Craft 5.5 release

This week sees the latest release for Craft and it brings with it a raft of new features that look really exciting!

Media preview

The majority of visual content on a site is going to be images and Craft already has some pretty great image editing tools baked in as well as pre-defined transforms to prepare images in a range of formats and for a range of resolutions. The focal point tool is fantastic if you want to be able to control the cropping of their own images by showing what features in the image you want to provide the basis for automatic cropping.

Aside from images if you want to showcase video and audio content we would almost always advise to use a hosted solution such as Vimeo or Soundcloud. As well as reducing storage and bandwidth, delivering audio and video content via a third-party means you can take advantage of a hosted CDN (Content Delivery Network) as well as capitalise on proven streaming technologies.

However what if you want to host audio or video content yourself? For example you may want to have complete control over how media controls are used and styled. Or you may have limits on the cookies needed to use content hosted by a third-party resource. Although we’ve always had the ability in Craft to upload media content alongside images this has been much in the same way you would upload any file such as a word document or a PDF.

Well now Craft 5.5 brings with it media preview that lets you watch and listen to rich media files you are hosting and delivering yourself from within the CMS.

However do bear in mind that if you are letting clients upload large files ensure you have enough storage space to handle the files. Size vanishes pretty fast when you start to host video and audio files. It might be a good idea to tweak your site config to put a limit on the size of files that can be uploaded with the maxUploadFileSize() config.

Customisable lists and drop-down

Dropdowns and checkboxes are great. They provide a simple means to let clients manage structured content within their CMS which can then be filtered in the front-end, especially using plugins such as Sprig.

But it has been a pain in the past to make these flexible without resorting to something like tags. But tags are more a way of describing and organising content than they are a way of structuring content so it is great to see Craft 5.5 bring with it the ability for clients to specify their own options directly when editing content. For example with a recipe website we might have a predefined list of common food allergies. But if you want to add an additional option for specific recipes this new feature provides a perfect solution!

More flexible link control

One of the great things about Craft is the plugin community around it. The flexibility and ability to extend it as well as the support that brings is fantastic. And a sign of a great plugin is when it becomes so indispensable that it gets adopted into the CMS.

We have used variants of the Hyper and LinkIt plugin since Craft 3.5. These let us provide some degree of control when clients are adding their own links into the CMS, for example if they want to add their own labels or want to force certain links to open in a new browser tab.

Wordpress to Craft migration

Finally alongside Craft 5.5 the Craft CMS developers have released a utility to help migrate content from Wordpress into Craft.

We’ve moved a number of clients from Wordpress in the past and this has usually involved us having to roll our sleeves up and dig deep into some custom coding to fetch the content from Wordpress in a format that we can work with and tweak it so that it can then be imported back into Craft. And there is ALWAYS a fair bit of sanitisation needed to get things into a usable state.  Wordpress and its plugins have a tendency to throw a lot of extra markup and styles into its content!

As well as being a pain in the neck, it takes time and costs our clients money they’d much rather spend on us delivering their shiny new website. So this latest release is music to our ears and we can’t wait to try it out the next time someone comes to us wanting to move away from their Wordpress site.

Get in touch

Craft is the gift that keeps giving. If you need a new website and want to see what we can do to help you bring your presence online drop us a line. We’d love to chat.