ON the dot

Ewan Lyle is Hampton's Digital Team Lead with over 20 years of experience in web development.

Dot One is a new event for the Craft CMS community. As we love being at the forefront of change AND the event was held in the UK, it seemed the perfect excuse for a digital team day out. Or at least, half the digital team.

Developer Steven Bedford and I packed our bags and journeyed to London to spend a day immersed a range of topics around our favourite CMS. And it did not disappoint!

Brandon Kelly (founder of Craft CMS) kicked the conference off with his State of Craft 2024 talk. He shared some of Pixel and Tonic successes, including how they now have the biggest market share of all privately owned CMS. We heard about the latest release, Craft 5, and discussed the many developer and author experience improvements that it brings.

Alex Morrison from Cogapp then discussed some of the large museum projects which his team have developed. Alex demonstrated how Craft CMS provided solutions to many of the challenges they faced, such as working with high-res images, large catalogues and complex searches.

The next session was our favourite. Mike Lowe from WebDNA spoke about his experience of turning client requests into a Craft CMS plugin, something that resonated with us as fellow Craft CMS developers. His talk was delivered with a great mix of humour (much of it self-deprecating) and insight until he was put on the spot by the Pixel and Tonic team, who wanted to know how extensive his plugin documentation was – we feel for you Mike!

Pixel and Tonic were then themselves in the spotlight as Brad Bell gave a demonstration of the new Craft Cloud offering. This is an all-in-one hosting solution where a site and CMS are hosted by Craft, as it says on the tin, in the cloud. Pixel and Tonic handle all the devops along with built in features such as backups, firewall and a CDN (if you don’t know anything about web development – that’s all really good).

Brad was then joined on stage by more members of the Pixel and Tonic team for a Q&A, diving deeper on Craft Cloud and discussing future developments. Several of the questions revolved around the upcoming switch to Laravel as the underlying framework – something we are eager to get our teeth into to explore the benefits.

Next up was Andrew Armitage from A Digital who spoke openly about a difficult project his team undertook. He discussed some key red flags and emphasised the importance of dealing with these early in a project. An in-depth discovery and scope protects both the agency and the client, and is something we at Hampton spend time on at the start of every project.

The penultimate talk was by WebDNA on their awesome project for elite sports people – tracking various metrics to improve their training performance and also their wellbeing. The team showed the evolution of design for the web app and how getting actual user testing and feedback was key to making their product usable and useful. As an ultra-marathon runner myself, this was an especially interesting one to have sight of.

Finally, Oscar Pettersson spoke about how he introduces potential clients to Craft CMS. The key takeaway from this session was to understand your audience and their needs and how Craft can solve those problems. Whether it’s the stability and security, the author experience and ease of use or the flexibility and performance – Craft brings something to everyone involved in a web project.

We a great day with a lot of positive learnings that we’re excited to take into our next Craft build. Maybe it’s yours?

If you want to talk to our expert team about your website, Craft CMS or running ultra-marathons – give us a shout! hello@hampton.agency