Screencasts Learning Craft
In 2 ½ hours of HD video, watch as Ryan builds a website in the brand new Craft CMS. Learning Craft consists of 3 videos and covers everything from installation to asset management to templating. Need a primer on using Craft? This video is for you.
Craft is a brand new CMS from Pixel & Tonic. The folks are Pixel & Tonic cut their teeth doing commercial add-on development for the ExpressionEngine CMS. After more than two years of work they are now out with their own CMS. Craft is a PHP/MySQL CMS and is build atop the Yii framework. It approaches content management with the attitude that you define the containers for your content, not the software. Along with a powerful template language (powered by Twig) you can create reusable template code for your site.
I’ve been using Craft regularly for the last 5+ months, including building a site in production, and you can get that experience in just 2 ½ hours of instructional video.
This course covers the basics you need to know to get started using Craft for your website. It is broken up into three different videos:
Learning Craft, Part 1
In the first video in the course we will cover the following topics:
- Overview of the Crafty Records sample site we will build during the course.
- Installing Craft
- Tour the Craft control panel
- Review the Craft directory structure
- Install Craft packages
Learning Craft, Part 2
The second video is where we leverage the planning and setup we did in the first video. During this one-hour video we’ll cover:
- Moving site assets to the server
- Planning and creating site sections and fields in Craft to hold our website content
- Setting up Asset sources in Craft for images and files, and configuring Asset transforms
Learning Craft, Part 3
In the final video, also one hour long, we jump into coding the templates for our sample website. Along the way we’ll cover:
- A brief introduction to the Twig templating engine
- Basics of using inheritance in Twig
- Building the site homepage in Craft
- Building the artists pages in Craft
- Building the staff pages (on your own!)
- Building the single pages (about, etc).
This screencast course will give you a gentle introduction to the Craft CMS and put on you on the right path to using Craft to build powerful websites.
Here’s a look at the introduction of video 1:
About Ryan Irelan
Ryan is Vice President of Technology at Happy Cog. He authored a widely recommended set of training videos for ExpressionEngine developers, the first book on ExpressionEngine 2 and is the creator of an official ExpressionEngine partner website, EE Insider. Most recently, Ryan appeared as a guest host on several shows at the popular 5by5 network.
