that's true of Craft or not, never used it)
- shortformblog 4y agoLocally, if you use something like Valet or Craft’s own Nitro tool, it’s relatively painless. You do need to embrace Composer, though, which is kind of a key element to how it works/is managed. There are also some Craft-specific hosts, like Fortrabbit (disclosure: Fortrabbit user) that can take the guesswork out of managing Craft pushes.
- marban 4y agoRaise your hands if you were an early user of ExpressionEngine or Textpattern — CMSs that weren't skewed into CRMs, Shops or PWAs. Good times, but then WP ate them all.
- zerkten 4y agoThat's me. I started with Radio UserLand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_UserLand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_UserLand), but later used the early version of Textpattern. I hadn't looked at Textpattern in a long-time, so I went searching, only to discover Dean Allen had passed away (https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/ https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/). I'm glad the software lives on.
- petecooper 4y agoYou may appreciate this: https://textpattern.com/weblog/memories-of-dean-allen https://textpattern.com/weblog/memories-of-dean-allen
- marban 4y agoOh yeah, I forgot about Manila — Thanks for RSS and XML-RPC :)
- petecooper 4y ago>Textpattern I still am! We're a bit of an endangered species but we're making good progress: https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/ https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/ https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/issues https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/issues
- marban 4y agoYes, just looked it up — Amazing that things are still rolling. Gotta give it another shot.
- andrei_says_ 4y agoWP is completely unwork-able for me. I am not smart enough to deal with that codebase. 1-click install is great but the nightmare on the other side of the easy setup is just not something I can deal with. Compromised, incompatible with each other plugins, the legacy blogging engine architecture, the horrible admin UX, the need for additional solutions to have any kind of sane CMS functionality.
- o_m 4y agoAfter fighting Headless CMS solutions for years I ended up with using Craft in headless mode with GraphQL. It solves pretty much everything a web CMS should do and I'm able to use modern frontends like Next.js. It's the ultimate no-code solution, and you don't need to touch PHP unless you want to create a plugin. I also like how I can host it myself locally and on the server of my choice. Throw it on a Hetzner cloud instance and get 20 000GB bandwidth each month and unlimited requests. Store the assets on S3 with Cloudfront, without any third plugins, and pay pennies. Invite as many users you want with no extra cost. Having the ability to watch the logs is also a huge benefit over Headless SaaS CMSes. No more request spikes without knowing what I did wrong.
- markoman 4y agoIs there any guide (online) that you followed for this CraftCMS-GraphQL-Next.js architecture? I'm intrigued and would appreciate being referred to some source material, if any is available. What do you use as your 'head', if you don't use CraftCMS's? Are you using something you create with Next.js?
- shortformblog 4y agoI have been using Craft to run my newsletter, Tedium (https://tedium.co https://tedium.co), since the start of 2019. I moved from Ghost, which at the time was not really designed for newsletters at all. I find Craft an amazing tool when I want to add new things—a big difference from Ghost, where everything is just kind of set for you and you have to rely on external integrations to expand functionality. I custom-code my emails and integrate design directly into the email, so that eventually became a nonstarter for me. Just as an example, I handle sponsorships by creating a category and adding it to my workflow. My email templates are designed using MJML—and I can create secondary views that allow me to view the completed template and copy the raw code of the email into the newsletter platform of my choice. (I could even run the newsletter soup to nuts via plugins, though I prefer to pay someone for that right for support reasons.) The plugin ecosystem is relatively strong, but I will point out that some of the plugins are paid—and at least one has gone commercial after previously being open-source. I did a lot of research into CMS platforms (static site, monolithic, flat file, and so on) that I felt could get me to this point where I could have a CMS that simplified the production process of building a twice-weekly email, and Craft got me closest. So I’m happy to see Craft continue to evolve. It’s a great tool and I recommend it highly.
- newusertoday 4y agowhat are you using for sending emails? any recommendations if you have evaluated multiple platforms for email?
- shortformblog 4y agoI keep it minimal. I use Email Octopus, essentially as a front end to Amazon SES. I’ve used them since 2016 when it was literally two guys running the service. For my needs I want something I can literally paste completed template code into that will not get in my way and will have decent deliverability. Email Octopus does a decent job on that front. I will say that I use hosted forms, though I had a bad support experience with my provider there, MailMunch, so I’m thinking of switching to someone else.
