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Like many boutique web studios, in our early years, we were quite averse to offering support engagements to clients. However, as time passed, we began to realise the immense value offered by such engagements. Over the years, we experimented on our support offerings and gradually drifted from hour counting to smarter packaging of support services.

The latest iteration of our support packaging is anchored around 3 unique client personas, offering simplicity of choice and several client benefits like—

• Reduced circle of concern (not responsible for servers/​application stability)
• Assurance that the best practices are being followed
• Proactive support if something fails/​stops working
• Reduced administrative overheads
• Predicable pricing
• Help and guidance, whenever they require
• Knowledge that someone’s got their back

At the same time, these packages have immensely benefited us in our sales, project management, developer efficiency, and most importantly, our business revenue.

This talk takes the audience through our lived experiences, as we transitioned from squarely a maker’s mindset to that of a caregiver’s mindset that empathises with client’s challenges. Drawing from this journey, I explore the whys and hows of packaging support plans and offer insights and guidance on how one might repackage their offerings.

If you’re keen to learn more, don’t hesitate to email hidden; JavaScript is required.

Most of our attention regarding websites is around creating new ones, but we cannot escape the reality of having to deal with retiring old or existing websites as well. After facing this scenario a few times at Miranj we built a tool to handle the end-of-life stage for websites. This tool attempts to crawl all publicly accessible URLs for a site and create a static archive, much like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It has a few built-in smarts to detect and capture the many different ways assets are referenced in modern markup. It generates a folder structure that retains clean URLs, as well as intelligently handles URLs with query parameters.

While the tool is not yet publicly available, we have been using it internally and some of the static archives generated by the tool of erstwhile CMS-based sites have been running smoothly in the wild for years.

email hidden; JavaScript is required if you’re interested in archiving a content-heavy site of your own. Always happy to help or exchange ideas around digital archival¹.

The Pixel & Tonic team were kind enough to invite me back on the Dot All stage¹ to share some of our learnings with a room full of people in Barcelona. This time, I spoke about leveraging some of the power and tools that Craft already ships with — filters, functions, collections, helpers, services, caches, and much more — right from within Twig.

The talk covers three broad areas:

• We start by looking at the benefits of leveraging Craft (and Yii) APIs in general and the ways in which that makes us more efficient developers, and our code more reliable and performant.

• Having established the why, we move on to examining commonly occurring scenarios during the development lifecycle and identifying patterns where we can start falling back to and integrating more of the API.

• In the third and final part, we look at ways to identify the appropriate Twig filters and functions, or Craft helpers, services, and components that can be plugged in these scenarios.

Demystifying the Craft API for Twig Developers by Prateek Rungta on Vimeo.

In order to demonstrate some of these more richly with relatable examples, I created a bare-bones site for a fictional Dot All Music Festival. The code for this site is up on GitHub.

Photographs from the event. 

This talk is based upon my own developer journey using Craft CMS over the years. I also drew from the experience of witnessing first-hand the individual development journeys of my teammates, and spotting common patterns between their paths and my own.

I hope this helps you discover and use more of the powerful tools available to use inside a Craft CMS Twig template file. email hidden; JavaScript is required if you found any of the techniques useful or discovered something new that you could use.

In the vast, multi-layered subject area of web performance, server response time is an important metric. From a CMS standpoint, however, it is one of the most significant. Best practise recommends a 200ms or lower time-to-first-byte. For medium to high-traffic sites, server load is another vital statistic.

We were invited to talk about our learnings from optimising and hosting high-traffic sites such as Guiding Tech at the sixth edition of the Bangalore Site Speed Meetup.

Bangalore Site Speed Meetup 6^th Event on YouTube.

In this talk we go over caching as a broad performance strategy, before dive into micro-caching as a specific approach to handle loads of 10 to 100 concurrent requests per second. We cover the filter, storage, and invalidation implementations¹ of this caching strategy in Nginx. The talk concludes by comparing metrics of our caching strategy against a target of achieving sub-200ms TTFB response times for all visitors.

This talk is a newer revision of the Fortifying Craft CMS for High Traffic talk from 2019² which, as it says on the tin, was specifically tailored for Craft CMS based workflows. In this edition we focus on just micro-caching as a strategy and look at it independent of any specific CMS running at the application layer.

Craft CMS continues to be an indispensable part of our toolbox for building websites here at Miranj. It has gotten even better earlier this year when a host of new content modelling options were added with the Craft 5 release and we’re loving the extra flexibility in creating our data models.

Aside from using Craft to power our projects, Miranj has also released a few utilitarian Craft plugins over the years. We were quick to update most of them with Craft 5 support immediately after the public release, and we have finally gotten around to updating the last (and most complex) plugin as well:

• Contact Form Tuner
• Cryptographer
• Obfuscator
• Router
• Sheets to Tables

In addition to these plugins, we also maintain a public Craft CMS starter project which has also been upgraded with Craft 5 support. Hope you find these useful!