Hvorfor du bør velge Craft CMS når du skal lage ny nettside

Craft CMS is an open source CMS that saw the light of day in 2011 and has grown to become the preferred choice for the professional market. They have won a number of awards, including Best CMS for SMB, Best CMS for Developers, and Best WordPress Alternative.

Do you prefer watching a video to reading a long article? We have made some demo videos that show some of Craft CMS's functionality.

Over 150,000 websites have been created with Craft CMS and they have well-known brand names such as Netflix, IKEA, Adidas and TEDx in their portfolio.

After several years of experience with Craft CMS, we are proud to say that we are official partner.

In short, we use Craft CMS because we think it is the best platform. Behind that sentence lies 10+ years of experience with trial and error, both in Craft CMS, Wordpress and other CMSs.

The second reason why we chose to specialize in Craft CMS is because we often have operational and support responsibilities after launch. When all developers and content producers work in the same tech stack, anyone can jump in and contribute to a project. It provides greater security for the customer by e.g. illness and holidays.

At the start, it was the developers who pushed for us to go for Craft CMS. Gradually, designers and content producers have applauded this choice, and the result is a cohesive team that has a good understanding of the process, the building blocks and the scope of possibilities.

Why content creators like Craft CMS

• Good overview of all main pages and subpages, where you can choose which properties you want to see. It is e.g. unnecessary to show publication date on a fixed page, but it can be useful to know when the last one was updated, as well as who did it

• All pages come with versioning. So you can easily roll back to a previous version

• Preview directly in the CMS before you publish

• Generate a secret URL that you can share with colleagues for feedback before publishing

• Great flexibility in how you want to build up the pages with "mix and match" with all the modules that are available

• Can create folders and subfolders in the image bank

• No need to think about customizing images before uploading to the CMS. Upload what you have, and the system itself generates the sizes the website needs

• Can set the focus point on images so that you get the correct section

• Easy to create, turn on and off campaign pages to collect leads

Why do customers like Craft CMS?

What we often hear from customers (even if they are not hands on inside Craft CMS) are advantages such as:

• It is very flexible compared to before, in terms of creating new pages, creating campaigns, changing menus and changing content in other languages

• Less risk of being hacked than e.g. by Wordpress

• Can set access levels for those who will work with the content. E.g. a user can only create content but not publish. Or they can publish, but only on the Norwegian edition of the website

• Access to expertise with us after launch

• The website runs much faster than before (but it's about far more than Craft CMS)

Why do developers like Craft CMS?

When I asked our developers to argue why they like Craft, I got a pretty long answer. So hold on tight, here it comes:

Most large CMSs are heavyweights when it comes to managing content, but along with the benefits of open source and large communities comes an inevitable downside: It becomes a hodgepodge of open source, and a lot of maintenance is required to ensure security and compatibility .

Here are our points on how Craft CMS helps us developers build solid online solutions:

No restrictions

You can shape your project however you like. Craft does not bring any preconfigured structure or styles to the frontend, it all depends on the developer. This is good for experienced programmers since you can take any approach to any task and not have to deal with limitations that may come from code that doesn't fit your current challenge.

Built-in security

Craft is very good at security and has many security measures to help developers who do not have in-depth expertise in the field. It has CRUD operations that provide the functionality you hope for in a CMS, but maintains strict MVC principles for security on sensitive operations.

Plugins you can trust

Wordpress can boast of a larger community, but that is not an advantage in our eyes. Many unqualified developers can create plugins, which can create challenges for both security and functionality. Craft CMS, on the other hand, is for more experienced developers, which means that fewer people create plugins, but what is created is of good quality.

Component-based PHP framework

Craft CMS is based on the Yii framework. It is a high-performance component-based PHP framework used by thousands of developers worldwide. This framework provides a solid structure to the code and helps you write secure and easy-to-read custom code for your plugins and modules.

TWIG for templates

Craft CMS uses TWIG as the built-in template engine. The advantages compared to the counterparty are:

• More concise syntax that makes templates more readable

• Speed

• Safety

• Scalability with several pre-made filters and functions, with a clear and user-friendly plugin system to create your own

• Template inheritance

Headless CMS

Flexibility by configuring Craft as a headless CMS. With Craft you are not limited to the TWIG engine, it allows a completely headless approach where you can use a Rest or GraphQL api to communicate between the backend and frontend and disconnect the frontend completely from PHP. Then you have a control panel to easily manage your website, your app and any other interface.

Built in GraphQL

GraphQL is a very robust coding language for APIs, and Craft CMS has this built in as plug & play.

From local, to staging, and on to the production server

Craft CMS is very good at configuring projects, where you can submit variables depending on your current environment, whether it's local development, staging or production server.

It also allows you to transfer updates and changes between these environments without additional manual work (which is much more useful than it might sound), while maintaining the same data structure between your servers.

This provides faster and more flexible solutions for distribution.

Composer

Craft CMS uses Composer which makes it easy to integrate and maintain libraries from 3rd parties.

Multisite

You can run multiple websites from a single installation. For example, a website with several languages, or that you simply have unique websites on different domains.