- dbingham 4y agoI was working at EllisLab on ExpressionEngine when Craft was first released. I don't know what things were like over at P&T, but it was interesting to witness from inside EllisLab. I would say Craft v ExpressionEngine is a case study in what happens when you don't pay your techdebt. Even if you have a lot of good ideas, if you don't stay on top of your techdebt, someone can always come, start fresh, cherry pick and build on/expand the best of your ideas (leaving you to deal with your bad ones), and quickly surpass you. ExpressionEngine had a lot of great ideas in it, but its code was an absolute a mess, and its leaders had no understanding of the concept of technical debt. They just kept racking it up until, by the time I joined in 2012, any changes were expected to take months because the code was a nest of interdependent singletons. While I was there, we spent a lot of time basically responding to the moves of P&T. If you weren't part of the ExpressionEngine community, then you might not know that P&T started out making paid add-ons for ExpressionEngine. I might be misremembering, but I think relationships and matrix were their main ones. One of the first projects I was given as a new engineer at EllisLab was essentially making an native relationship field for ExpressionEngine in response to P&T. If I remember correctly, we knew Craft was coming and were trying to undercut P&T even though they were one of EL's most popular plugin makers. We ended up taking on a rewrite for EE3, because the techdebt was that bad and refactoring wouldn't have got us where we needed to go in time. In retrospect, I'm not sure if that was the right choice, even though I was one of the strongest voices in EL arguing for it at the time. I definitely thought it was the right choice at the time, but I was also a really inexperienced engineer. I don't know if there were any right choices though. Thinking back, I have a hard time imagining a path forward that didn't involve some level of rewrite. It's one of those experiences you can go round and round in your head about wondering whether you did/argued for the right things. In the end, I think EL's fate was already sealed by how much techdebt they'd racked up. The rewrite took a solid two years, Craft was released first, and was better than EE2 in every way (and EE3 if you ask me), and thus began the death spiral. EllisLab is no more (though the rewritten ExpressionEngine lives on as an open source project maintained by one of the agencies that used it), and Craft is clearly still around.
- brandonkelly 4y agoInteresting scoop from the other side—thanks Daniel! From the outside, there were some weird vibes coming out of EL back then – they’d taken a bit of an adversarial tone with the community, which had us wondering whether it was a good idea to have all our eggs in the EE basket. Then an EL designer publicly ranted about P&T, calling us a “direct competitor”, on the EE Podcast, when Craft was just a twinkle in our eye. Which ironically, was the exact moment we decided to really commit to building a CMS. Self-fulfilling rant I guess :)
- andrei_says_ 4y agoCraftCMS keeps giving and evolving. It is my go-to for small to mid-size sites that require a CMS. Have been using it for over 5 years, on multiple sites. Clean architecture, excellent documentation, good support. Highly recommended.
- CharlesW 4y ago> It is my go-to for small to mid-size sites that require a CMS. What's a "large site", and what would be your go-to for that?
- CharlesW 4y agoHey @brandonkelly, would Craft CMS be a practical foundation for a catalog of millions of "things", each of which contains anywhere from tens to hundreds of things? I'm thinking of a use case that I've been assuming would require an application-specific CMS, and now I'm wondering if Craft CMS might be an option.
- V__ 4y agoI can't answer this specifically, but the consensus in the community is, that if your server can handle the database and requests, then Craft won't have a problem handling it. > There are Craft CMS and Craft Commerce sites in the wild running smoothly with tens of millions of elements, and we’ve seen smaller sites struggle to keep up with modest amounts of traffic. The answer is usually “yes, Craft can handle that,” but you should take care with a few things that maximize your site’s ability to handle a growing body of content [1] [1] https://craftcms.com/knowledge-base/how-much-content-can-a-craft-site-have https://craftcms.com/knowledge-base/how-much-content-can-a-c...
- brandonkelly 4y agoMost scaling issues come from overly complex content models. The overall volume of content isn’t much of a concern.