The Latest from Dot All Conf

Twig Super Power Roundup from Dot All 2018

Jason Mayo took us through key takeaways from Dot All in a great talk titled Twig Super Power Roundup (Twig'in hell!).

First stop was Craft Commerce and how to detect a user account to make the checkout flow as smooth as possible; helping with user experience and conversion rates.

Detect if there is a user existing for the email address on a Commerce site, and from there you can detect if they need to login or if you can pre-populate. Once you've got the cart email, which is the main thing, you can check that against the users. If the User exists you can ask them to login or you can pull more information from that.

See Stephen Callender's talk Building a Smarter Craft Commerce Website.

Next up Performance; eager loading and caching everything you can to lower the time to first byte.

From Matt Weinberg's talk Scaling Craft CMS Sites for Large Launches and Making a Craft CMS Website That FLIES by Andrew Welch.

Then on to Languages and internationalisation support (INTL) which uses ICU library that enables locale based formatting.

You can use the powerful Translate filter and you can attach variables or objects into your string and then translate that string but it will pull variables back in.

Detailed in Zoltan Varady's talk Multilingual Sites in Craft 3.

Jason also touched on number formatting and translating numbers via t() filter, also from Zoltan's talk.

And then some extra snippets too...

• Including templates - pass an array of templates to the include and the first one found will be output
• Null-Coalescing Operator returns the first value if it's defined and not null

Next up was a great recap on Design Process, inspired by Courtney Bradford's talk.

This took us through the concept of atoms, molecules and organisms (detailed in Brad Frost's article here) and how to build a design system using atomic design (see this article by Igor Syvets), which then led us to folder structure where we saw examples if it in play.

There was discussion around...

• Neo and how to group separate fields (Atoms) together in Matrix blocks to create molecules,
• how to loop through matrix and output selected molecules or organisms,
• making molecules more customisable with Colours or Transitions using Dynamic Fields,
• and outputting the utility via a macro so it can be reused through multiple molecules or atoms

See also Architecting a Content Website with Souvik Das Gupta.

It was brilliant to hear a round up of Jason's key takeaways and there was plenty of chat afterwards about each part of the talk. Thanks, Jason!