2019 Dot All Conference

Dot All 2019, the official Craft CMS conference, took place September 18-20 at the Phi Centre in Montreal, and Good Work was happy to be a part of it.

In case you don’t know, Craft is Good Work’s CMS of choice. We’ve been using it since its inception in 2012, and recently became a verified Craft partner. Representing Good Work were two of our awesome developers, Jake Dohm and Chase Giunta. Jake partnered with Andris Ševčenko of Pixel & Tonic (the creators of Craft), leading a workshop titled “Modern Web Development with Craft, Vue and GraphQL.” The workshop introduced the Craft community to new methods of tackling complex problems in development, utilizing our favorite javascript framework - Vue.js - and a new feature recently introduced into Craft, the GraphQL API (aimed to intelligently fetch data from Craft).

Not only was the workshop a huge success, allowing our team to share their knowledge with the larger Craft community is always a plus. In addition to the various workshops, Brandon Kelly, the founder and CEO of Pixel & Tonic, kicked off the conference with a “State of Craft 2019” presentation (in which he showcased Good Work!). Below are a few highlights:

• The official Craft CMS plugin store has 627 plugins and counting

• There are currently 28,000 known websites using Craft CMS, a massive usage growth over the past year

• Craft Cloud, a Craft CMS as a service offering, will be released in 2020, allowing authors to create and manage content with their favorite CMS, while simplifying developer's jobs by removing the need to create and manage servers

• Craft 4 will be released in 2020, with improvements focused on accessibility, collaboration, content modeling and author experience. A few additional highlights:
  • Full keyboard control in the control panel
  • Dark mode
  • Alerts for multiple users editing the same element
  • Improved field layout support
  • User-defined index views, with advanced control over what entries you see in the control panel, and how you see them

This year’s conference offered two tracks, one technically focused for developers, and one geared toward business philosophies, content author experience and client interactions. It was not only informative, it provided an excellent opportunity for our team to connect with the Craft community. We enjoyed putting names with faces and speaking with those who create and maintain many of the plugins our team uses on a daily basis. It reinforced our faith in the Craft product and the future of our industry.

We can't wait to be back, and with the 2020 Dot All Conference taking place in Amsterdam, we’re pretty sure our UK team members are just a tad bit excited.