Craft CMS Meetup: how Craft is changing people’s lives
At Little Miss Robot, we like to do things differently. So we decided to host the first Craft CMS Meetup of 2020 at our offices!
Feb 14It was the perfect opportunity for our in-house Craft CMS ambassador Collin to tell everyone how much and why he loves Craft CMS. Our friends from Statik and Webstoemp jumped in to talk about on-boarding new co-workers with Craft CMS and the importance of JAMstack. To top it all off, Craft’s creators Pixel & Tonic gifted us beer and pizza for the whole crowd of fifty people!
“How one field changed my life.” - Collin Van der Vorst on Craft CMS
Collin kicked off with his talk on how one field changed his life, or at least his experience with Craft. The powerful matrix field he talked about houses multiple modular building blocks that feed all pages. In this way, Collin discovered, the author gets free play: they can create every single page exactly as they envision it. As with everything, this setup has pros and cons, of course.
Even though the freedom and flexibility Craft CMS provides in this way is incredible, Collin argued that there are also a few risks involved. You want to minimise those risks. To meet people’s expectations by providing an attractive and modular website, there has to be a close interaction and strong communication between the client, design, development. The author has to be properly guided.

“Onboarding new co-workers with Craft CMS.” - Jan Henckens
Statik’s Jan Henckens took up guiding co-workers into the world of Craft CMS. With the influx of new team members, they had to find a way to lead and guide them into Craft CMS. That’s why Statik created their own on-boarding-trajectory, in which they slowly build up to deliver production-ready code. Apart from Craft CMS, Jan also taught us his essentials for developers. He shares these with the new development team members.

“It’s a brave new Jamstack world!” - Jérôme Coupé
In his talk, Webstoemp’s Jérôme Coupé dove into creating websites based on Jamstack. More specifically, working with Jamstack means that this type of websites serves static pages to the visitor, which results into fast-loading, lightweight websites with a high degree of robustness. The static pages are fed by a headless CMS, which allows the admin to manage the website with ease. Craft is an excellent choice for Jamstack since it provides one of the best author experiences and has a powerful API. In a short demo, Jérôme showed us how such a setup works with 11ty, GraphQL and Craft.

Love Craft CMS as much as we do? Then we want YOU for the next Craft CMS Meetup!
We’re looking for people who want to share their learnings and experiences with Craft CMS at the next meetup with our friends from Lunar on the 9th of April. Interested? Don’t hesitate to contact Collin!


