Why We Like Craft CMS

For years now the bulk of our work has been in Word­Press or Dru­pal.

Dru­pal is spec­tac­u­lar when it comes to man­ag­ing thou­sands upon thou­sands of assets and users. The per­mis­sions are incred­i­bly fine-grained and if I want to dis­play a sub­set of tens of thou­sands of nodes based on a users loca­tion, I’m all over Dru­pal but this does­n’t come up often.

Word­Press is tru­ly best of class blog soft­ware and there is a darn good rea­son it pow­ers some­thing like 35% of the web. The UI is remark­ably intu­itive and any com­pe­tent (or half-com­pe­tent, more on this lat­er) devel­op­er can get a ful­ly fea­tured blog up and run­ning in a mat­ter of hours.

That said, Dru­pal is overkill for for most sites and let’s face it, the learn­ing curve can be rough. Word­Press, on the oth­er hand, isn’t real­ly enough. At least not with­out a slew of plu­g­ins to extend it beyond the built in core capa­bil­i­ties. These plu­g­ins not only add expense but increase com­plex­i­ty while reduc­ing security.

We have pri­mar­i­ly moved to Craft CMS when look­ing for a PHP con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. Craft strikes the per­fect bal­ance allow­ing com­plete devel­op­er con­trol on both the front and back ends while still pro­vid­ing a com­pre­hen­sive set of tools.

So, What’s Dif­fer­ent About Craft?

It allows me to do every­thing I want and does­n’t force me to do any­thing at all.

The field layout screen in Craft.

The default instal­la­tion of Craft does­n’t pro­vide any HTML, CSS, Javascript, fields or con­tent types.

It is blank slate allow­ing devel­op­ers to imple­ment any frame­work or design.

But that’s good.

Craft uses the Twig tem­plat­ing engine on top of the Yii PHP frame­work. Both are sol­id, mature, secure and well doc­u­ment­ed. This foun­da­tion helps assure longevi­ty while avoid­ing tech­ni­cal debt and break­ing changes with updates — Dru­pal breaks every­thing with each major update and Word­Press breaks noth­ing while pil­ing up lega­cy code.

The Craft CMS editing screen showing Live Preview. Image © Craft CMS.

Want to use Bul­ma or Tail­wind CSS? Not a prob­lem, link it in the head like any oth­er web­site. No use for jQuery — and there real­ly is no need, ever — don’t add it.

Don’t want to use any­thing at all? Rock on. Craft gen­er­ates struc­tured data ready to use with your new­fan­gled fan­cy JAM stack.

Not all good.

This does come at a cost. Casu­al devel­op­ers are not like­ly to use Craft, and the lack of canned themes and serv­er require­ments rule out many ​‘devel­op­ers’.

This can make a Craft site some­what more expen­sive than a typ­i­cal Word­Press build. At least in the short term. In the long term doing it right, once, offers a far bet­ter return than the con­stant incre­men­tal changes and updates Word­Press and Dru­pal require.

Pro Tip: ask your dev team, or poten­tial dev team, about their famil­iar­i­ty with Com­pos­er, Ver­sion Control/​GIT and Envi­ron­men­tal Con­fig­u­ra­tion. If they are vague or eva­sive, maybe look around more.

Good again.

The bar to entry dis­cour­ages fly-by-night site builders and assumes a lev­el of exper­tise. A Craft devel­op­er is like­ly to dis­play more atten­tion to detail and be more famil­iar with the code base of a project than most WP-cen­tric shops. Because there are no pre-built ​‘themes’ every site is guar­an­teed to be unique.

By using just the fea­tures we need in a mod­u­lar way we avoid the kitchen sink approach and use the tool­ing we need. Noth­ing more. This results in a sim­pler eas­i­er to update code base dras­ti­cal­ly enhanc­ing per­for­mance and security.

This atten­tion to detail assures that best prac­tices are uti­lized through­out with an eye towards SEO and accessibility.

We’ll be talk­ing more, a lot more, about Craft.