We ourselves define how we want to control availability and content. Some administrators have e.g. only access to one website, but not the others. And we can define ourselves whether a new subpage should be created on all versions, or only on e.g. the Norwegian.

We have created multisite websites in recent years and are well aware of how we can maximize this functionality

Read more here

More modules, less templates

Before, it was common to build a new website based on templates. Now it has switched to modules.

Examples of a module can be text, video, image gallery, quiz, newsletter, lead form, and so on. It can basically be whatever you want as long as we define how it works.

These modules can then be used as desired on each subpage created in the CMS. This results in a very flexible system for the content creators and gives them the tools they need to create engaging content on the website.

When we create websites, it often goes from sitemaps, page structure to modules.

A sitemap defines all the pages to be included on the website. This is displayed in a tree structure.

A page structure defines how a single page is structured. Most often there is a Hero at the top with an image or video as well as a headline, intro and CTA button. Below that come optional modules. And at the very bottom we have a footer.

But what are modules?

Modules are a component with given rules for how it should look and behave.

Examples of such modules:

• Text module

• Image module

• Video module

• Gallery

• Side-by-side module

• Quote

• Subscribe to newsletter

• Lead form

• Quiz

• Scrollytelling

• Product features

• Player card

How they should look and how they should function is something we work out together with the customer.

For example, it may be that the customer wants to use Mailchimp to receive leads, and then send out curated content based on the type of product group they are interested in.

Then we create a form for leads that also sends in the product group as a variable. In this way, the customer receives not only the name and e-mail of a lead, but can also set up automatic e-mail runs based on product category.

Media library

With Craft CMS you get a very good and flexible media library. Users can do the usual tasks you'd expect, such as adding/editing/deleting files and managing associated metadata. In addition, there is support for saving Vimeo and YouTube movies.

You choose the folder structure you want, and you can also easily find each asset through search. You can also edit image size, rotation and scaling, as well as set the focus point. Images are automatically transformed to different sizes to ensure a good balance between quality and loading time.

Promotions and landing pages

Craft CMS' system for listing pages is clear and simple for those who have to create/publish/plan or set an expiry date for content. Together with the module-based approach, everything is in place for a flexible way of creating content, which in turn will help to achieve campaign goals and optimize lead generation.

Contents directory

With this CMS, it is easy to keep track of existing content and to create new content. All pages and sub-pages are categorized, so that it is easy to navigate to the right section. For sections with many pages, it is possible to filter and sort by data values. This can be configured section by section, sorting can for example be done alphabetically, by number or date.

All sections have a meta field that is generated automatically when a page is created or edited (date created, date updated, author etc).

SEO / Social media

We use a plugin that allows users to control the page's SEO properties. This applies overall and right down to each and every entry on the page.

Craft CMS allows automatic registration of metadata, such as search title, description and image share, as well as other important data points such as canonical url, OG meta tags, etc.

All automatically generated information can be overwritten, including sitemap.xml, robot.txt, human.txt and security.txt settings.

Each section can have its own default settings for automatic meta information. The add-on provides a preview of how the page will look in a search engine, or shared on Facebook or Twitter.

301 redirect

We keep a log of new 404 error codes ("page not found"), which allows us to create custom url rewrites to redirect the content to a new address. A plugin shows statistical information about how often we get 404 or 301 errors, allows us to change content or create new redirects to maintain the page's SEO rankings.

We also create custom url rewriting patterns to redirect visitors to new urls, if the new site's url structure doesn't match the old one. This allows you to keep your earned search engine rankings, without penalty.

Administration of users

Craft CMS has a flexible system for managing user roles and permissions. Each user can be assigned multiple roles with predefined permissions. We can also set the permissions manually, one by one.

We can control exactly which part of the CMS the user has access to, and which pages the individual has the opportunity to edit, or we can set restrictions according to the type of post.

Version log

Craft CMS has one of the best and easiest versioning systems we have experience with. Craft CMS automatically creates a new version of your content each time it is saved, and keeps unsaved updates in a draft. This makes it possible to work with large amounts of content over a longer period. Any drafts of new pages or edits are saved in memory, so there's no need to save or publish the content before exiting.

Each version and draft is date and time stamped, making it easy to track changes and retrieve older versions.

Content preview

Craft CMS has a simple but powerful preview function, which makes it easy to see changes almost immediately, the editing tool and the display image are located side by side.

Unpublished versions can also be shared through a link. This is smart when the content producer wants feedback or needs approval before publication.

Headless CMS

Most traditional or monolithic content management systems are “coupled,” meaning that the content management application (CMA) and content delivery application (CDA) are unified into a single application, making back-end user tools, content editing and taxonomy, web design, and templates inseparable.

With a Headless CMS, we can connect CMA from CDA, which in turn facilitates:

• Excellent omnichannel experiences (content delivery through website/apps/data sharing platform from a central hub)

• Speed ​​and simple solutions for developers

• Future-proof solutions at a lower cost

• Scalable into the future

• Superior software architecture

• Headless CMS is more scalable

Are you wondering if websites created with Craft CMS could be something for your business? Drop me an email for a non-binding talk about Craft CMS.