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.
Learn how to improve your Craft CMS development workflow with PhpStorm. Today we'll be exploring the popular PHP IDE PhpStorm and discussing tips and tricks and workflows for Craft development and beyond. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
How do you customize Craft to make it easy to use for clients and admins? In this hangout we'll explore a variety of ways to improve user workflows in the Craft Control Panel. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
The performance of your website has an impact on your search results, sales, and the happiness of your users. Today we will be doing a performance review of Straight Up Craft and exploring everything we can find to optimize and the tools available to optimize your own sites. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
Do you write clean, optimized code and aspire to best practices? Whether you're actively developing Craft plugins or just getting started, in this Code Review we'll demo real Craft plugin code that's out in the wild and discuss what we can learn from it and how to make it better. This week we'll look at MN Twig Perversion, one of the daring plugins that has ventured into extending Twig to create a new Twig Tag. Twig Tags are a complex feature that require we get a better understanding of Twig's internals as we extend the template engine with Token Parser and Node classes. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
Do you write clean, optimized code and aspire to best practices? Whether you're actively developing Craft plugins or just getting started, in this Code Review we'll demo real Craft plugin code that's out in the wild and discuss what we can learn from it and how to make it better. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
In this hangout we will appreciate Craft's BYO HTML approach to templating and take a closer look at the CSS Flexbox Layout module. Breaking away from the float-based approach that has guided web layouts for many years, Flexbox brings a new way of thinking to to how we approach the components of our websites and web applications giving us a variety of new features to help keep things flexible as we design for multiple devices and screen sizes. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
How do you create site navigation in Craft? From Table and Matrix fields to Structures and nav plugins, in this hangout we'll discuss navigation in its many forms and the tradeoffs between usability, flexibility, development costs, and more. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
What is the Matrix? Craft's Matrix field is a powerful tool for creating rich content, but it can be used for much more than that. This week we'll take a look at using Matrix fields to manage navigation, forms, and content layouts. We can show you the door. You're the one who has to walk through it. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
Do you write clean, optimized code and aspire to best practices? Whether you're actively developing Craft plugins or just getting started, in this Code Review we'll demo real Craft plugin code that's out in the wild and discuss what we can learn from it and how to make it better. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
In this hangout, we'll take a closer look at Garnish, craft.js, and the many things that javascript does in the Craft Control Panel. From Element indexes to field layouts to modals to charts – while the javascript that helps power Craft is largely undocumented, its a core part of the user experience. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
What can you do to ensure your Craft install is as secure as possible? What has Craft done? What do plugin developers do? In this hangout will discuss security in Craft and various considerations to keep in mind for managing a secure website. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
What's in a name? That which we call a null-coalescing operator by any other name would smell as sweet. Explore when and how to use the null-coalescing operator; simplify conditionals in your templates. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
Explore common techniques for optimizing your templates by writing reusable code. In this hangout, we'll discuss considerations as we use Twig tags like extends, set, block, macro, and more. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
Improve the performance of your website and optimize your element database queries using eager-loading and the `with` parameter. Eager-loading elements gives you the ability to tell Craft which sub-elements you need up front so Craft can fetch them in advance and you and your clients can smile at the end of each page load. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
In this hangout, we'll look at various tools and resources to help kick-start plugin development, or just learn more about it. We'll take a closer look at pluginfactory.io and the Business Logic plugin template for Craft CMS. Read More »
Barrel Strength Design
