If I wrote love poetry, I would write it for Craft CMS.
I’m not exactly a romantic when it comes to web platforms, but with Craft I come pretty close. Simple, scalable & extensible, CraftCMS ticks all my boxes. For now :)
When I entered the development world full-time in 2011, I was fresh from an intensive full-time course at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at BU. There I strengthened my skills and learned more in-depth Web Development Practices and languages like HTML5, CSS3, jQuery — all those buzzwords 🐝.
Wordpress was the standard at the time (still is for most), and was what clients were requesting, so I never really questioned my work with it. I built and developed custom Wordpress sites for a range of small businesses from 2009–2013. During that time, I also built some static sites, and got some experience with Zend Framework, but my work was without-a-doubt WP dominated.
In early 2013 I took a job with a small creative agency in Sarasota FL called atLarge Inc. who introduced me to Drupal. Drupal is a different beast altogether. It lacks the simplicity of Wordpress, but is more customizable and extensible. I enjoyed working with it, but was consistently frustrated with the lack of control. Drupal required separate skills to program the front and backend, and so I spent much of my time working with static files, and handing those off to the backend devs to wire into Drupal. That was in 2013, and at that point, I was working in Drupal 6 & 7 which required extensive PHP knowledge. Now Drupal 8 has TWIG. Had this change happened sooner, I may have never been driven to discover Craft, but I’m happy I did.
In late 2014 I had just relocated from Sarasota FL to Portland OR, and was looking for local opportunities. I grabbed a beer with a developer from a creative agency in town called Parliament. During our chat, he mentioned they’d been building sites in Craft. Always excited to learn new things, I went home and immediately downloaded the CMS. I started playing around and developing with it on my local machine and explored all that it had to offer. I was immediately taken with it. The first client-site I built with it was the Sarasota Chalk Festival, and later, Quality Enclosures. At that point I was totally hooked, and started looking for a Craft-only creative agency to work with, which I found with TrendyMinds.
The great thing about Craft is that it combines the things I love about both Wordpress and Drupal. It’s both simple, and endlessly extensible. As a front-end dev, I could take on the entire build myself, using TWIG to hookup the backend. It can be scaled to fit sites of any size, from portfolio one-pagers to enterprise behemoths.
Like Wordpress and Drupal, Craft uses plugins to extend its abilities, but the plugins themselves are more light-weight, require far less maintenance, and can be custom-built with more ease than their WP counterparts. A great tool to use in this respect is pluginfactory.io, which helps you set up the structure of a Craft plugin by giving you all the base folders and templates that you need to get started.
Craft runs on Yii, and in their own words is
for folks who like to take their time and do things right, building out their HTML, CSS, and JS by hand.
You take your time to get it right from the beginning, and, because I can modularize the process and build out the backend in tandem with the frontend, the finished product comes together very quickly.
When I think back on what frustrated me the most about Wordpress and Drupal, it was the uncontrollable nature of some aspects of the platforms. They often came with abilities and features that were not necessary, and that simply bogged down the build. For example, WP out-of-the-box comes with certain WYSIWYG and backend features that you may need to delete, or overwrite. With Craft, if you want it, you build it. It’s as simple as that. Again, in Craft’s own words, it
doesn’t make any assumptions about your content. You’re in charge of defining it by setting up custom fields to capture the information you need.
You define this content and modularize entries through a Matrix field. You can build Matrix fields however you like, so that your clients can easily add, remove, and re-organize content.
From a UX designer’s perspective, Craft is wonderful to work with. Its backend has been carefully designed to be clean, clear and simple to navigate. For anybody coming from Drupal in particular, it’s a whole new world. The cleanliness makes it a pleasure to work with, and makes it far less daunting for clients during handoff.
From a client perspective, Craft is a dream. It’s simple to navigate and manage content. The developer maintains full control over the code, and can easily organize it and prevent it from becoming bloated with dozens and dozens of cumbersome themes and plugins. This leads to a faster site, and a much more stable product. Also, unlike Drupal, Craft is light and easy to work with, making future customizations, changes and additions both faster and cheaper.
These are just some of the reasons I like to build with Craft. If you’re interested in a full list, check out their features at craftcms.com.
If you’re thinking about getting started with Craft, I recommend just jumping right in. Their documentation is written from a beginner’s perspective, and will gently guide you in the process. Craft has an awesome community and one of my personal favorites is their Discord, where people in the community help each other out with problems and questions. If you get stuck in any particular spot, feel free to reach out to me for a nudge.
There are so many platforms out there. Right now, Craft is my favorite but that could change on a dime. Do you use a platform that you prefer? Let me know in the comments below, or drop me a line and tell me about it.
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