Blog

On a recent project that was built on Craft, I finally got the chance the kick the tires on building a members-only section with Craft. Out of the box, Craft provides so much user functionality, but the user moderation process wasn’t exactly what the client wanted. Luckily, Craft provides us with the ability to change that process with ease.

When I started working here five years ago, we had two offices: one in Falls Church, VA and another in Durham, NC. Now we have a third office in Boulder, CO and a handful of employees, including myself, working remotely. Being set up the way we are, we are all used to interacting with remote team members, but the majority of the employees work in an office.

I happily worked from the Virginia office for three years, but because of personal circumstance, I had to move to Michigan for a year. I didn’t want to leave Viget, so I asked for the opportunity to work remotely; I was anxious and hesitant about giving up the office environment.

Pattern library, style guide, UI library, parts kit; call them what you want, but these are essential to building websites of any scale. Typically, this is something you manually construct to demonstrate all the modules and pieces that you have constructed, but I have been investigating ways to make them a bit more dynamic when building sites with Craft.

I decided to write a little post to give some insight into why we love Craft so much at Viget.

I’m a little belated, but I was lucky enough to attend and speak at the first Craft CMS Summit two weeks ago. This was the first online conference that I had ever attended, and I was thoroughly impressed. I had always been a bit hesitant to attend online conferences because I was unsure about the quality, but after experiencing it firsthand I won't hesitate in the future. Everything was very well organized and the speakers all gave excellent presentations. It was also nice to sit and learn in the comfort of my own home instead of having to deal with the extra burdon of traveling for a conference. Side note: Environments for Humans, the company who hosted the conference, has additional upcoming events.

As we have the opportunity work on more Craft sites at Viget, we’ve been able to do some interesting integrations, like our most recent integration with the ecommerce platform Shopify. Below is a step-by-step guide to implementing Craft and Shopify by utilizing a plugin I built.

You know what's really annoying? Having a million redirects in your .htaccess file. When we build EE sites, Detour Pro has become a part of our builds so that other team members and clients can manage redirects. But, that solution won't really work when you launch your first Craft site for a client!

Here at Viget, we have been using ExpressionEngine as our primary off-the-shelf CMS for years. Craft and Statamic, both of which are developed by EE add-on developers, have really caught our attention. We finally determined that Craft would be an appropriate solution for a project, and while building the site, I built a couple small plugins.

I’m not sure if it’s a couple of talks that I recently saw at Peers Conference or maybe the fact that I’m just getting older, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about work/life balance and personal health.

I finally got back to blogging and wrote an article about JavaScript execution patterns, a topic which I recently presented on at the DC jQuery Meetup.