Craft CMS Tutorial

Welcome to our tutorial about Craft CMS. In it, you will read about what Craft CMS is, what it is used for, how it works, and how you can create great websites with it. Most importantly, the tutorial’s main purpose is to be beginner-friendly. We will show you how to start with Craft, how to build your first pages, and a few tips and tricks to help you along the way.

What is Craft CMS

To begin, Craft CMS (or just Craft going forward) is, as the name suggests, a Content Management System. With it, you can create custom websites and web applications from scratch. It was created in 2013 and, since then, has gained a reputation for being intuitive, customizable, and easy to work with. The CMS is built on several robust technologies.

• PHP - Craft is primarily written in PHP, which is a proven and reliable server-side scripting language;
• Yii Framework - The foundation of Craft is the Yii framework, a PHP framework known for its efficient and modular design. The CMS uses Yii2 specifically;
• Twig Templating Engine - Craft uses the Twig Templating engine, allowing it to create complex HTML templates with logic and data-binding capabilities;
• MySQL or PostgreSQL - Adding to its flexibility, Craft can use either MySQL or PostgreSQL as its database management system. For our customers, we recommend MySQL, as our services are set up with the newest version;
• Composer - Finally, Craft uses Composer, which is a dependency manager for PHP. Users can install packages and dependencies through it, allowing for quick and easy plugin installation.

As you can see, Craft uses a set of highly reliable and robust technologies that have repeatedly proven themselves.

Key Features

Aside from being built on a solid foundation, Craft has a number of key features that set it apart from other systems of its kind.

Customizability - One of Craft’s most important features, its customizability allows developers and designers to create websites tailored to specific needs. It is capable of building custom content models and layouts with ease. The content structure it uses adds to this flexibility since it uses sections, entries, fields, and categories to build your content models;

• User-friendly - From the installation to the admin interface, Craft is focused on the user experience and making it as straightforward and simple as possible;
• Template Engine - The Twig templating engine allows developers and designers to create sophisticated and dynamic website templates with ease;
• Security - Craft offers a robust set of features designed to protect all applications created with it from common vulnerabilities;
• SEO and Performance - Additionally, Craft has tools and features that help optimize websites both for SEO and performance;
• Asset Management - Craft also offers a built-in asset management system that allows for easy handling of files such as images or videos. Not only that, but it is also possible to manipulate and organize your assets in multiple ways. For example, users can transform images to their needs with the built-in tools;
• Multi-language - Finally, Craft comes with multi-language support natively, making it an excellent choice for international websites.

If you would like to read more about the key features of Craft, we recommend you head over to our blog and check out the post we put up about the system there. In it, we discuss these features in more detail and touch on a few other topics related to Craft.