Dot All 2022, Brooklyn

Dot All is the official conference for Craft CMS brought to us by Pixel & Tonic. It’s a three-day event, and it came to Brooklyn, New York, this year.

Dot all logo brooklyn

I was very fortunate to be speaking at this year's event, and you can find more info and resources from my talk here, Bending the Craft Control Panel.

Travel, Friends and Food

I hadn't been on a plane in 4 years, let alone in a room packed with people, so I was reasonably nervous setting out on my travels. But, conference aside, this trip was about travel, friends and food. You would swear it was a food conference, as all the chatter for weeks leading up to September was about restaurants, eateries, and bars. I did the same and planned my week in NY around food!

The conference was full of old friends and lots of new faces. It says a lot for the community when you can just pick up a conversation with a friend where you last left off 5 years ago. There were comments about the lack of young people there, but I'd say that was down to disposable income (Brooklyn is not cheap!), and still coming out of Covid. The conference will be in Barcelona next year, and I imagine there will be many more new faces and friends to make.

Travel friends food
The Wythe Hotel, Manhattan Skyline, L'industrie Pizzeria, Nepalese Sel Roti, Brooklyn Brewery, Literally the worst poured pint of Guinness

Day 1 (Workshop Day)

Automate More, Worry Less Workshop Tim Kelty and Brad Bell

This was an excellent workshop IMO. Tim and Brad took the existing Apple News plugin and updated it to Craft 4 using DDEV, Rector, testing, GitHub actions and other automation. It wasn't too technical and left enough breadcrumb trails to follow on any portions that piqued your interest throughout the day. In addition, they provided a mini-site with everything needed for the day. I struggled with my laptop running DDEV on the day but could follow along just fine, regardless.

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Image Credit: Ryan Irelan (CraftQuest)

Day 2 (Conference Day & After Party)

Craft announcements (The State of Craft)Brandon Kelly

Some brilliant announcements from Brandon Kelly. Here are some of the items I'm excited about

Shopify integration

This was a pleasant surprise that P&T are releasing a first-party Shopify integration, which will sync Shopify products into Craft as elements, with support for custom fields and relations. This is fantastic news and should expand the Craft CMS market a lot more for clients not suited to Craft Commerce.

Craft Console

The announcement that Craft Console is launching as a replacement for Craft ID later this year is welcome. Most notable are the Partner profiles via Organizations features.

Craft Cloud

Pixel & Tonic are going to dip their toes into the hosting market. Their only paid plan, for now, will include an automated build pipeline for Composer and npm scripts, built-in logging, image transforms, and asset storage, custom staging environments based on Git branches, all the benefits of their Enterprise Cloudflare account and worldwide availability, enhanced by AWS Global Accelerator.

Craft 5

Great news that Craft 5 dev has begun. Some excellent features on the way. Some you may have heard about already, some not. The highlights for me include

  • Entries everywhere – categories, tags, and global sets are becoming entries.
  • Multiple entry authors – entries will no longer be limited to a single author.
  • Entry portability – entries will be able to move to other sections that allow the same entry type).

Implementing component-driven design systems with Craft + FractalDalton Rooney
Crafting components with StorybookBrian Hanson

I will talk about these two together as they complemented each other so well, even though Dalton and Brian weren't aware of each other's content! I only recently started using Storybook and learning to create these design system components. Fractal was something I knew nothing about, but Dalton gave an excellent presentation and case study; in fact, it looked much easier to implement than Storybook.

Craft in K8sMatt Gray

My knowledge of Kubernetes (K8s) was slim until the end of Matt's talk. While I don't think I'll ever use it, he gave great insight into how he uses it, and it's good to be aware of such things. I've even recently signed up for Matt's hosting Servd.

A Practical Guide to HTML "Over The Wire"John D. Wells

Beforehand I didn't know what this talk was going to be about, but when John started to get into it, I realised I was using this stuff every day, Sprig and HTMX mainly. But aside from that, there were other options out there, like Unpoly, which looked fascinating to me.

Craft Command Line MagicMichael Rog

I honestly thought, what more could I learn that I don't know about the available console commands. I was so wrong. Natural-born presenter Michael Rog kept dropping trick after trick on each slide. Well worth keeping these slides as a bookmark.

Managing Craft at ScaleMark Huot

Mark gave a comprehensive outline of what he called Mark's Mistakes. I can honestly say I made many of them, making me feel better. There were a few nuggets in his presentation I definitely want to go back and review again, though. One that stood out was targeting source using categories, and what a difference that makes. Reference.

Brooklyn new york
Wythe Rooftop, Hulk Pretzel, Bending the Craft Control Panel (Me), The Jim Henson Exhibition – Museum of the Moving Image, Blitz Responsibly

Day 3 (Conference Day)

Better Together: Improving Collaboration Through EmpathySarah Carr

I'm often accused of lacking empathy, at least in my family life. This talk hit home and made me think about how I interact with work colleagues and the people around me. I mean, I know how to, but people just need reminding, right?

Mind the Gap - What's left behind when we build for the cutting edge?Shawna O'Neal

We saw many more of these types of talks back in the day. But then we all seemed to forget about these issues as if they didn't exist anymore. So this was refreshing to know that data, networks, and devices are still a very much prevalent problem. Excellent and significant data and insights from Shawna.

Using Entries and Relationships as a content builder systemJustin Holt

Cracking the perfect page builder seems a path many of us Craft developers find ourselves going down. Well, here is a totally different viewpoint and method explained in detail by Justin. Well worth a look and see if all or parts of this fit into your builds.

Accessibility takeaways from the W3C website redesignMarie Manandise

Always an afterthought for me, accessibility will feature much more in my builds after listening to Marie's talk about their redesign of the W3C website. She also shared some great resources.

Thanks

What a week, I was so lucky to be a part of the conference. It is nice to know that a world is still waiting to be explored and played in. I've been back at my desk for a couple of weeks now, and I still feel refreshed, enthused and optimistic. Thanks, P&T ❤️

I'm a no-nonsense, experienced website developer who works with Content Management Sytems and specializes in Craft CMS.

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