Getting reacquainted with Craft CMS

December 7, 2024

Screenshot of the Craft CMS website

I’ve had a desire to revisit Craft CMS for many years now. One of the barriers that I had was finding a solution to run Craft locally. Local has been a God send for working with WordPress in a local environment. When I was using Craft in my work several years ago, I was setting up a Apache, PHP, and MySQL on my Mac.

One of the things that I didn’t like about that setup is that I would have to go back and set the development environment again when a major OS update happened. I had to track down the articles I had used before to help me get back up and running. I liked having a tool like Local that allowed me to just spin up a new WordPress project and I did not have to do DevOps in order to start working on a project.

I have kept an eye on Craft even though my work opportunities shifted my focus back to WordPress for the past 8 years. I had subscribed to the Craft newsletter back when I was using it regularly and continued to skim it from time to time. I had seen that they had created a local environment tool called Craft Nitro in 2020. They retired the tool in 2022 and now recommend using DDEV.

I have had an interest in checking out out Craft for many years. My interest was renewed earlier this year when working on a project with LGND. Our client wanted to make some new pages on their site, which was built in Craft CMS. I was given access to their development server and was able to kick the tires a bit with the Craft dashboard. I noticed some improvements to the interface but it was still very familiar to what I remembered.

Jumping back in

Several weeks ago, I saw a job listing on the Work with Craft site that interested me. I checked out the agency’s website and was drawn in by their value-driven approach. I decided to take a chance and apply for the job as a Craft CMS developer.

I was motivated by opportunity to reacquaint myself with Craft CMS. I decided to look to Ryan Irland and his CraftQuest platform. I had first learned how to use Craft through his earlier platform, Mijingo. CraftQuest has a free Craft CMS 5 Quick-Start Guide. I followed the directions on the Craft site on installing DDEV and found it very easy to get up and going with DDEV. Once I had DDEV installed, I was ready to follow along with Ryan in the Quick-Guide course.

This course was very much like the ones I had taken many years ago through Mijingo. Ryan is a great teacher. His teaching style is very straightforward. I appreciate that he takes time to give some tips and explain why he builds things a certain way. I quickly picked up again and not much had changed as far as coding the templates. What has changed is that Pixel and Tonic (the makers of Craft) has made it easier to create new content in the Craft back-end. The flow has been improved and cuts down on the complexity of creating content.

Simple site that I build in the Quick-Start course

Going deeper

The Quick-Start course was a great introduction to Craft 5. But I wanted to go deeper and reacquaint myself with a real-world project. I decided to buy join CraftQuest for a month so that I could take the Real World Craft CMS 5 course. Ryan was running a promotional just before Thanksgiving so I was able to use a 40% discount.

Completing the course gave me a lot of confidence about working with Craft CMS again. I loved working with Craft when I first used it nine years ago. I was reminded of why I like it so much after working through this course over the past two weeks. I think Craft is very easy to pick up and Twig is a very powerful templating tool. You can do so much right out of the box and don’t need a lot of plugins or enable features through adding code to a functions file.

I have liked building block based sites in WordPress by created custom blocks, both with ACF and native blocks with React. I had wondered if you could create a similar page builder in Craft. I had remembered using Matrix fields in the Craft sites I had built years ago so I suspected that there was a way to build something similar to WordPress blocks. Getting my hands dirty with Craft the past two weeks confirmed that I could use Craft to create a flexible content creation experience that I have appreciated about Gutenberg and WordPress blocks.

Now that I have reacquainted myself with Craft CMS, I would like to continue to use it, perhaps in my next job or project. I feel more confident moving forward after completing several courses on CraftQuest including search, created archive pages, and pagination.

Related links

Comment on this post