Video Course

Learning Craft

by Ryan Irelan

In more than 3 hours of video, watch as Ryan builds a website in the brand new Craft CMS. Learning Craft consists of 11 videos and covers everything from installation to asset management to templating to using the Matrix field. Need a primer on using Craft? This video is for you. Read the full description

What's in this Course?

Craft is a CMS from Pixel & Tonic. The folks are Pixel & Tonic cut their teeth doing commercial add-on development for the ExpressionEngine CMS. After almost a year after releasing Craft 1, they are now out with Craft 2.

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.

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

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 third 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).

Using Matrix in Craft

This brand new addition to the course gives you a foundation on using the powerful Matrix field in Craft. The videos use a new sample site to demonstrate how to configure, code, and use the Matrix field. Here are the topics:

• Introduction, What We’re Building
• Setting up Matrix
• Adding Content to Matrix
• Matrix Template Code
• Using the switch tag
• Wrapping up

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.

Using Categories in Craft

This new addition to the course covers how to use categories in Craft. We’ll continue building the Crafty Brewery website that we started in the Matrix videos, adding beer styles to reach brew recipe using Craft’s categories feature.

Craft Courses Bundle

Both the Craft CMS courses are also available together in a handy bundle. This course + Twig Templates in Craft in one simple purchase.

Get the Bundle

About Ryan Irelan

Ryan is the founder of Mijingo and former Vice President of Technology at Happy Cog where he helped manage web projects for some of the most prominent brands in the world. Ryan has authored numerous courses for people who build for the web. He's covered topics like Git, Craft CMS, website deployments, and more. Ryan also authored the first book on ExpressionEngine 2.

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