What are Straight Up Hangouts?

Straight Up Hangouts are loosely structured conversations on Craft CMS. From design to development to content strategy and more.

Join Barrel Strength Design (the team behind the Sprout Plugins) and special guests from the community and learn to master Craft CMS.

Migrat­ing a web­site with plu­g­ins from Craft 2 to Craft 3

In this hangout, we'll start with a walk through upgrading a simple Craft 2 site to Craft 3. We'll explore how the upgrade process works with plugins that exist in and don't exist yet on Craft 3 and deepen our understanding of how Craft behaves during the upgrade process so we can plan successful migrations. For plugin developers, we'll continue the discussion on how to plan for and test migrations during the upgrade process, including the new Install migration and how to make sure your plugins are ready for PostgreSQL. Read More »

Ben Parizek

Com­pos­er and Craft 3

Craft 3 is available as a composer package and enables developers to manage plugins as composer packages as well. While this is exciting news for some, it's also a source of confusion for many users who don't use composer on a regular basis. In this hangout, we'll talk with Brandon Kelly how they are using composer with Craft and go through several examples of how to manage Craft projects and plugin development workflows using composer as well. Read More »

Barrel Strength Design

Craft-Pow­ered Apps

Craft CMS isn't just for websites; it can also be used as a headless CMS. This allows you to take advantage of Craft's flexible control panel to manage content via the web, while making that content available via an API to power apps for mobile and tablet apps. This week we'll be joined by Aaron Berkowitz who has been working with Craft to power multiple apps for PBS KIDS. Read More »

Barrel Strength Design

Push­ing the Lim­its of Craft CMS’s Matrix Field

Craft CMS's Matrix field gave users power they never before had. The user rejoiced but they were not satisfied. They pushed the limits of that power, found new ways they wished to harness it, and submitted feature requests. In this hangout, we're taking a trip to Australia to join Benjamin Fleming and Josh Crawford – authors of two Craft field plugins (Neo and Super Table, respectively) that explore new boundaries for Matrix-style fields. We'll discuss the limits of the Matrix, what new problems fields like Neo and Super Table aim to solve, and look at examples of how folks are using these fieldtypes to manage advanced content in Craft. Read More »

Barrel Strength Design

Don’t stop at the sys­tem. Auto­mate, then humanize.

Traditional print/graphic design relies on a strong system to provide a base system so we can get to a minimum standard of consistency and quality as soon as possible… much like the web. But unlike the web, once we have our underlying foundation, most of the effort is made in adding expression and care into how each piece of content is produced and presented. Read More »

Barrel Strength Design

Crit­i­cal Updates and Craft CMS

Craft CMS takes security seriously and takes several measures to be secure. However, in any complex ecosystem it's possible for a critical security issue to be discovered. What does this mean for website owners and their users? What steps does Craft CMS take to notify users of a critical security issue and help users take steps to fix it? In this hangout we'll be discussing how Craft CMS handles critical updates and how website owners and web firms approach them and get them resolved. Read More »

Barrel Strength Design

Bet­ter Build Process­es with Gulp and Craft CMS

This week we'll be looking Gulp, build processes, and how to get started and improve your build processes on a Craft CMS website. We'll start with the basics–for those who are new to build scripts or using Codekit–and then take things to the next level looking at a more advanced setup and additional areas to configure for a powerful Gulp workflow on your Craft CMS site and beyond. Read More »

Barrel Strength Design

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